There are some fundamental problems with the way engineering is done in this country. I can see what they are trying to do, but it’s probably not going to help.
The problem starts all the way back at college. Engineering students get all theory and very little practical information shoved down their throats. When they graduate, they have no practical experience whatsoever. The industry pretty much expects that your first couple of years of on the job experience will be the practical part of your education.
A lot of companies won’t even look at you if you have less than two years of experience. They don’t want to pay to train you. They want to pay for engineers who can actually do practical work. There isn’t a shortage of untrained recent engineer grads. There’s a shortage of engineers with enough experience to actually do the work. This is nothing new. It’s been this way for many years now.
I see this as a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t address the main underlying problem.
As a Public Defender, I’ve been waiting for this for quite some time. And I’m lucky–I’m not nearly as bad off as many of my colleagues, who went to private law schools and are trying to pay off $100,000 in debt on a $42,500 a year starting salary. I had a full scholarship and small stipend and I still had to take out $25K in loans just for living expenses over three years.
My guess is that it won’t get funded, though. We do have a war going on, after all.
I’m rather curious about that if you wouldn’t mind elaborating. I suppose in school you work out practical – though fictional – problems, for example how many pylons you need to build a bridge. But a beginning civil engineer just out of college wouldn’t be asked to do a bridge. Or would they? What parts of the job does the curriculum not prepare you for?
In computer science and other IT related fields, these days, the trend has been towards buy-don’t-build, so while in the old days programmers in business environments actually built financial systems from scratch, using a language like COBOL, now they’re lucky if they get to do some configuration work. Does anything like that happen in engineering, or is it too different to compare?
Feel free to PM me, maybe I should apologize for the hijack.
I apologize, bouv, for overlooking that previously. I’m not ‘hip’ to what’s going on in the biomedical engineering field as far as employment. All I’m educated about is the debate I’ve heard/read as it pertains to Civils.
That’s another debate going on - some folks say that more education is needed, some say it’s fine the way it is. This is how one letter to the editor of Civil Engineering magazine recently put it:
The problem, to expand on what engineer_comp_geek said, is that it is difficult to teach “practical” knowledge in college. That is best learned by “doing” the actual engineering work. Historically that is done on the new graduate’s first job. There is a requirement (here, and in most states) for professional engineering license applicants to have worked under the supervision of a licensed P.E. for 4 years before sitting for the exam.
Companies in my area are begging for new engineering graduates. However, we traditionally lag behind the rest of the country as far as trends go, and things may change here as well.
Are there really college age kids saying “well, I was going to go into Civil Engineering, but with those loans, I don’t see how I’ll be able to make ends meet. So I decided to major in philosophy instead.”
Aren’t loan forgiveness people usually designed to encourage people to go into careers that are so low paid that people can not afford to do them (teachers, public interest law, medical help in poor communities) and pay back student loans.
Engineering doesn’t have that problem. They tend to make enough money to handle the cost of their education.
I think this is supposed to be an incentive for students who would have gotten loans to choose engineering. I may be wrong, but that was the impression I got.
Engineers make a comfortable living, but it’s not as lucrative as some other careers. As a new graduate in my first job, I would have appreciated the ‘elbow room’ in my budget that eliminating my loan payment would have given me. The payment was about 6% of my gross income.
And my point is that 6% is quite doable. 25-40%, which is where some of the other professions I listed can be, is not.
I think that the money being provided should tend to go to professions where they truly cannot make ends meet. And when some of the pot is given to provide ‘elbow room’ (which of course is appreciated. Who doesn’t appreciate not having to pay back loans), that means there is less available for people who need it to provide food and shelter.
Foreign language specialists? Damn. Now I wish I hadn’t wasted my first two years in the business college and instead went to languages from the outset.
Right, I realized l had kind of sidestepped your point later after my post. 'Scuse me for that.
To me, this goes back to that debate about an engineering shortage. Is there one, or not? It’s my understanding that this loan forgiveness stuff is related to some folks’ opinion that there is a shortage. It’s not got anything to do with whether or not loan payments are affordable to that group.
Not to speak for you, but maybe your position is somewhat like this: “There isn’t a shortage, or enough of one, to warrant spending money on loan forgiveness for engineering students, and the money would be better spent on loan forgiveness for other programs.” Personally I think the subject would make a good GD thread.
I wish this program had existed when I was fresh out of school, working as an interpreter for the Dept. of Justice, living in a roach-infested studio apartment with drug dealers on the corner and trying to pay back student loans on a GS-5 salary (about $16k/year then).
Damn, I was hoping it explicitly stated it will help cover veterinary students’ loans. Unless they consider us under medical specialists, I don’t see it.
For the record, veterinarians had a similar loan forgiveness plan, and it’s been a law for a couple of years now. I don’t know of anyone that benefits, but that may be due to the limited scope. Either you are a rural veterinarian, or you work for USDA. Heck, I’m not even sure there is money so that my rural veterinarians and former classmates can use it.
And for those that think that veterinarians make good money… I think vetbridge mentioned it earlier, than compared with what our debts are, the average pay sucks donkey balls.
I sure know a lot of 'em, though.