It's not about becoming an engineer. It's about not wasting four years of your life on studies that don't get you anywhere.

Engineering degrees are fantastic for getting your foot in the door on a decent career track. You don't need family connections or to be the smooth-talker of the century to land a decent job. Degrees in fields like Humanities? More often than not, you end up in a 'lost decade' of underemployment because you don't bring anything an employer actually needs.

But just because you got a degree in Engineering (or any other STEM subject) doesn't mean you need to stay there. One of the virtues of being in a career track job that requires a college-level education is that you spend your time around other such people and build the connections necessary for a career.

I have the benefit of being able to look back at my college friends in terms of decades of career development. The non-STEM folks? They eventually got there. They're doing pretty well now. But they spent a lot of years struggling where the STEM folks didn't.

In an age of widespread student loans, this is especially important. That first decade out of college when that interest is piling up and you're trying to pay it off with some low end job? That's a huge amount of money you're leaving on the table.