This hypothesis is highly questionable - "they’re choosing to opt out instead of cashing in once they’re among the country’s best engineers?"
These premier engineering/mba colleges provide access to opportunities that are far beyond the core field of engineering & management. An output of how we have evolved our education systems & search/tagging of talent. But the choice to get non-engieering jobs does not always happen during or end of the college.
I'm surprised but let me give this a shot. What I mean by cashing in, for example, is that I'm a mechanical engineer by training and I chose a career outside of it once I graduated. So the principal skillset I acquired (technical skills in the discipline) were not used to build out a career in my area of specialization.
Viewed differently, you can say that the principal skillset acquired is one of problem solving and critical thinking and that has cross-domain utility in a knowledge economy. So much so that we can now sell that utility to the highest bidder we're interested in. This is in my experience how campus placements happen in college.
Yes. The selection to that prestige college, the continued performance their and exposure are all good signals to identify talent. Degree is just the stamp on top of it, may be!
This hypothesis is highly questionable - "they’re choosing to opt out instead of cashing in once they’re among the country’s best engineers?"
These premier engineering/mba colleges provide access to opportunities that are far beyond the core field of engineering & management. An output of how we have evolved our education systems & search/tagging of talent. But the choice to get non-engieering jobs does not always happen during or end of the college.
I'm surprised but let me give this a shot. What I mean by cashing in, for example, is that I'm a mechanical engineer by training and I chose a career outside of it once I graduated. So the principal skillset I acquired (technical skills in the discipline) were not used to build out a career in my area of specialization.
Viewed differently, you can say that the principal skillset acquired is one of problem solving and critical thinking and that has cross-domain utility in a knowledge economy. So much so that we can now sell that utility to the highest bidder we're interested in. This is in my experience how campus placements happen in college.
Yes. The selection to that prestige college, the continued performance their and exposure are all good signals to identify talent. Degree is just the stamp on top of it, may be!
Then fair to say that we were looking at the principal skillset acquired through technical education differently. Which in itself is revealing.