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Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

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Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#41

Post by voteapathy »

Well, I guess this is me?

I had the ideal of going to law school several years ago, studied history and economics in college, with loads of public policy knowledge. Ultimately I determined that these fields actually don't interest me all that much. I mean, I had been reading texts on formal logic in my spare time because I found such subjects to be far more engaging.

I enrolled for another Bachelor's degree a while ago to help build up my chops for a career in development; effectively swapping one applied logic for another. Yet I have a lot of catching up to do to meet up with peers who have been working in the industry for nearly a decade. There's a nagging feeling of dread within me that I might just be naive at best, a fraud at worst, and end up a failure. Still, I enjoy working on projects for hours at a time (when I manage to find the time to do so) and find the subject matter I'm studying engaging. In that sense, I can at least say I don't regret the shift.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#42

Post by iak8god »

patio11 wrote: post #28
iak8god wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential, but I'm curious: your comment seems to imply that that are now fewer CS degrees issued per year than in 1985. Is that what you meant? Can you point me to the numbers?

Seems my joke is out of date: we've actually hit the 1985 number again! Whee! Granted total degrees doubled over the interval and CS is virtually flat but whee! http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.as...

Thanks. I'm surprised to see that computer and information sciences and engineering have dropped quite a bit since then as the percentage of degrees.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#43

Post by MollyR »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #33

Engineering has exploded with foreign students who will leave the US with a degree that prints money in their home country. Not so much in America. They need to look at the numbers closer to see where the US students are actually going.

Seriously this times a lot. At one unnamed ivy league university I went to, there were tons of chinese kids, not chinese americans. They made no effort to integrate, because they seriously were only there to study engineering, go back to china, and make a ton of money.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#44

Post by VLM »

jdhawk wrote: post #16
mohap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is why can't somebody love to code and not maintain a public github repo? Sometimes you want to keep things private-- it shouldn't have to mean the best stuff you developed has to be on github in order for you to get a good job as a programmer. It's on the technical interviewer to test out programmer's skills. Too many non-technical recruiters these days are passing on candidates because they…

No joke. If I code for a living, usually I want to spend my free time doing something OTHER than coding. The projects I DO work on in my free time are for me - usually silly little things (maybe in a new lang that I'm playing with), and not indicative of standard of code quality I produce in the "real world."

In my opinion most programmers who use github should have at least two accounts, one carefully crafted to match some tradeoff between their current work environment and future work aspirations and heavily linked to their real name, and the other pseudonymous with no real name containing their real hobbies and code.

There is a substantial danger in being pigeonholed and eliminated because of some weekend hobby project three years ago "Oh we can't hire that guy, he does low level hardware driver work on microcontroller RFID devices and we need a DBA" Outside SV and NYC there is no shortage of coders and you'll get rejected for nothing.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#45

Post by pkaye »

jdhawk wrote: post #16
mohap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is why can't somebody love to code and not maintain a public github repo? Sometimes you want to keep things private-- it shouldn't have to mean the best stuff you developed has to be on github in order for you to get a good job as a programmer. It's on the technical interviewer to test out programmer's skills. Too many non-technical recruiters these days are passing on candidates because they…

No joke. If I code for a living, usually I want to spend my free time doing something OTHER than coding. The projects I DO work on in my free time are for me - usually silly little things (maybe in a new lang that I'm playing with), and not indicative of standard of code quality I produce in the "real world."

I personally like to do gardening, home improvement, spend my time with my family over the weekends. My normal work time keeps me deep into coding and I just don't want to do 100% of my week.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#46

Post by kjs3 »

doktrin wrote: post #40
theVirginian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interned in a law firm my entire senior year and now hold a BA with majors in Government and Philosophy. These experiences would leave me well primed to go to law school which was my original intention after graduation. After spending time in the firm however it is really eye opening to see how the business is rapidly changing. There is an over supply of young lawyers these days for a number of reason. First, there…

> It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants. In my experience, this is 100% true. I spent a few years working in "legal technology", which is just industry parlance for categorizing documents into "databases" (really just proprietary applications that compete over how best to read data from a flat file). At the time (2009 - 2011), a ton of work was being done by teams of contract rev…

This is my experience as well. If you look at just the "e-Discovery" product space, corporations are saving literally millions of dollars by implementing digital tools instead of retaining outside council to trawl through files looking for discoverable data. This alone is costing a lot of lawyers and paralegals their jobs.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#47

Post by logfromblammo »

patio11 wrote: post #28
iak8god wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential, but I'm curious: your comment seems to imply that that are now fewer CS degrees issued per year than in 1985. Is that what you meant? Can you point me to the numbers?

Seems my joke is out of date: we've actually hit the 1985 number again! Whee! Granted total degrees doubled over the interval and CS is virtually flat but whee! http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.as...

Read the footnote.

NOTE: Data through 1990-91 are for institutions of higher education, while later data are for postsecondary institutions that participate in Title IV federal financial aid programs.

There's a definition change in there, and we can't be certain whether we can meaningfully compare the latest year of data with 1985--the curse of using government-published statistics.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#48

Post by dang »

geebee wrote: post #5

Interesting data, but I'm not sure the title is supported by the conclusion. The title reads "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering." This is backed up by data that shows law school enrollment declining and engineering graduate enrollment increasing. However, it's not exactly a secret that engineering graduate programs have higher international student enrollment than law schools. So we'd n…

Good point. We moved the "US" qualifier from "students" to "schools" in the title.

Re: Students are fleeing US law schools and pouring into engineering

#50

Post by stephengillie »

emodendroket wrote: post #49

If recent trends are anything to go by, this will lead in ten years to an oversupply of engineers and then an attendant rise in unemployment and dip in wages, like what's starting to happen with nursing.

So you're saying this is a good time to start a law career?
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