Choosing an engineering degree is the
most challenging thing that a young STEM student has to face up to that
point in their entire life. In the tens of thousands of comments
that I get on this YouTube channel, about half of those are just about this, how to pick the right engineering
major, the anxiety, the concern, the worry about picking the wrong thing
is present in all of these comments. I understand it can be overwhelming.
There are so many choices and nowadays, every student knows about the
pain that is student loans. And so there's this fear of picking
the wrong thing and regretting. It, having to backpedal. Being forced to go to grad school, being forced into a career that you
don't even like, things like this. So if you feel this way, do
not worry. You're not alone. It's a very common problem.
And as vast as the internet is, there still is not that many pieces
of good information about this, particularly because there's so many
people who are trying to convince you that engineering isn't the way so
they can sell you. Some course, your teachers don't know your
guidance counselors don't know. So unless you have a parent or
family member as an engineer, it can be very challenging and isolating
to be in this situation and Shane homeless and Matthew
Tran definitely don't. Oh, no. I made a response video recently to
Shane's engineering degree tier list. And it's doing super well, which is mostly
analyzing all the falls in his video. And there's a lot, but in this video now it's time for me
to make my actual engineering degree tear list. So good thing.
You made it here today. We're going to go over the most
important things when choosing a major, the reasons why certain engineering majors
are good and others are not so great. And how you can even understand where
interests and skillsets and passions may lie. And what type of engineering
majors I think are future-proof. So this way you don't have to
worry about this decision anymore, and you could move on with your
engineering journey. So in this video, we're going over the top 11
engineering majors in 2021 and beyond, and we're starting. Right now. Hey. I'm Jake Vorhees. And welcome back to the 1% engineer
show where we empower young engineers to rise to the top 1% of their career. So if this is you make sure you hit
the notification bell and subscribe. This is episode 137.
So if you're new here, make sure you go and check
out our other videos. Seeing the links below for things
like access to our discord server, the free 1% engineer kit I'll link
to our IgE page and more what type of engineering program do you want to do
comment below with that being said, let's get right into this video. This video is backed by data from the
Bureau of labor statistics around salary information and the amount of engineers
that exist in each sector right now, along with how many degrees are
being awarded into the industry by an organization called a S E E the American
society for engineering education. All right, we're going to start our list
with biomedical engineering. Number 11, we're starting with BME because we
cannot possibly omit it from this list, but it just barely makes it. And this is why biomedical engineering
is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to
medicine and biology for healthcare. This field seeks to close the gap
between engineering and medicine, combining the design and problem solving
skills of engineering with medical, biological sciences, to
advance healthcare solutions, majoring in BME sounds like a good idea, and it's definitely a super cool industry, but based on what I'm about to show
you, this is why it's last on the list. Let's start here. I just, I love
this blog post from medical devices, group.net article title is good advice.
Don't major in biomedical engineering. There's only 21,000 jobs for
biomedical engineers that exist today, not job openings, actual positions, where people have the title biomedical
engineer. And as you can see, they're adding about
7,000 degrees per year. So you do the math that doesn't look
very good for biomedical engineering. I've developed this concept
called a saturation ratio, which is essentially the fraction of the
amount of degrees added to the industry divided by the amount of jobs that
actually exist. So as you can see, this is 33% saturated,
which is not that great. Biomedical engineering actually has
98 different EBIT accredited programs for the degree, but still I think there
are too many degrees being
pumped out into the industry. And biomedical engineers oftentimes
cannot get jobs and sure biomedical engineering is growing up at 5% per year, but it doesn't matter if it's
already so small at 21,000 jobs. And then I also want to point out the
fact using this table that only 45% of biomedical engineers actually are able
to even enter the workforce with their four year degree. So many need to
go get a master's or a PhD. In fact, one fifth of working biomedical
engineers actually have a PhD. That's a little bit,
yeah. Mind blowing to me, which if you compare it to a
lot of other core engineering, like the big three electrical, civil and
mechanical, this is just not the case. Engineering is one of the best majors, because with most degrees you can walk
into a corporate situation and start your career and make a great salary. I have a path to career advancement
and work on cool projects and stuff, a very nice engineering journey.
That's not always the case. That's not the case with
biomedical engineering. So that's why it's here
at number 11 on this list. I do not suggest that people get
a biomedical engineering degree. It's much better to do something like
mechanical engineering or electrical engineering. And then you can concentrate
or focus your technical electives, your internships, your networking, your
research, the clubs, organizations, and societies that you joined
in biomedical engineering. If this is what you want, that way, you have more flexibility
because your degree, which would be mechanical engineering or
electrical engineering can open up more opportunities for you for other
directions. If you choose also, it's a little bit better to
choose a more general engineering, because what if you decide halfway
through your engineering student career, or even a few years into your
actual professional career, that biomedical engineering is not
the best for you. What you've done, if you choose biomedical engineering
is you've narrowed your focus. You've isolated yourself, and it's a
little bit more challenging to backpedal. You're going to see that theme here today, guys is that I'm a big proponent of
larger core engineering groups like civil mechanical, the more jobs
that exist the better, I think it is for those majors
and that does not include BME. So it's number of next on the
list is chemical engineering. So first of all, chemical engineers
work in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, healthcare design, and construction,
pulp, and paper, Petro chemicals, food processing, specialty chemicals,
micro electronics, electronic, and advanced materials, polymers,
business services, biotechnology. You get the point. You can do almost anything with
a chemical engineering degree. It's entirely flexible.
It's entirely broad, but I still don't think it's
a great type of engineering. Also it's considered one of the
most challenging engineering majors. You can possibly get chemistry
and chemical engineering. If you look at the most challenging
majors on lots of different queries, commonly sits at number two, number
three of the lowest GPA's in university. And if you take a look
at this saturation ratio, there's only 32,000 chemical
engineering jobs in America right now. And last year there were over 11,000
degrees awarded for that industry. This ratio is even worse
than biomedical engineering. So there's just so many degrees being
added to a sector where it can not possibly support the amount of jobs. So chemical engineering graduates are
forced to step outside of chemical engineering roles like
process engineering, or even computer science
roles or pharmaceutical rules, or go to grad school in some sort of
other niche that is not engineering in order to gain employment. And even though chemical engineering has
155 different programs in the country, I'm still not that excited about it. I met a lot of chemical engineers who
are incredibly brilliant and got good grades and survive. One of the hardest
college majors you can possibly choose. And then they can't get a job in chemical
engineering because there's so few roles. And if you take a
look at chemical engineering, you'll see here that under half of
working chemical engineers are actually working with just that bachelor's. So almost a quarter of them
have a master's degree and
a large percentage just like biomedical engineering of chemical
engineers actually have a PhD in order to be qualified for the job
that exists for their career. So this is why it's number
10, not that many jobs, bad saturation ratio needed advanced
degree. And it's really challenging. Why not just major in something
else? That's a little bit easier, has better jobs and the
salary. Yeah, sure. It's great. But I really don't look at things like
$108,000 salary when you can do aerospace computer engineering, electrical engineering even has a
median salary that's higher than this. So I just don't like
chemical engineering. Now, why would you potentially
choose chemical engineering? Say you absolutely know exactly which
sector that you want work on within chemical engineering. And you've
been in love with it forever. You really like chemistry and the
intersection of engineering and chemistry. And it's been your life plan and you've
talked to lots of engineers and you've even done some projects and you really
have already gotten your feet wet with it somehow before you even
get into university. And another thing is if you live
in an area, a country, a culture, a city that actually has a
lot of chemical engineering, and you want to be there for a while.
That's another exception to this, but otherwise I'm really not that
enthusiastic about chemical engineering. Number nine on the list, we have material
engineers, materials, engineering, careers involve the study development
and testing of materials required in a wide range of manufacturing
products. Materials, engineers may work to find new
uses for existing materials, or they may use basic types of materials
like metals, ceramics, plastics, semiconductors, and composites to create
brand new substances that
meet the specifications of a particular project, which
sales engineering is a
very cool field. But again, just like biomedical and chemical,
it is a pretty narrow Avenue. There's only 27,000 working
materials engineers here in America right now. And the other thing that's interesting
with this major is that there are more masters and PhDs awarded every year,
then even undergraduate degrees, 54% of the degrees are graduate degrees. So it shows you that in order
to have a successful career, you basically need to go to grad school. The salary is not even
that high 93,000 median, which is just ahead of some
of the course big three. So I'm just not a big fan of it. What type of person might be
interested in materials engineering? I have a friend who went on to get his
PhD in this field and he works on really cool things like aerospace
engineering, composite surfaces. And it's really cool. But again, you could end up doing that with a
standard mechanical engineering degree or something that doesn't absolutely require
you to go get your master's or your PhD. So it's an okay major, but here
it sits at number nine on the list. Next up we have environmental engineering, environmental engineering takes from
broad scientific topics like chemistry, biology, ecology, geology,
hydraulics, hydrology, microbiology, and mathematics to create solutions
that will protect and also improve the health of living organisms and improve
the quality of our environment. Environmental engineering
is a sub-discipline of
both civil engineering and chemical engineering. So here we are finally at an engineering
sector that has over 50,000 jobs. Environmental engineering is ninth on
the list with the amount of total jobs in an engineering sector. There's only 70 programs that are actually
environmental engineering in America. But one thing that's interesting here
is that oftentimes just like my degree, you will see civil and
environmental engineering
combined together in the actual major. So that's why there's
only 70. And besides that, the only thing with
environmental engineering is
that there are a lot of people who are going back to school and getting
graduate degrees in comparison to the amount of undergrads, about 47% of the degrees that are
awarded every year are graduate degrees. So you might be asking yourself, how can it be that only about 2,400
environmental engineering degrees are awarded, but there's over 55,000
environmental engineers working today. And that's because a lot of chemical
engineers end up sitting in environmental engineering roles. So it's a little
bit competitive in that regard. I also think that even though
environmental engineering
says that it's a 3% growth rate based on the
Bureau of labor statistics, there has to be more environmental
engineering interest because we are destroying this planet with fossil fuels
and plastic usage and petrochemical use. So this I think is going
to be a better major. Yeah, the salary is pretty standard comparison
to a lot of other big engineering, but that's fine. A lot of this video is not based on salary
because salary doesn't really have to do with the degree that you have.
It has to do with who, you know, and the skills that you've developed and
how special you have become within your area. Another thing I like about environmental
engineering is that it's actually the only engineering sector that is
slightly more women than men. I do get a lot of comments from women
in engineering who are a little bit intimidated by things like
mechanical, aerospace, electrical, and computer engineering
that are under 15% women. But environmental engineering
is actually 50.6% women based on 2008 data, only about 22% of engineering
degrees are awarded to women, but in environmental engineering,
it's over half, which is pretty cool. All right, number seven, it was really hard for me to decide
what should be seven and eight. So I think this is pretty close to a
tie with environmental engineering, but the next one is industrial
and systems engineering. Most engineering fields are traditionally
decompositional to understand the whole of something. It is first
broken down into its parts. Once the parts are mastered you then put
them back together to create a better understanding of how to master the whole, the approach of industrial and
systems engineering is the opposite. Any one part cannot be understood
without the context of the entire system changes in one part of the
system affect the whole system. And the role of a single part is to
better serve the umbrella system. Entirely industrial engineering has
the fastest growth rate of all the engineering degrees right now, based
on the Bureau of labor statistics, it's growing at 10% per year. And right now I have this thing
that I called the big three, which is electrical, civil
and mechanical engineering. And next year industrial engineering
will pass that 300,000 Mark. So I guess I'm going to
start saying the big four. There's not that many programs for the
amount of industrial engineers that exist only 68, a bet accredited programs. And this is because lots of people who
are in civil or mechanical engineering ended up working in
industrial engineering. So it's really not a whole lot of
engineers radar. The pay is not fantastic. Again, pretty average, almost
90,000 for the median salary. And there's a lot of people who end up
getting a master's degree in industrial engineering. It's not just because
industrial engineering requires
that you get a master's degree. I think it's mostly because
someone gets a degree in either operations management or systems management
or some other type of engineering, and they want to become a specialist
in industrial engineering. So they go out and get their bachelor's
degree because it is so different. And it has a system wide approach. There's other types of skills that are
more relevant in industrial engineering, like communication. You deal
with a lot of human factors. You have a lot of operations management
and just things that are present within industrial engineering. That would never be the case in other
engineerings because it does have that opposite approach to the industry. So it's a very cool major because there
are fewer programs and it's a little bit of a non-standard engineering. I couldn't really rank it much
higher than seventh on this list. So there you have it guys, industrial
engineering, excellent. Listen, number six, you have computer engineering. Computer engineering is a branch of
engineering that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic
engineering required to develop computer hardware. And computer engineering is a branch of
electrical and electronic engineering. There's two camps of computer engineers. You have computer software engineers
who ended up working with primarily the programming and the software engineering
component and integration with computer systems. And then of course you
have computer hardware engineering. And for this video, we're
going to be focusing on that. The computer hardware engineering element, the Bureau of labor statistics does
report exclusively on computer hardware engineering because the computer engineers
that ended up working programmers or software engineers get lumped into the
job category that is software developers, computer engineers make
a pretty good salary. It's actually the second on the list
at 106, $17,000 for median income. There's 71,000 positions just for computer
hardware engineers in America alone, which is pretty solid. There's 218
accredited programs, which is fantastic. And those programs are not the programs
that are electrical and computer engineering, which is incredibly common. Those are just computer
engineering program. It's only growing at about 2% per year. It's a little bit sluggish because there
is this offset in hardware engineering being slowly, slowly, slowly overtaken by more and more
momentum around software development, software engineering, and
pure electrical engineering. Instead of the electronic side of
things that is computer engineering. I really like it as a major because it's
also one of the degrees where you could pursue a mechatronics career and work
with mechatronic systems or robotics, which I get so many questions
about robotics. Nowadays, guys, tronics video is doing pretty well
on the channel. So check that out. We also have what two computer
engineers video that's doing super well. So check out both of those
after this video. All right, getting down to the top five fifth
on the list is aerospace engineering. Aerospace engineering is the primary
field of engineering concern with the development of aircraft and spacecraft.
It has to are overlapping branches, aeronautical engineering, which is things within the atmosphere
and astronautical engineering, which is things in outer space. So I can say with absolute confidence
that if I was going to repeat my engineering career, I would
definitely do aerospace engineering. I am in love with space X and blue
origin and the moonshots and what all of these rocket in space exploration
companies are doing nowadays. We're definitely going to
have a colony on the moon. We're definitely gonna
have a colony on Mars. We're definitely going to
be mining asteroids one day, go ahead and start reading about what
becoming a galactic species looks like. We definitely have the
capacity to colonize other
planets and potentially yeah. Even other solar systems. That's what to me were the most
exciting things are headed in engineering. It's the third highest engineering salary
at $116,000 for its median Bureau of labor. Statistics only says a 3%
growth rate, which is ridiculous. And it's wrong. If you look back at what they predicted
for software development in the two thousands and the 2010s,
they were always wrong. It did not say 22% growth
like it does today. So we're going to see that increase. There's 66,000 jobs in
aerospace engineering right now, which is not right only 53 programs
to major in aerospace engineering. That's also because a lot of engineers
move into aerospace engineering careers, and you don't have as many programs. The graduate school requirement or
saturation ratio is not that bad for every three undergraduate degrees
awarded there's someone
who's getting their master's or PhD in this field. It also is
rocket science at a certain level. So that's why there's a decent
bit masters and PhDs awarded here. So check it out. Aerospace engineering. If you find yourself captivated
by aircraft, spacecraft, Thermo and fluid dynamics,
and if you are into space X, and if you're into the
colonization of planetary systems, check out aerospace engineering,
for sure. All right, here we come to number
four, civil engineering, civil engineering is what I studied
in university. And that was the plan. My entire life, civil engineers work
with any sort of infrastructure. There's five branches. You
have structural, which is
the primary transportation, geo-technical environmental, and
then coastal and Marine systems. So it's very broad. Civil engineers
can work anywhere and with anything. And it sits here at number four
because it is one of the big three. There's only three types of engineering
that have over 300,000 jobs. And civil engineering actually has
more existing engineers employed, any other type of engineering at
329,000 rolls growth rate is only 2% per year. But again, it
has so many people employed. So I'm not too worried about that. There's 256 EBIT accredited
programs in America. Not that bad of a master's degree ratio, only about 32% of degrees awarded our
graduate degrees and because of the sheer number of jobs, civil
engineering, since yeah, at the top of this video at number
four, not because I studied it, the median salary is not incredible
at a little under $90,000 a year, but so is mechanical,
industrial environmental. You have a lot that
just are shy of 90,000. The other thing I like about civil
engineering is that is actually recession proof. Unlike a lot of sectors, all my civil engineering friends have
said that even during COVID civil engineering firms have
been going sky high, this is because a lot of governments
will subsidize infrastructure spending because it hires a lot of jobs and
generates a lot of money spending. So it is a pretty safe industry. Plus we're never truly going
to leave infrastructure behind. You have a lot of technological paradigm
shifts in certain industries and things will go obsolete, but we are always going to need physical
infrastructure like buildings and bridges and piping and utilities. And
even if we start to go into outer space, we're going to need to build
colonies on other planets. And so who do you think is going to
do that? It will be civil engineers, very safe for the future. You
can work anywhere you want, and if you invest your career in things
like BIM building information modeling, you can stand out from other
people and have a cool career. Plus there's a lot of little tiny niches
within civil engineering that you can have a sweet, awesome career. Want to
give a shout out to my buddy grant. Waldi who's a bridge inspector. That's an example of something
that's super duper cool. He climbs the tallest bridges all over
North America flies all over the place to find these rights reports and basically
runs his own business unit for the company that he works for. I chose civil of its integration
to technology within traffic, intelligent transport,
patient systems, drones, connected vehicles and things like
that. So it's a very cool career. I'm very optimistic about its future, and that's why it sits at the
number four spot on this list. Next up number three,
mechanical engineering, mechanical engineering is an engineering
branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles
with material science to design, analyze manufacturer and maintain
mechanical systems is one of the oldest and pretty much the primary
bracket of engineering. If you're not sure what type of engineer
you should do it because you love everything or you're just sort of
more a generalist and engineering that mechanical engineering is
the way to go for you. You, you can literally work anywhere you
want. And in any sector that you choose, it's even more flexible than civil
engineering in the sense that every single company that builds something or
make something or generates a product has to have mechanical engineers. My biggest video on this channel
nearly half a million views is what do mechanical engineers do. And it goes over a bunch of industries
where you can work and the list is incredibly vast. How do you know if you want to do
mechanical versus civil engineering? This part is pretty
straight forward to me. If you like to tinker and build things
with your hands that have components like work with engines or do models. And you'd like the concept of
designing individual parts, then mechanical engineering is for you. Civil engineers are more attracted to
building structures like Ford and Legos, even digital ecosystems, SIM city.
That's what I did when I was a kid. I didn't take apart things and put
them back together. I built stuff. And that's how I knew civil
engineering was for me. There's 316,000 mechanical
engineers in the country. Another somewhat standard salary
at a median of just under 90,000. There's 337 EBIT accredited
programs in the country. The saturation ratio is a little alarming
with over 30,000 degrees being added every single year and only
300,000 jobs. And that's, I think because a lot of engineers do
sort of choose mechanical engineering based off of a knee jerk reaction.
They know they're going to be fine. So they just go with
mechanical engineering, then they can choose
their speciality later. It can get you into any
sort of grad school. It can get you into any sort of
career, the direction that you want. So I think it's a great career and that's
why it sits at number three on this list. All right, the grand finale,
what you've all been waiting for, we actually have a tie for
first place in this video. And first of all, we're going to talk about is the
actual engineering side of this tie, which is of course you've been waiting
for it. Electrical engineering, electrical engineering is an engineering
discipline concern with the field of study design and application of
equipment devices and systems, which use electric Tricity, electronics and electromagnetism
good 328,000 rolls right now in America. And one of the only bad things about the
electrical engineering degree is that there are a lot of people who
get their master's degree here. And I think it's for a few reasons,
it is decently competitive, but I think it's because so many
people know that this is the future, probably the safest and most future-proof
type of engineering degree that you can get today. And this is
for two reasons, first of all, electrical engineers work with
everything electronic we're going in the direction of nanotechnologies and micro
electronics and everything that's going to be using space and robotics. Basically everything that technology
touches, electrical engineers can as well. Do you have a limitation
within mechanical engineering? We cannot design things to be
physically smaller and smaller and smaller, but within electricity
and electrical circuitry, there is less of a barrier and is less
of a limitation here because of this element. It becomes very theoretical.
You cannot see electricity, you cannot see magnetism.
And for that reason, the types of mathematics that electrical
engineers have to take is more challenging. There's more math and more theoretical
mathematics in electrical engineering than any other type of engineering. This is why the salary is a little bit
higher because it's considerably more challenging. Another reason why electrical engineering
sits at a tie for first in this video is because of its
attachment to programming, electrical engineers have to
be sophisticated programmers. You cannot avoid coding and becoming
essentially halfway a computer scientist within electrical engineering.
It's impossible. And as you know, computer science, programming,
coding, whatever you want to call it, guys is continuing to grow and has
lots of opportunities for the future. Just like mechanical engineering, electrical engineers can work in pretty
much any sector and lots of electrical engineers go on to work as software
engineers and computer scientists and data scientists. You can do anything
you want with this degree. And that's why it's tied for first
electrical engineering is my number one choice for engineering today. And finally, the absolute last degree that we're going
to talk about on this list is actually computer science. I know, I know a lot of you are going to be
shocked that it's tied for first on this list, but I know some of you are going to
react like what is computer science doing tight at first, within an
engineering degree to your video? And the reason for that is
that there are actually 283, a bet accredited computer science
programs in America. That's right. A computer science degree by the
international authority on deeming your program eligible for the
professional engineering exam, considers 283 programs within computer
science to be worthy of being a professional engineer. This is why computer science sits here
and it's tied for first because it has a 22% growth rate. That's more than double the fastest
engineering degree growth rate, which is industrial engineering. And the median salary is
$107,000 a year with 1.4, 6 million jobs in computer
development in America right now, not all of those are
engineers. Of course not, not all those are computer scientists.
Some of those are data analysts, people working in machine learning,
all types of coders and programmers. But this to me is the distinction between
just being a coder and a programmer and being potentially an
engineer. What's different. My you ask software engineers, they make software design software
build software. You can be a programmer, a coder, a data scientist your entire life and
not actually make a new piece of software or build a computer program. And
this is why computer science, again, because of the Abe accreditation
backing is on this list where software engineering might you add? Well,
there's only 30 software engineering, ABET accredited programs in the country
compared to 283 computer science. And if you look at the list
and you go to a bets website, there's a bunch of small niche
programs and all of the heavy hitting universities, they don't even
offer software engineering. So software engineering gets a mentioned
in this video, but not as a degree, not as a major choice. If you do a bunch of research about what
all the software engineers in Silicon Valley and tech companies say
about what you should study, they will tell you computer
science, not software engineering, computer science is more broad. Software engineering is a
branch of computer science. Computer science is a study of
computers and computing as well as their theoretical and practical applications. Computer science applies the
principles of mathematics, engineering and logic to
a plethora of functions, including algorithm,
formulations, software, and hardware development
and artificial intelligence, just like electrical and
mechanical engineering. You can work in any field that you
want with a computer science degree. Almost every company needs
computer scientists today. So with such a rapid growth rate with
almost one and a half million jobs, the median salary of
107,283, a bit accredited, meaning it's considered an
engineering type of degree. Computer science is tied with
electrical engineering on this list, even though it doesn't have the word
engineering in its degree title. I mean, take a look at the chart from the ASC
there's 19,000 degrees that are within an engineering program in 2018, that's more degrees in a
single engineering category
than anyone else besides mechanical engineering. And even
with such a high number is 19,000. That saturation ratio is only 1.3% because
there's almost a million and a half jobs in software development. And if
you have a computer science degree, especially from an embedded accredited
school, you could get any of them. So there you have it guys.
That's my engineering degree. Tearless my top 11 types of engineering
majors that you should look at in 2021 and beyond what type of engineering
program do you want to do comment below. If you want a little bit more information
about what is right and wrong in terms of choosing an engineering degree, go check out my criticism of Shane
hummus's engineering degree to your list because I tore it to pieces
and ate hummus for breakfast. Thanks again for watching
the 1% engineer show guys, if you're a young engineer and you want
to rise to the top 1% of your career, then make sure you hit the
notification bell and subscribe. We have 137 episodes on this channel
for your engineering success. So make sure you check out some of
those and we'll see you again in another video, Bubba,
