I agree. It is possible to have too many engineers. People are complaining that there are too many lawyers, for instance. There is no reason it can't happen to us.
I'm not sure, and engineering degree is very flexible.
A friend of mine got a job straight out of university, and in the following years did biological, civil and automotive engineering.
Lawyering, in contrast, I believe is fairly specialised - in that it's not as easy to move around between different areas of law? Aslo, people will always complain there are too many lawyers, the economics of law aren't properly market-lead..
He stopped working with engineering about 15 years ago, because there was too many engineers, the pay was too low to be worth the effort and risk.
He recently resumed working with engineering, and unfortunately remembered why he had left in first place, he worked in a couple projects, and most of them had engineers getting pay less than senior construction workers, and companies frequently believed that hiring an engineer was just out of necessity because the law says so, and otherwise would build whatever they want without one.
This does had some very, very bad effects, like when an engineer-less construction company thought it was good idea to just demolish some pillars that were in the way of what they wanted to build, and managed to demolish two buildings and damage a third. (this happened in Rio de Janeiro... the person that asked to take down the pillars was the secretary, that looked at the project and concluded that by taking down the pillars they could fit more desks in the office they were furbishing...)
Flexible? In these days where unemployment rules, companies will reject your application if you have not 5 years of experience with the exact complete toolchain they use. Doesn't matter if you have been working 15 years in the same industry and 10 years on the same kind of job, and that you could adapt easily and quickly to other toolchains, jobs or industries, they don't care, they can find someone that doesn't even need to adapt. So the more years pass, the more you get stuck in the exact same thing, despite your theoretical flexibility.
> and in the following years did biological, civil and automotive engineering.
I would guess that most of what those fields have in common are their quantitative/mathematical nature. Would he have been just as fit for these roles with a degree in Math or Physics?
Of course it's possible. If everyone becomes an engineer, that just means the median engineer is less impressive.
Can there be too many people with 130+ IQs? Not sure about that.
Right now engineering degrees are valuable as intelligence proxies because the standards are less relaxed than other degrees. If everyone became an engineer this would no longer be the case.
