In recent years it's harder to get into engineering as an engineering grad, most engineers who start in other fields are not by choice, and by the time they are 5 years into that field, who wants to start over and waste all that experience?Phlegmbot wrote: ↑ That's missing the mark. I know these surveys you're talking about, and they indeed show that most undergraduate students in their fourth years intend to work in engineering. But when they start to actually look for a job, I bet they see other things that interest them and they apply to those jobs. It's not the same. I want the OSPE or whatever to tell me how many engineering graduates who are working in other fields are doing it out of necessity and not choice. The last OSPE report I saw about this acknowledged that they didn't even bother to ask this important question.
A good measurement would have been if every engineering student could be guaranteed an engineering job after graduation, then the amount of engineers working as engineers would have been much higher, of course there are people who worked as engineers then found that it is not for them, it does happen, but a much lower percentage than 65%.