Interesting data, but I'm not sure the title is supported by the conclusion.
The title reads "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering." This is backed up by data that shows law school enrollment declining and engineering graduate enrollment increasing.
However, it's not exactly a secret that engineering graduate programs have higher international student enrollment than law schools. So we'd need to know where the enrollment growth is coming from before we can conclude that US students are fleeing law for engineering.
This is my thought. What percentage of the engineering grad school bump is non-US citizens? What percentage of people who go to law school are non-US citizens?
From purely anecdotal experience, I would guess that a significant portion of the rise in grad school attendance is from international students.
> What percentage of people who go to law school are non-US citizens?
Significantly fewer than engineering schools, because engineering degrees are applicable worldwide, and law degrees are applicable only to the jurisdiction you wish to practice in.
Additionally, law schools have been in a bubble for at least the last 6-7 years, so seeing a decline as students realize this fact (and particularly hear anecdotes from people struggling to pay back their loans!) wouldn't be surprising to me and seems like it would make logical sense. I'm curious what the trends were with other academic bubbles to either confirm or deny this datapoint being significant.
Another factor to consider here is a rise (if any) in engineering undergraduate degrees. I know that grad engineering degrees to law degrees seems like more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but there's a big difference. A history major who goes to law school goes from not lawyer to lawyer (assuming he or she passes the bar).
Engineering graduate students, on the other hand, almost always have a background in their field of graduate study. This is often very substantial - for instance, an EE major doesn't need a grad degree in EE to get to work. And even if a student is using grad school to build some general knowledge of a new field (such as a physics or math major going to grad school in CS), they're much closer than a history major would be to law [1].
In this case, the growth in grad enrollment might understate the transition, since a student who wanted to be a lawyer who instead decides to become an engineer might just change majors and avoid grad school altogether.
[1] I actually think that if people were allowed to take the bar without attending law school, you'd find that a lot of people could become extremely talented lawyers without the graduate degree.
As a lawyer, I think I'd actually be in favor of the opposite approach -- law school (maybe just one year) with no bar exam. I guess the bar has some value as a "last line of defense" against totally incompetent people entering the profession [1], but it's really just a giant memorization frenzy with no real practical benefit. It's expected that you'll get a large chunk of the test wrong and forget everything in a couple months. Law school, on the other hand, is where people are introduced to legal writing, reading opinions, legal research, and thinking logically (something that isn't a big deal for many undergrads.)
It kills me because law school is way too expensive and way too long, and may well be unnecessary for a lot of people. But I understand the need for some kind of meaningful credentialing, since the harm one can do as a bad lawyer is usually more dangerous than what can be done by a bad engineer. (Mostly because any law grad can go and hang a shingle the day after they are admitted.)
[1] I don't mean to imply that failing the bar means one is incompetent! Extreme incompetency is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition.
I don't know - I personally felt I learned a lot from studying for the bar. Sure, I don't remember most of the details - but I remember enough to have instincts and point myself in the right direction if I need to. And I definitely learned a lot more black letter law from studying for the bar than I did in law school. Frankly, I think I would have been well-served by having to study for the bar prior to law school.
Agreed on "way too expensive and way too long." Most of the world seems to do fine with law as an undergraduate degree. I think a mandatory apprenticeship period, as Canada and the UK have, would also be useful, as neither American law schools nor the bar exam teach you much about how to actually practice law. (But good luck convincing the ABA education committee of any of this...)
I think this is because an engineering undergrad degree is way harder than most other degrees except maybe pre-med types. That means there's a substantial weeding out effect plus all the extra studying helps shore up the general knowledge that the LSAT tests. In general, poli-sci or history majors have spent the previous four years idling.
After I got my EE degree I took the GRE and GMAT and aced them, getting 95th+ percentile, without studying at all. I then enrolled in a MBA program and was shocked at how easy, and unrigorous, the courses were compared to EE classes.
I wouldn't be so quick to write those majors off, they involve massive amounts of reading and writing; both skills that I heard many engineering students say they felt they were lacking in. Furthermore both of those majors score highly as well and the marginal difference is not large. I don't think that its the difficulty of engineering that lends itself to the LSAT I think it is the emphasis on problem solving and logical thinking, which is essentially what the LSAT tests.
When I was at uni we used to talk about "contact hours", which was basically how many hours you spent per week in lectures, labs and tutorials. In my first year (studying Engineering) I had about 20-25 contact hours a week, that didn't include time spent studying working on assignments etc. From what I remember that was at the upper end of most undergraduate courses.
In later years during weeks with a large portion of lab work it wasn't uncommon to have 40+ hour weeks.
While I was an undergrad I rented a flat with a good friend of mine who was doing a B.A. (majoring in creative writing). He would complian if he had more than 7 hours a week.
There was a certain element among engineering students who reveled in the percieved difficulty of the degree there was a lot of 'machoness' about how hard the course was etc and there was a tendency to disparage other faculties particularly the Arts faculty. Which of course is nonsense.
I wouldn't have called most of the classes in my MBA program easy or unrigorous. I didn't find just about any extremely challenging as I found some of my undergraduate engineering courses. It probably didn't hurt that I had worked for a few years and probably had significantly better work habits when I got my MBA.
It's also true that the non-quantitatively inclined do find some of a good MBA core curriculum pretty hard. I did some tutoring and in economics, among other things, and I had students who couldn't a simple equation. One once asked me to "explain how graphs work," i.e. basic x-y axis price elasticity, etc. Every few years there seems to be a book written by someone who really struggled with basic math in business school.
As pre-med isn't an undergrad degree in the states, we'd probably find pre-meds with engineering undergrad degrees outscore other majors on the MCAT. The engineering grad is also a bonus for admission (given way too many chem/biology applicants). Not that this happens very often, however.
I'm not surprised. The "logic" section of the LSAT (traditionally said to be the hardest part of the test) is much easier if you know some computer science/discrete math. A lot of questions can be quickly parsed into some sort of constraint satisfaction problem, and using the right tool (drawing truth tables/constructing a directed acyclic graph) means you can get to the answer much faster.[1] Since the LSAT is a time-pressure based test, this gives you a big advantage. Of course, the reading comprehension parts are still hard, and engineering gives you no advantage there. There's also lots of selection bias potentially going on - engineers who go on to take the LSAT are rare. Who knows how that prior correlates with ability.
Somewhat relatedly, it's been well known that for CS PhD admissions, at least with native English speakers, the GRE Verbal is a better predictor of PhD performance than the GRE Math. It's unclear how much of this is top-end compression in math though (almost everyone going to a top CS PhD school gets a 790 or 800 on the GRE Math, so there's no signal left there, whereas verbal has a higher spread. A 720 on the verbal is 98th percentile).[2]
[1] I know this because in 2009 as a college senior, I took some practice LSAT tests, and found the logic section endlessly delightful and challenging in a timed setting - I was this close to applying to law schools before I changed my mind and did a CS PhD instead. I know it sounds like a weird choice, but 2009 was a weird soul-searching year for me for various personal reasons.
[2] All of this has changed since 2011 when the GRE scoring system changed to a 130-170 scale from the old 200-800 scale, along with changes to the test itself. All of my points are probably obsolete.
I think the section that delighted you is actually called the "analytical reasoning" section. The "logical reasoning" section gives you a paragraph about some subject, and that asks about inferences and deductions you can make from that.
I too found analytic reasoning delightful, both during practice tests and during the actual test. One thing about the actual test that kicked it up a notch over practice tests (aside from the pressure of it being for real) was that you could not bring scratch paper to the real test. There was a fair bit of empty space in the test booklet so you had room for truth tables, graphs, and such, but if you botched one and had to start over you might find scratch space tight.
I aced analytic reasoning. Shortly after the test, I saw a magazine at the supermarket full of those kinds of problems. The shelf position and the ads in the magazine indicated it was aimed at older women. I bought it, because I enjoyed that part of the test so much, but didn't have much hope because I aced that part of the LSAT! How are puzzles for Grannies going to be a challenge? So I tried a level 3 difficulty puzzle (range was 1 to 5 with 5 the hardest).
It DESTROYED me. I could do level 1 reasonably, and level 2 with a lot of effort.
I vowed that if I did become a lawyer, I would not take cases that would pit me against old ladies. (I did not become a lawyer. I decided near the end of law school that I would rather be a programmer who knew a lot about law than a lawyer who knew a lot about programming. My policy of not going against old ladies in battles of wits remains in force).
The GRE math is actually a dumbed down version of the SAT math so it's not surprising there's no signal left among engineering students. Probably most engineering students have gotten better at math since high school.
The GRE verbal is a great predictor of success in CS grad school and any kind of science grad school because it's so heavily g-loaded. Verbal scores are very hard to game and correlate well with raw IQ even when people try to study for the test and artificially improve scores. Antonyms, vocabulary, and reading comprehension are very good measures of the same mental ability that deep cutting edge research requires.
Of course, that doesn't work for non-fluent English speakers.
Interesting to read that. I have always thought of CS as a discipline that involves creating and testing competing explanatory models of the world similarly to the way that a lawyer might construct an argument to represent a series of events or a mathematician might construct an equation to represent a set/series of data.
Standardized test scores aren't that important after your first professional job. For some reason, though, the financial industry is infatuated with GPAs.
They get an unspeakable number of applicants and finance requires horse like work ethic, a high tolerance for boredom and detail orientation. A high GPA is a strong signal of all of those and also has a very high correlation with g/IQ/processing speed.
Work sample tests might work better but at least in the UK they do multiple rounds of structured interviews followed by free form interviews after filtering by class of degree/university prestige. I bet their false positive rate on hiring is very low even if the false negative rate is high.
I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I've read a lot of data, eg the link below, that shows that engineers do very well, but aren't the top major.
With that in mind, it's not as if all students from all majors are required to take the exam- the data represents those people that self-selected to take the lsat.
One thing these stats don't capture is the effective tuition charged by law schools. Schools are raising sticker prices, but handing out more scholarships. From discussions with someone who tracks these things, effective law school tuitions have been dropping.
Law school attendance for most students is being subsidized by richer students and by those who haven't figured out that law school at sticker is generally a scam.
The higher the sticker price, the more impressive a scholarship can seem.
As enrolments drop, schools are pretty desperate for students at present. LSAT median scores and median GPAs are dropping at many schools. Eventually, some schools will have to close; they're in a bubble.
As a product of the system, agreed 100%. Also, the true cost should account for lost income while in law school. As opportunities improve for those students who could excel in other areas, the lost income exceeds the tuition cost.
A bit under $300,000 for most schools when you consider tuition and living expenses. That doesn't include interest on the debt.
It also doesn't consider the opportunity cost you mention. Finally, one thing most young students ignore is that they have to pay the debt back in AFTER-TAX income.
$300,000 in debt takes $450,000 in before tax earnings, assuming a 33% average tax rate.
The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial.
Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a mediated arbitration (much less expensive).
It's no surprise to me that law school grads are out of work these days.
I interned in a law firm my entire senior year and now hold a BA with majors in Government and Philosophy. These experiences would leave me well primed to go to law school which was my original intention after graduation. After spending time in the firm however it is really eye opening to see how the business is rapidly changing. There is an over supply of young lawyers these days for a number of reason.
First, there are too many low quality law schools churning out people who can barely pass the bar. Those schools take home the tuition money and the young graduates have a mountain of non-dischargable debt with nowhere to turn. The rate of unemployed young graduates is actually probably even higher than figures show because schools will pay a small stipend to recent graduates so that they can say they are "employed" when the yearly figures for former students employed 6mo out are released. It's all about taking home the tuition for these schools and they shamefully advertise how demand for lawyers will increase and job prospects will remain high.
Second, the business has become vastly more efficient as firms begin to adopt digital case management systems and can now conduct research online instead of having to sort through volumes of old books. You know when you see the generic shelves of law books in offices? Yeah those just sit there collecting dust now. They are for show because all of that information has now moved onto the computer. The legal industry has been slow and late to adopt technology but it has made lawyers vastly more efficient than they could have been before. Even things like being able to email scans of documents can speed up the process astronomically. As older lawyers who cannot use computers begin to exit the workforce and younger ones who can move up in the ranks, firms just do not need as many people working as they did before. The vast majority of legal work is not what you see on TV or in the Ellen Pao case where it is a battle of the brains in real time for a court room. It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants.
A lot of this stuff can even be done at home by your average person with products like turbo tax that enable the average person to not need representation for basic needs legal needs anymore.
I no longer plan on going to law school and have been taking online courses in programming/reading a ton of programming books since I graduated in hopes of turning what has been a long term hobby of mine into a career, hopefully combined with politics or law. (I am thinking campaign research/advertising online or legal software on the law side.)
> It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants.
In my experience, this is 100% true. I spent a few years working in "legal technology", which is just industry parlance for categorizing documents into "databases" (really just proprietary applications that compete over how best to read data from a flat file).
At the time (2009 - 2011), a ton of work was being done by teams of contract review attorneys. Entire rooms would be filled to the brim with these guys, paid anywhere between $20-$40 an hour to tab through page after page of document metadata and images.
The entire industry was on the verge of being completely upended, and this is in fact starting to have effect. The article on topic modelling and LDA that's also on the front page today is particularly germane, as there are in fact implementations of topic modelling and LDA for the legal technology world.
This is my experience as well. If you look at just the "e-Discovery" product space, corporations are saving literally millions of dollars by implementing digital tools instead of retaining outside council to trawl through files looking for discoverable data. This alone is costing a lot of lawyers and paralegals their jobs.
Yeah, doc review attorneys, who hardly make $30 per hr in Manhattan, but are subcontracted to a big law firm, which charges its client $350 per hour. Now clients have realized it, and started to offshore doc review work.
I have degrees in software and law (non US), and while I did the law degree for fun on the side, I thought for a long time there would be a profitable niche on the crossroads of the two. Turns out there isn't though - the combination is so rare that there are no jobs there, all is set up to work with multiple people. Even in patent work I'd make less than in the very specialized software consulting niche I work in now.
I've always suspected it was an artifact of the legal infrastructure failing to scale with demand. This chokes the courts and forces disputes to be settled outside of it (perhaps with a minimal final-stage "blessing" from a judge).
The "demand" (number of disputes) increases with the number of interactions, which is roughly the square of the number of people (each pair is another potential dispute). So if
- population is increasing, and
- supply (courts and lawyers) does not increase as fast as the square, and
- legal technology does not increase output per person[1],
then the backlog steadily increases and people have to work around it.
[1] Many economists insist that law inherently experiences Baumol's cost disease of resistance to technological improvements due to high human component of output, but I think that's more an artifact of the constrains we place on courts.
> The "demand" (number of disputes) increases with the number of interactions, which is roughly the square of the number of people (each pair is another potential dispute).
It wouldn't actually be a square of the population. There's a fairly low number of interactions a single person can have in a day. Plus most disputes that I can have with a person I don't know are criminal instead of civil.
Criminal or civil wouldn't matter; both require use of legal infrastructure, though criminal trials are even harder to "opt out of", which makes the process even more choked. (Lock you up for a year just in case you're guilty...)
And you have potential interactions with anyone within a given jurisdiction, the same one over which the infrastructure exists. Sure, you don't interact with them all, but you interact with a fraction of them, so the scaling properties are the same.
If recent trends are anything to go by, this will lead in ten years to an oversupply of engineers and then an attendant rise in unemployment and dip in wages, like what's starting to happen with nursing.
In ten years, a huge amount of legal work will be done with software. A gigantic codified legal system is a job almost tailor made for machine learning.
Could you elaborate? I think a better approach would be to revise the legal codex so that it becomes simple enough for individuals to research and lower dependency on professional lawyers.
Moreover, I disagree with the common analogy made in circles like HN that laws resemble code. Perhaps in some esoteric probabilistic language they might, though I don't believe thinking such as "ML will fix this" will yield a proper correspondence.
Well, to step back from even the future the parent is describing, consider what's already taking place.
LegalZoom type services are wiping out entire segments that pricey lawyers used to occupy. Need to incorporate? Don't spend thousands of dollars, spend $150 to $200 + state fees. Need a trademark? $150 to $200 plus govt fees. Need a basic will? $50 to $100, no hassle.
There are somewhere around 3 to 4 million corporations in the US. Most of those will fail and die over ten years. The new corporations that get started, will increasingly use easier and cheaper web services to incorporate. That's billions of dollars in lawyer revenue wiped out every ten years, from one example service.
> I think a better approach would be to revise the legal codex so that it becomes simple enough for individuals to research and lower dependency on professional lawyers.
I think this is about as realistic a goal as the Holy Grail of an English-like programming language that's easy for non-programmers to use.
Engineering has exploded with foreign students who will leave the US with a degree that prints money in their home country. Not so much in America. They need to look at the numbers closer to see where the US students are actually going.
Seriously this times a lot.
At one unnamed ivy league university I went to, there were tons of chinese kids, not chinese americans.
They made no effort to integrate, because they seriously were only there to study engineering, go back to china, and make a ton of money.
There's even a trend for US grads relocating to developing economies. A lot of us (me included) have found very interesting work/life arrangements in places with lower taxes, lower rent and higher salaries (relative to cost of living of course). There's even a smallish trend of people expatriating to avoid crushing student loan debt. IMHO I'd expect that to increase.
As one of those people, I have to say taxes and prices are much lower in the USA than say china or Thailand. Especially when you get away from food and low end services.
I work in china but shop in the states on my visits back. As far as salary goes, I'm a bit below us levels but can save alot because I don't need, nor could I buy even I I wanted to, a car. Working in Swiss was like that also, things were just too expensive to buy so I was able to save alot.
The US, as far as I know, is by far the highest paying country to software engineers in the world, starting by 2-3x to rich countries. I seriously doubt ANY software engineer can make more money in China than in the US for any similar position of responsibility.
I've known quite a few people who return to their home countries and getting Director/VP positions moving from their previous titles of "Software Engineer" due to their US experience. There is a significant startup scene shaping up in Europe and Asia and so demand for US educated/experienced engineers is pretty high almost everywhere. US is revered as Mecca of software and startups pretty much everywhere so any experience at recognizable company in US counts a lot. Most of these startup typically attempt to emulate US companies like Uber and Amazon so work doesn't have lot of novelty or technical challenges as such but money could become significant - as if you had joined Amazon or Uber when before their Series A except that you are joining foreign counterparts afterwards. Most people I've known usually return to their home countries because of their families however.
Another fact I learned from my travels is that US is actually cheapest country if you keep the quality of goods and services constant. In most foreign countries - including tax free countries like UAE - things like iPhone, computers, cars are actually more expensive than in US. Almost all imported goods from China, Japan etc are typically cheaper in US than in other countries. Some services, food and labor could be cheaper but overall if you insist at staying at Hilton quality hotels or eating at nice restaurants, buying an equivalently nice urban home, or getting top quality spa treatment, cost usually comes out to same as in US.
Obviously these are anecdots so don't take it as statistical trend. Having said that there has been no better time to be expat if (1) if you have US education/experience (2) you can get work permits (3) you have freedom to travel around.
Its probably that VP/Directors of whatever in Europe dont make nearly as much for the same position in the US, though its a good point that the experience gives you an edge for a higher paid position like that.
I still would not believe China pays software engineers more than the US, even at a leadership position, without some stats. China as much as India has vast lower "engineering" cast based on price.
I have not yet heard of people from Argentina returning to glory after working outside, it is expected to take a dent in income, even though argentina is much richer than China/India for these purposes.
Tangential, but I'm curious: your comment seems to imply that that are now fewer CS degrees issued per year than in 1985. Is that what you meant? Can you point me to the numbers?
Seems my joke is out of date: we've actually hit the 1985 number again! Whee! Granted total degrees doubled over the interval and CS is virtually flat but whee!
NOTE: Data through 1990-91 are for institutions of higher education, while later data are for postsecondary institutions that participate in Title IV federal financial aid programs.
There's a definition change in there, and we can't be certain whether we can meaningfully compare the latest year of data with 1985--the curse of using government-published statistics.
But has it dropped as a percentage of high school graduates? My impression is a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to get in to a university twenty years ago are going now, but they're getting the kinds of degrees you'd expect for people who barely made it in.
So... a lot of comments in this thread seem to equate "engineering grad school" with CS or EE.
There are some other branches of engineering too and the non-EE types outnumber the EE's. Pretty sure the programs in questions are mostly civil, mechanical, chemical, etc.
I used to contract at a company and worked beside David Pollack (of the Lift framework), who came to the software world after being a lawyer (I think for most of his life). I'm sure he explained the "why" when I asked, but all I could think of was "Very cool! A lawyer likes this stuff too!". I still have a blast at my job, and one factor of people taking up engineering from other trades could be their found passion for it.
I had the ideal of going to law school several years ago, studied history and economics in college, with loads of public policy knowledge. Ultimately I determined that these fields actually don't interest me all that much. I mean, I had been reading texts on formal logic in my spare time because I found such subjects to be far more engaging.
I enrolled for another Bachelor's degree a while ago to help build up my chops for a career in development; effectively swapping one applied logic for another. Yet I have a lot of catching up to do to meet up with peers who have been working in the industry for nearly a decade. There's a nagging feeling of dread within me that I might just be naive at best, a fraud at worst, and end up a failure. Still, I enjoy working on projects for hours at a time (when I manage to find the time to do so) and find the subject matter I'm studying engaging. In that sense, I can at least say I don't regret the shift.
I did a BA+BS in History and Economics in undergrad intending to go to law school. Did undergraduate law review and everything. About junior year or so I realized I actually did not want to do that.
Now, 5-6 years out of undergrad I am a professional software developer without a formal CS education. I took a few CS classes and plenty of hard math as part of my Econ degree, but I don't hold a CS degree (or even a minor).
But I was always a computer geek from a young age. Through many years of interest, motivation, and self-teaching I worked in IT, then QA, and now development. I also work with many other non-CS-degree developers that are great.
[Anecdotally] I was on my way to Law School but decided to start a job in QA at a startup. Three months later I was writing code, and 9 months after that I left to find my first truly-engineering spot. Haven't looked back.
And I always complain that sodtware engineering, while having a decent initial salary progression, is a dead end career path (gaant charts anyone?), and I should have studied law instead.
We'd better improve our interview techniques before the flood of lawyer-like engineers who are only in it for the money arrives. My recommendation- avoid brain-teasers that can be crammed for. Assess based on open-source contributions, which show craftsmanship, architecture, and love of coding.
What I don't understand is why can't somebody love to code and not maintain a public github repo? Sometimes you want to keep things private-- it shouldn't have to mean the best stuff you developed has to be on github in order for you to get a good job as a programmer. It's on the technical interviewer to test out programmer's skills. Too many non-technical recruiters these days are passing on candidates because they don't have a big github repo. That's a cop out and an insult to the profession.
No joke. If I code for a living, usually I want to spend my free time doing something OTHER than coding. The projects I DO work on in my free time are for me - usually silly little things (maybe in a new lang that I'm playing with), and not indicative of standard of code quality I produce in the "real world."
In my opinion most programmers who use github should have at least two accounts, one carefully crafted to match some tradeoff between their current work environment and future work aspirations and heavily linked to their real name, and the other pseudonymous with no real name containing their real hobbies and code.
There is a substantial danger in being pigeonholed and eliminated because of some weekend hobby project three years ago "Oh we can't hire that guy, he does low level hardware driver work on microcontroller RFID devices and we need a DBA" Outside SV and NYC there is no shortage of coders and you'll get rejected for nothing.
I personally like to do gardening, home improvement, spend my time with my family over the weekends. My normal work time keeps me deep into coding and I just don't want to do 100% of my week.
Believe it or not, there are already large swathes of people that get engineering degrees because it is a good paying, stable, respected job. Probably 1/3 of my graduating class would have said their primary motivation for getting an engineering degree was the solid salary.
Historically, the solid pay and good prospects have been a primary driving criterion for people going into engineering. The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon, not the other way around.
> The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" is the new phenomenon
The Silicon Valley idealists who want to "change the world with food delivery" are (as a broad class, not every specific instance) largely PR faces created for marketing purposes by and for people who want to make lots of money, and know that having some kind of compelling mission (even if that "compelling mission" might change to something radically different later on) is important both for attracting customers and for attracting investors.
I mean, I don't want to mock it--it's challenging stuff, and makes a lot of money. It's the optimism that's a total culture shock to me. What I consider the traditional engineering attitude is the exact opposite--conservative, pessimistic, "don't fix it if it ain't broken."
Here in Brazil it's been a trend, more and more people going into engineering so that last year it was the undergraduate course with most applicants. And we have A LOT of law schools, probably more than any other country (no joke). Why so many going into engineering? Simple, there's a shortage and a job is almost guaranteed if you're a reasonable engineer, and the pay is good.
And it's not like these people are useless. I knew a guy like this in college, and he eventually settled into a decent job. Not everybody needs to be passionate about their work.
I used to write code in my free time before I married and had kids. I used to do a lot of stuff in my free time before then.
For a self-insured employer, the fact that I have a family makes me more expensive to employ. Hiring only young, single males or young, single, and sterile females allows them to raise base salary offers without inflating total compensation.
But they are not allowed by law to use the size of my family against me in the hiring process. Technically. Practically speaking, they do it anyway, and the law is unenforceable. If there's a potential legal problem, it's easy to fall back on the "not a good cultural fit" cushion.
If you don't expect someone to be contributing to their github repo on the clock, on your dime, don't check it as a criterion for employment.
I think that we should expect employers to allow open source contributions where it is appropriate. Breaking out general purpose stuff into libraries is more maintainable code anyway. If your current employer is hurting your career prospects, you should quit.
I'm not really concerned about whatever supposed "hidden biases" there are in open source, the simple fact is that the best way to judge someone's work is to see it.
If you're concerned about hidden biases I would direct you to the status quo brainteasers used today, where the interviewer simply has a blank slate to project whatever personal biases they have onto the candidate in a highly subjective, highly unrealistic situation that has nothing to do with actual programming.
That's why orchestra companies will conduct blind auditions rather than check a musician's SoundCloud portfolio.
If you want to see someone's actual work, you will have to simulate as closely as possible, in a controlled and repeatable fashion, the conditions under which that person will be doing work for you.
If you're looking for a cello player, you don't watch YouTube videos of musicians tap dancing, making trick shots in billiards, sawing lumber by hand, or performing close-up magic tricks. You number them, sit them down behind a visual barrier, and listen to each of them play the same piece of music. Then you pick the number that played it the best and hire that person.
Pulling back from that metaphor a bit, software professionals don't play just one instrument, or one genre of music. We know multiple high level languages, use different framework tools, use different design patterns, follow different processes, and the only thing we really all have in common is the ability to take a large, human-sized task and break it down into tiny, specific instructions simple enough for a stupid electronic machine to carry out--the paths between origin and destination being uncountably varied, and the ones chosen being largely a matter of arbitrary choices or aesthetic preferences.
If you won't consider anyone that does not have a public portfolio, you are inviting the obvious countermeasure of creating a sham portfolio just to jump through your hoop. You are encouraging people to write code that advances the author's interests rather than those of a project.
How about we create assessments which measure skill, and not simply how much spare time someone has, or whether their current employment allows them to do side work?
I've worked with some excellent former-lawyer devs. I think there is significant overlap between the ways a person must think as an attorney, and as a developer.
The title reads "US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering." This is backed up by data that shows law school enrollment declining and engineering graduate enrollment increasing.
However, it's not exactly a secret that engineering graduate programs have higher international student enrollment than law schools. So we'd need to know where the enrollment growth is coming from before we can conclude that US students are fleeing law for engineering.