Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I would have guessed ME >> EE, but I mostly was working around MEs.  

I was going to make a comment but deleted it about CS/EE/CIS all being sort of interrelated. Probably more the first two than the last one, because Computer and Information Systems is probably more IT than actual coding/design.

I can say from being in the electronics industry is that in any electrical product design, you have a handful of hardware engineers and a huge team of firmware engineers. Those firmware engineers will VERY often be EE and less often CS. CS is more into software application development rather than product/firmware level stuff IMHO. 

Those teams typically dwarf the few mechanical engineers which are needed to design the product fitting around the electronics.

This is somewhat less true in half of my company (HDDs) because the electro-mechanical portion of the design is massively complicated and with a lot of moving parts. But it's completely true in the other half (SSDs) because an SSD is basically electrical components soldered to a PCB and put in a housing [sometimes]. Mechanical engineers are necessary, but not very many of them. Likewise, the team creating the schematic and laying out the board are obviously necessary, but not very many of them relative to the team doing firmware development. 

I'd say that this would be completely inverted in an industry like, for example, automobiles. But even there, electronics and computer controls of EVERYTHING in a car would suggest that EE would be catching up quickly. Especially as we add driver assist / self-driving features. 

You had me all pissed off until that last part.

to me, arts =/= art history.

we need few art historians. i'm fine with a large population of artists, to a degree. but much the same way a population of too many engineers wouldn't be a good thing either.

in fact, overall, we're probably "too educated" in the sense that we have too many people going to college for fields that don't need that level of population/concentration. we need more in ag and technical degrees.

i put "too educated" in "" because, imo, we're overall terribly educated, but too many people have a piece of paper saying they're special and not enough willing to stand up and show it. there's tons of great opportunities for fantastic jobs like welding, electrician, plumbing, mechanic, tech technician, nursing and several others i'm sure.

EE and Comp Sci go hand in hand in a lot of ways.  EE is actually ECE at Texas-- Electrical and Computer Engineering.  My upper division sequence had just as many computer-related courses, as it had traditional EE courses like Electro Magnetics or Analog Circuit Design.

Not sure what it is today at Purdue, but it was ECE when I was there as well. 

That said, it was still separated from CS. 

As I say above, in my estimation a key differentiator is that CS is a little bit more focused on software application development and is more abstracted from the hardware. Whereas the computer engineering folks may do just as much coding, but it's more likely to be a firmware focus where the code is inextricably linked to the hardware, i.e. making an electrical or electromechanical system do something. 

There's enough overlap that learning one can lay the groundwork to do the other, with the exception that a CS major may be able to be a great firmware engineer, but that CS major is probably never going to be doing analog circuit design. 

(Granted, most EEs will never touch analog circuit design... Analog experts these days are few and far between, and extraordinarily well compensated as a result.)

China plays the long game.  The US plays whatever works for the next quarter.

China plays the long game.  The US plays whatever works for the next quarter.

Sometimes. Didn’t they just build a bunch of empty cities to make their GDP look extra shiny?

Where do you put nursing?

I hadn't exactly included it in STEM, but I could easily see the argument that it should be included. 

A search of the googles with the question "is nursing part of STEM" suggests there's a lot of disagreement on that, with some saying yes and others no.

Even our own government doesn't agree, apparently: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhedgecock/2016/03/29/is-nursing-a-stem-field-does-it-matter/

The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for instance, includes nursing in its list of STEM fields as, at minimum, STEM-adjacent--but the Department of Commerce's Economics and Statistics Administration does not. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn't include nursing on its list of STEM fields that make non-citizens eligible for a visa extension.

The way BLS categorizes nursing is complicated (as, it seems, is the way most people seem to categorize nursing): While it's included in a very broad list of STEM fields, it's more properly categorized under a secondary STEM "domain," along with other health-related professions. When asked why the agency categorizes nursing the way it does, a spokesperson was careful to note that "there’s no single official definition of 'STEM,' and a different one might work better for another user."

ICE declined to comment for this story.

The Department of Commerce , on the other hand, takes its cues from the National Science Foundation, which supports "all fields of fundamental science and engineering." Nursing is an applied field, not necessarily focused on the fundamentals of physical sciences. No pure science research, no STEM designation. (Going beyond NSF designations, the DOC also doesn't consider social sciences to be STEM.)

I've been a big proponent of Voc Ed for a long time for this reason.  There are a LOT of college majors and even grad school majors that have a hard time finding jobs but if you know how to weld or fix HVAC systems, you'll always find offers. 

The other aspect here is the massive gulf between those to GO to college and those who GRADUATE from college.  When you add the two together you have a massive number of people wasting a massive amount of time and resources to go to college for no benefit.  They either get a worthless degree or no degree at all. 

at least they get the debt to show for it!!