Graduates need the right degree

Engineering topped the list of the 10 hardest jobs to fill.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MILWAUKEE — Mike Borden appreciates all the attention he’s been getting from potential employers. He also knows it’s not personal.

They don’t want him, exactly. They want his degree.

Borden, who accepted an internship with NASA this summer, graduated this month from the Milwaukee School of Engineering with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He had a job offer from Illumination Optics in Wauwatosa, but decided to go with NASA to push his engineering degree and training as far as he could into cutting-edge work.

“I know it’s pretty in demand,” Borden said of his degree. “I don’t know if there’s any other major that is more broad or open to anything you want.”

Borden’s major puts him in one of a handful of fields for which colleges are failing to produce enough graduates to meet employers’ needs.

Engineering topped this year’s list of the 10 hardest jobs to fill, according to the annual compilation by Milwaukee-based staffing agency Manpower Inc. Second on that list was machinists/machine operators, followed by skilled trades, technicians, sales representatives, accounting and finance staff, mechanics, laborers, IT staff and production operators.

Yet engineering ranked ninth in the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in Wisconsin in 2005-06, with 1,440 degrees in the field, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. First on that list is business, with 6,510 degrees awarded annually, followed by education (with 2,810 degrees), the social sciences (2,630), health professions (2,320), communications (2,070), biological and biomedical sciences (2,040), visual and performing arts (1,720) and psychology (1,590).

The disparity is seen in salaries. Mechanical engineering graduates are commanding strong starting salaries: Someone with a four-year degree in mechanical engineering starts at about $58,000 a year, according to a spring 2008 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Someone with a bachelor’s in business administration starts around $44,000, and a four-year accounting degree will get you $47,000.

In contrast, the starting salary for a four-year degree in English is about $33,000, while sociology graduates start at $27,000.

Why the disconnect?

Mark Schug, former director of UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Education, said the problem is part nature, part nurture.

“Skills in hard sciences and higher-level mathematics abilities and things of that sort are simply less prevalent,” he said, “but another factor is that we don’t do a very good job with math and science at the pre-college level.”

He said elementary and high schools have a hard time attracting and retaining talented math and science teachers because they don’t pay them enough to compete with other companies. A pay scale that compensates a kindergarten teacher and a physics teacher the same way ignores the fact that the physics teacher could make much more money as an engineer or elsewhere, Schug said.

The lack of math and science expertise in schools puts students at a disadvantage in those fields when they reach college, he said, and leads to a dearth of degrees that require those skills.

Jason Eckert, associate director of Marquette University’s Career Services Center, said reasons vary for a shortage of graduates in a given field. For engineering or accounting, rigorous math or science requirements may deter students, he said.

In computer sciences, Eckert said, the cloud of the burst dot-com bubble still scares people away from the field, even though information technology jobs cracked the hard-to-fill jobs list at No. 9 this year.

“The bottom line is we’re struggling to produce enough of certain degrees,” he said.

Tina Lesterhuis, an area manager for Manpower Professional, said companies try to lock up students with in-demand degrees early on.

An engineering major might draw attention from potential employers from the day he or she sets foot on campus, she said, and can expect “multiple job offers” after graduation.

“If you’re in one of those hard-to-fill professions, the job market is great,” she said.

Luke Junk, a newly minted Marquette alumnus who graduated May 18 with a bachelor’s degree in finance, discovered as much.

Junk secured an internship with Robert W. Baird & Co. as a junior in college, and followed it with another during his senior year. By October of his senior year, he said, about half of the people in his Applied Investment Management program at Marquette already had jobs lined up.

By the time he graduated, he had his pick of a half-dozen offers, ultimately electing to return to Baird as an equity researcher.

“I think for finance, if you’re a pretty good student, then there are going to be doors open for you,” he said.

With employers eager to hire graduates in select fields — and willing to pay them handsomely — college career counselors often face a dilemma: Urge students to pursue their interests, or push them toward the jobs and the money.

“I would never push someone to go into a field they didn’t like or weren’t good at,” Marquette’s Eckert said.

Instead, he encourages students to think about what they like to do, and then figure out how to fit their skills to a job.

Greg Krejci, director of career services for the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at UW-Milwaukee, said it doesn’t hurt students to think about the careers that are out there when picking a major.

“I loved history, but I knew unless I wanted to teach, there weren’t going to be a whole lot of jobs in it,” Krejci said. “You say, ‘I love anthropology, I’m going to study anthropology,’ but what are you going to do with that?”