If you need some help with deciding which college is the best choice for you, here’s the list of 10 easiest engineering degrees to get a job to help you decide.
Before we plunge into our list, there are few things to consider. First of all, there isn’t a definitive answer to the easiest engineering branch question. When making a list of engineering majors by difficulty people will rank them according to their own preferences and interest, which means any such list will be inherently biased. Needless to say, reaching a consensus on such an issue can be a tricky proposition. One of the reasons behind that is that engineering is one of the most varied fields of human endeavor. It ranges from designing computer processors to building dams and bridges, with everything else in between. From the depths of the mining pits to space, one would be hard-pressed to find a human activity that isn’t touched by engineering in some degree. Every object we use daily has been either designed or constructed by an engineer. If nuclear physics is your passion, then nuclear engineering will be far easier for you compared to someone who doesn’t really care about splitting atoms or projecting a new type of reactor that will prevent future Fukushimas and Chernobyls. The same goes for every other branch of engineering. Somebody who always dreamt about space travel will be right at home in aerospace engineering school but will have a hard time learning about intricacies of mining engineering.
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Another thing that affects the hardest engineering major ranking is the actual school future engineers are attending. When comparing any of the top 20 engineering schools in America with some of their less esteemed counterparts, results will be quite different. Even among top engineering schools, there will be some discrepancies. For instance, if a school has a rather small class of chemical engineers, it will be easier to study there, despite it being one of the hardest engineering majors available. Professors will bend over backward to help their students graduate, seeing that making their department impossibly hard doesn’t really do wonders for their job security. Departments with massive numbers of students don’t have to worry about that and can adopt more hunger games type of approach.
In order to make a lit of easiest engineering degrees to get a job, we have gone by the Vox populi. After an extensive scouring of the most popular forums on the Internet, we have chosen several threads where people discuss which engineering is easy to study. The easiest engineering degree is something people really like to talk about, especially on Reddit, which has dozens of discussions on the topic. Another forum that likes to list top ten hardest engineering majors is College Confidential, which also offers plenty of material on the most difficult engineering discipline.
Staying away from most difficult engineering degree is just one part of the equation. Regardless of how easy it is to obtain any engineering degree, it will be quite useless unless you can find a job. That is why we consulted United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and their Employment outlook for engineering occupations to 2024 report. Report consist of the projected growth of every major engineering branch until 2024, just about as generations enrolling in colleges in the next few years enter the workforce. The report presents some interesting projections. For instance, aerospace engineers, a branch always associated with future technological progress and perceived as a sure bet when it comes to future jobs, is predicted to decline by 2.3%. On the other hand, with all the hype about the green energy, fossil fuels are deemed to be going the way of the Dodo. Petroleum engineers are thought to be on the way to becoming fossils themselves, but instead, they have one of the highest projected growth rates, at 9.8%.
We combined these two ranking in order to create the most accurate list of easiest engineering degrees to get a job. After some thought, we decided against including the salary in our ranking system, since it would skew the results quite badly, but we did list median income for each branch in our list, just so that you may know what to expect.
10. Mining & geological engineers
Projected growth: 6.4%
Median annual wage: $94,040
Projected number of jobs in 2024: 8,800
Dwarfs delved too greedily and too deep into the Moria and have awakened Balrog, a mistake which would have been easily avoided should they have employed a proper mining engineer. Jokes aside, designing mining pits and getting minerals out on the surface isn’t for everyone. That is why mining engineers have some of the highest salaries of all engineering branches.
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