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May 24, 1998

Fast Times for Engineering Graduates, as a Slump Ends

By KAREN W. ARENSON

ith the economy booming, college graduates are facing the best job market in years. And for students in engineering and computer science -- a small group who chose their majors when companies were downsizing and engineers were being tossed aside like used Kleenex -- the market is sizzling.

Most have multiple job offers, signing bonuses are common, and some are even being offered stock options, a benefit normally reserved for top executives. On many campuses in the New York metropolitan region, engineering and computer science graduates are receiving salary offers of $45,000 to $50,000 a year as employers compete for one of the smallest graduating classes of engineers in a decade. Those offers are up as much as 20 percent over last year's, and well above offers to graduates in fields like economics and psychology. Career counselors at Ivy League colleges and commuter schools are shaking their heads in amazement.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., for example, the average annual starting salary is $45,621, and one computer science undergraduate has accepted a job for $70,000.

"Student salaries are out of sight," said Thomas Tarantelli, director of the R.P.I. career center, who said they surpassed salaries in his office long ago. "We often sit around and joke about the fact that the students are coming to us for advice."

Paul J. Kostek, a consulting engineer in Seattle and president-elect of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-U.S.A., said: "I call the class of '98 the class of optimists. These students took a chance, and that chance has paid off."

Allison Cooke, a 25-year-old student at the City College of New York, recalls the job market when she chose chemical engineering as her major. "It was kind of grim," she said. "Dow Chemical was being sued for its silicone implants. Companies were laying off workers."

As she struggled through fluid mechanics and kinetics and passed up parties so she could spend nights in the laboratory, she questioned her choice of major again and again. But as she prepares to graduate, she has received two job offers, one for more than $45,000 a year and the other for more than $50,000.

"Now I feel I can exhale," she said. "I'm really making it. The job market for chemical engineers right now is fantastic. We are so in demand."

With computers on nearly every desk and factory floor in America, companies are hungry for people who can program and maintain them.

And as other fields like biotechnology and financial services explode, they, too, are eager to hire people with technological and analytical expertise.

Eileen Kohan, executive director of the Center for Career Services at Columbia University, said she expected annual salaries for engineering graduates to average more than $50,000 this year, with bonuses ranging between $5,000 and $10,000 at many Wall Street firms and communications companies.

She said that although engineers have long been among the most highly paid graduates, the gap widened this year, with engineers averaging about $8,000 more than liberal arts graduates.

The booming market for engineers is a sharp turnaround from just a few years ago.

In the early 1990's, the engineering work force was shrinking and unemployment among engineers was climbing.

Not surprisingly, the number of students going into engineering dropped. By 1996, there were only 356,000 engineering majors, down nearly 20 percent from 13 years earlier, just before the decline began. Last year, only 65,000 students earned bachelor's degrees in engineering, down from 76,000 a decade earlier. And although data are not yet available for this year's graduating class, some colleges, like Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., say the number is even smaller.

For Monika Posluszna, 23, a senior in computer engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., the demand for engineers has made it easy to find a job. Posluszna, who did not learn English until she arrived in New Jersey from Poland in the 10th grade, interviewed with nine companies and accepted a job with Mars Inc., the candy company -- at more than $60,000 a year.

James Destro, 22, a chemical engineering major at R.P.I., sent his resume to 25 companies and got 22 responses. After the interviews, more than half of them invited him to visit their plants, and 7 companies made offers. The lowest was $45,000, with a $3,000 bonus for signing on. On June 26, he will start with the Exxon Corporation at a salary of more than $50,000. Until then, he will be scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef.

"I'll be totally relaxed," he said. "The last time that happened was between high school and college."

Although salaries in the region are higher than in many other parts of the country, salaries everywhere for computer majors and other graduates in technical fields have jumped, after a long period of stagnation.

In its April salary survey, the National Association of Colleges and Employers in Bethlehem, Pa., found that salaries for chemical engineers were averaging close to $46,000, up from about $42,500 a year earlier. The average for computer science graduates was nearly $41,000, up from about $36,000 last year, and 10 percent of the offers to computer science graduates from computer software companies topped $48,000.

"Nerds are king now," said Bill Linstaedt, director of career services at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind., where the average salary offer to computer engineers is more than $44,000 and 40 percent have received signing bonuses.

For students, it is a world they were not fully prepared for. Some were unsure about the ethics of accepting bonuses, others about how to balance competing job offers.

Cassandra Simmons, director of corporate recruitment at City College, said that one electrical engineering student went to her to discuss whether he could accept a $6,000 bonus if he signed on with a telecommunications company. She told him that he could, but that he should look at the job itself, not just the money. (He liked the job and took it.)

Another issue for many students was simply how to juggle so many interviews and job offers. R.P.I. brought in financial planners and time-management experts to help students like Sarah Jordan, 21, a computer science and systems engineering major, who had so many job interviews (30) and company visits (7) that some weeks she had trouble fitting them in around her classes.

"People saw me in a suit almost every day," she said.

She ultimately chose Hewlett-Packard in Andover, Mass., and will start on July 16 at a salary of $49,200.

Sometimes, though, the career office officials were not sure the students needed much help. Tarantelli said one student went to him a month ago with a $70,000 offer, asking, "How do I negotiate?"

"Our reaction was, 'What are you, nuts?' " Tarantelli said.

For companies, the challenge has been how to lure students to interviews -- and then get them to sign on. On college campuses, companies sponsored dinners and ran lotteries for mountain bikes and trips to Hawaii. They also sweetened their financial packages. But many also recognized that the biggest challenge was to convince students they would be working in a good environment.

Sapient Corporation, an information-technology consulting company in Cambridge, Mass., offered salaries of $45,000 to $55,000, annual bonuses and immediate stock options. But it also brought in potential recruits -- 25 to 40 at a time -- for two-day visits that included interviews, team exercises and social events.

"They really get to see that they will be working with other smart people doing really cool things, versus sitting in a cubicle, writing code," said Nikki Fisher, Sapient's vice president for marketing.

Companies also widened their recruiting to include nonengineering students who showed any hint of experience -- or interest -- in a technical job.

"We were looking at bright, smart students who might have a newly budding interest in information technology," said Allan Jones, manager of college recruiting for American Management Systems, an information-technology consulting company in Fairfax, Va., that is hiring about 600 undergraduates and 200 graduate students this year. "We looked at students like history majors who worked in the computer center, or philosophy majors who had an internship where they stumbled on information technology and realized that was the way they wanted to go."

For now, there is no sign that next year's supply of graduating engineers will be larger, and companies are already vying for interview slots at the colleges.

Some college career-service officials say that their interviewing rooms are already booked for the fall.

Meanwhile, corporate officials and engineering experts say they hope the job market will entice more students into engineering.

But some, like Linstaedt at Rose-Hulman, remain concerned that students may be put off by what he called the "Dilbert" factor, after the comic-strip character: "the idea of engineers as nerds without lives who have lousy jobs, evil bosses, tiny offices, no sense of style and a personal life to match."

That is a real problem, said Gregory Schuckman, a spokesman for the American Association of Engineering Societies in Washington.

"If we can get people to focus on other role models than Dilbert, maybe we can get our enrollments up," he said hopefully. "Everybody likes to read 'Dilbert.' But do you know anyone who wants to be Dilbert?"