Don, enemy, what you're calling for is selfless altruism: Young people can work less hard in college and get better jobs with more upward mobility if they eschew engineering altogether.

I know it's different in Germany, but here in the US of A the rewards go to those who manipulate resources, not those who create them. Salary, promotions, and plain old control over your destiny are withheld from those who are viewed as interchangeable cogs in the great profit-making machine. Technical specialists, no matter how highly trained and experienced, are still viewed as the Enlisted Class by the Officer Corps.

After all, a GM or a VW isn't in business to make cars, their only raison d'être is making money, and cars are nothing more than a waste product of that enterprise. The means to the end is therefore to pinch back your expenses - meaning payroll - as much as possible while continuing to roll product out the door. Who cares if it's a short-sighted approach? Any Board of Directors that lets profits sag because they're investing in the future will be out the door long before their approach is vindicated.

None of this should be news to anyone here - I learned these lessons myself the hard way. You'd a thunk that a Stanford Ph.D. in Chemistry and a dozen patents would engender a little respect after thirty years, but you'd be wrong. So now I've abandoned all productive work, and my income has risen dramatically ever since. I can't get over this cognitive dissonance as I'm tugged between the extremes of judgment in "wasting my life" vs. seeing my work used to kill innocent people and enrich company leaders who are little more than hideous caricatures of bloated self-indulgence.

I'm sorry; was that harsh? As Lily Tomlin said, "No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up."

The lack of good graduate students is critical--especially a few years down the line when we will need to dramatically increase the number of engineers that we are educating.

Forty or more years ago, when I was in the MBA program at U.C., Berkeley, we had a number of engineers in the program. They were tired of being second class citizens and wanted to move up into management, where they would get more money and a lot more respect.

During the first half of the twentieth century engineers had a lot of status, and many boys (and a few girls) dreamed about becoming engineers; they were the heroes of science fiction stories in the forties and the fifties. Indeed, "Astounding Science Fiction" was written largely by, for, and about engineers in an exciting future.

But since the end of the sixties, finance and law have been the prestige areas--as a result of which we have hundreds of thousands of useless parasitic lawyers and similar numbers of MBAs in finance; these are the people who drove great banks and brokerage houses into the ground.

My guess is that we will have to import huge numbers of engineers, because we are not producing anywhere near enough of them in the U.S.

My experience was a bit better. That is probably a result of computing being a fairly new field which is still rapidly changing. It is also an important core competency for much of engineering and science. But it too is becoming more tedious. Where before we were attacking new things, and a few clever ideas could take you far. More and more now it is just complexity wrapped in complexity, covering up more complexity.

Joule,

I disagree on many levels. The only thing I didn't enjoy about being an undergraduate engineering student was the astronomical cost. The academic side of it all was fascinating and has provided me alot of knowledge I feel could help me survive fairly soon. The challenge of studying long hours was part of the reason I went.

In the not so distant future, those skill will become far more valuable than accounting or finance. Money does you no good if you don't know how to effectively utilize resources in a tangible way. Call it leverage. The leverage that engineers have over management will increase very soon, especially considering the shortages that we're talking about. This might first be manifest by increases in salaries relative to other positions.

Just from an ethical standpoint it was better to choose engineering over finance or management. The fact is, the future doesn't come easy, and it takes intelligence, diligence, and planning to make it happen.

I'm confident that my mundane cube shaped day-cage will soon be replaced by something far more stimulating (albeit far more perilous).

The only sort of engineering I could ever get enthused about was the sort of grass-roots stuff practiced in and around the Victorian Era.

If you get stuck with Victorian-era technology, don't complain! ;)

most engineers seldom do anything truly useful, but rather function to keep the corporate cogs well lubricated and turning

I must not know most engineers, then.  Most every engineering job I've ever seen anyone do was involved with making things work to legal requirements and customer expectations, and hiding the details so it all looks seamless and is easy to operate.

Those who do call the shots (mostly politically oriented lawyers and financial types) are generally completely ignorant of scientific physical realities.

Those realities are coming to the fore, and enterprises led by people who neither understand them nor have advisors who do will fail miserably unless they are subsidized.

are going have a whole mess of very talented unemployed engineers before too long.

And lots of them have garages.  Expect interesting results.

I loved maths and science in high school, and am at present doing an undergrad in Actuarial studies. It's true that my decision to choose the more finance based maths was purely based on money, I could have chosen pure maths or a science degree. I regret my choice now as I've realized how utterly pointless and what a sham finance really is. Hoping to now do a Masters in something that would actually be useful in a post-peak world but there is the sense that I've wasted precious time. If I'd known back than what I know now...sigh. Lots of my friends are not getting jobs in finance/ banking, really smart guys ,their talent wasted on a field thats set to diminish greatly.

A very large fraction of the 6 billion are literally not intelligent enough to perform the high-end jobs (national average IQ as low as 70, when you need a minimum of 120 for a technical job).  You can get all the rough carpenters and landscapers you want (a lot have gone back to Mexico).  Petroleum geologists and nuclear engineers are going to be kinda scarce unless and until the country stops treating them as disposable commodities which can be fired and hired to suit the immediate market conditions; people with the brains to do those jobs also have the brains to go where they're treated better.

Soylent Green...in the movie, the Soylent Corporation Oceanographic Survey Report of 2025 was kept secret from the people and documented that the oceans were dying. In real world 2008 these reports have been public and document phenomena that are actually happening.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/science/03fish.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877387,00.html

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2006/03/oceans_index.html

There are more, go find them yourself if you are interested.

But, we are successfully distracted by bread and circuses: Pro and College sports, Olympics, video game consoles, MP3 players, MySpace, FaceBook, the 'War on Christmas', the continual war on gay people and the abortion controversy, White House Intern BJs, Survivor and Dancing with the Stars, the latest scoop on what Caribou Barbie said/did/wore/will do, etc.

Once again, as with sustainable energy issues, the Democrat sheeple have been bitten in the arse one too many times by the opposition and will not push any kind of meaningful environmental agenda...for blowhards such as Limbaugh will use their three-hour-per day sermons to the brain-dead to scream about left-wing, liberal, feminazi, environazi, socialists, communist, secret Muslim extremists out to take away your GOD GIVEN RIGHTS (Rush's shouting, not mine) to consume all you like because the 'free market' of glorious capitalism, in the greatest country on Earth, as favored by GOD, will prevail. And the flocks in the pews in the great, mall-sized mega-churches will sing hallelujah and revel in the gospels of prosperity (He who believeth in me will surely get a McMansion and a new SUV!)! And the folks in the tiny little churches in the sticks will say that God will provide, and if he doesn't, it must be time for Revelation anyway, and the believers will all go to a better place and this Earth matters not.

Of course we don't have enough scientists and engineers. Two broad forces have killed them off: 1) Self-absorption in the lazy pleasures of consumption, avoiding any semblance of hard work studying science and engineering, and of fast-track make a buck (wall-street, import tainted crap from PRC prison laborers and child laborers)management/finance career fantasies promulgated by the business mags and by Hollywood movies, and 2)The disavowing of science by the fundamentalist religious right.

... critical to the functioning of civilization?