Back in the old days, that is, when I entered MIT in 1999, Master's students in the School of Engineering pursued Master of Science degrees. I had heard about that new species, the Master of Engineering student, but interacted with few of those because most (at least at MIT) were former MIT undergraduates staying on for a fifth year, and they hung out with the friends they had made the previous years. That always puzzled me a bit - since this was the College of Engineering, why didn't every Master student get a Master of Engineering? My department at Lehigh also offers both a Master of Science and a Master of Engineering in Industrial Engineering. At Lehigh M.Eng. programs do not require a thesis while M.S. do (instead they require a project), but at MIT the main distinction between M.Eng. and M.S. was that M.Eng., which did require some kind of thesis work, were aimed at the graduating MIT seniors rather than the outside graduate population - after all, if MIT spends four years training students using the best professors and the best research facilities, it is only natural that it try to get some return on its investment. The first M.Eng. recipient at MIT graduated from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department in 1994. To make the degree more attractive to earnings-hungry students, the M.Eng. program at MIT is a one-year program while S.M. degrees are typically completed in 1 1/2 to 2 years. Lehigh has also been moving along towards five-year degrees similar in spirit to MIT's M.Eng.; incidentally, those degrees have played a significant part in increasing the number of American students attending graduate school in engineering (and you thought the numbers were low... over the academic year 2005-2006, MIT EECS granted 70 PhDs, 105 M.S. degrees and 135 M.Eng. degrees.)
The push for five-year combined B.S./M.S. [or M.Eng.] degrees by university administrators comes at a time where more and more students are graduating from college while some fear the pool of college-level jobs is not following pace. Since college diplomas are turning into commodities, it is only natural for graduates to try differentiating themselves by staying in school a little longer, and apply for more selective job openings where they will face less competition. While the increase in the numbers of Americans pursuing advanced degrees in engineering then results from market forces, not any burning desire to become scientists or researchers, MIT does note that 15 percent of its M.Eng. recipients decide to continue graduate study (that is, enroll in the PhD program). Maybe Americans just need a little taste of graduate work before taking the jump.
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