I see these were started under Sharp in 2013 and expanded significantly when Young was president.

Are these another DEI scheme that needs to go away?

Not DEI. It's a way to expand enrollment without overloading the College Station campus. Students don't go to BCS until their sophomore or junior year and they don't stay on the main campus for as long. Know some kids who went this route. It's good.

To put the shortage into a little perspective, I was trying to hire an ELEN from SWTSU last year, and I was outbid. The winning bid was $125k, and the winning bid did not come from one of the usual suspects for overbids Austin (e.g., Apple, Facebook, MSFT, Google, Amazon).

The concept was for kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to have an affordable pathway to A&M engineering.

Vestal_Flame said:

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To put the shortage into a little perspective, I was trying to hire an ELEN from SWTSU last year, and I was outbid. The winning bid was $125k, and the winning bid did not come from one of the usual suspects for overbids Austin (e.g., Apple, Facebook, MSFT, Google, Amazon).

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. Thus was a new graduate or experienced engineer?

My son graduated from A&M in 2015 with an Areo engineering degree. Had a co-op with a major defense contractor while in school and never even had to interview and has been at that company ever since.
Our neighbor is a senior at A&M in Aero and can't get a co-op or internship right now. Things seem much more bleak.
Is this what people in the engineering industry are experiencing now?

I don't really think there is such a thing as the "engineering industry". There are engineering jobs across all different kinds of industries and government entities . Sure there are large engineering firms that are involved with a broad spectrum of different industries and skills and knowledge that are somewhat interchangeable across a range of industries but the work only exists to support economic activity in one way or another . Therefore , engineering jobs supporting some types of activities might be red hot and others might be ice cold at any given point in time.

Consequently very specialized engineering degrees like Petroleum or Aerospace or Nuclear might be more subject to up and down demand as opposed to less specialized degrees like Mechanical, Electrical, Civil , or Chemical Engineering.

If a recent engineering grad is hell bent on working in a specific industry and it's not hot when they graduate then my advice is get into the industry at whatever level they can , do a stellar job at it, and work your way up. If they are good they will get an opportunity eventually unless that particular industry is just dead in the water for good which is not the case for Aerospace.

Another option to consider might be the Air Force or Navy aviation . I would guess the Aerospace industry is well populated with people that cut their teeth there. Certification and work experience as a licensed A & P mechanic is another path in as well , military or otherwise.

Captain Augustus McCrae said:

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I see these were started under Sharp in 2013 and expanded significantly when Young was president.

Are these another DEI scheme that needs to go away?

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Not DEI at all, this is about getting more people to have actual skills with a degree. DEI is accepting kids into schools they have no business being at academically and letting them do a Liberal Arts major with the intent of being a Diversity Officer. Engineering Academies are basically a step up from trade schools with the opportunity to go to College Station if they do well.

Engineering academies first started as a spin-off of Blinn TEAM. Blinn TEAM is a program at Texas A&M where students would attend both Blinn and Texas A&M at the same time. Eventually, the student will be allowed to change their major into whichever major they want. The Engineering Academies first stated off from Blinn TEAM, but for those wanting to do an engineering major. The Engineering academices then eventually spread to other colleges outside the Bryan/College Station area.

Texas A&M is full, the moose out front should have told ya.

Academies do exactly what others have said, takes the freshman population pressure off the main campus. And a % of freshman engineering students switch out to other things, or unenroll completely.

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Thus was a new graduate or experienced engineer?

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New grad.

Quote:

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Is this what people in the engineering industry are experiencing now?

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All that I know is what I'm seeing in ELEN. If I were an AERO right now, I would probably sell myself as an expert in heat transfer. The link below explains why.

The AI rush is hitting a bottleneck
https://economist.com/business/2026/04/27/the-ai-rush-is-hitting-a-bottleneck
from The Economist

TAMU engineering is one of the most difficult colleges to get into. A leg up is a good thing, does not matter who you are.

TAMU engineering college has been "weeding" out their students for years, by sending them to take and pass courses in the hard sciences. Most first year graduate students in engineering are not paid a stipend so Jobs for Aggies is flooded with their applications.

In some ways they balance out DEI policy. The top 10% rule fills up the engineering incoming class then as the less prepared get weeded out the best performing academy students take their place. The incoming academy students to main campus have higher average SAT scores than incoming freshmen.

Vestal_Flame said:

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Quote:

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Thus was a new graduate or experienced engineer?

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New grad.

Quote:

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Is this what people in the engineering industry are experiencing now?

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All that I know is what I'm seeing in ELEN. If I were an AERO right now, I would probably sell myself as an expert in heat transfer. The link below explains why.

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Electric utilities are having an extremely hard time hiring engineers right now, especially licensed PE's on the substation side. There is a ton of work but the talent is going to consultants or data centers.

I don't think A&M-affiliated "Engineering Academies" are needed as much as good network of junior colleges with relevant math and science classes for STEM majors. This would benefit all students at all schools across the state.

I've known several people who did two years at the local junior college, mostly to save money, then transferred to A&M and finished their engineering degrees. They have done just fine. The people I'm thinking of had good junior colleges in their area.

Conversely, I remember a couple of people who went to lesser junior colleges. They got to a 300-level electromagnetics class, and they had trouble with calculating divergence and curl of Maxwell's equations. Their lower-level calculus classes were just not that rigorous.

The origin of the Engineering Academy was with the Blinn TEAM program. One of the limitations of TEAM originally was the CoE did not allow any of those students to take any TAMU engineering courses. That put those students behind if/when they matriculated as they were rising sophomores in credit and freshmen in engineering coursework.

Kathy Banks had just come on as Dean of the CoE and worked with the Chairs of Science and Math at Blinn to open up those freshman and later sophomore engineering courses courses to TEAM students while simultaneously tweaking the TEAM enrollment to target and add in more students who were 1st generation college students and as a sidebar a more diverse student pop. The biggest change was the willingness by the CoE to open the doors to the freshman ENGR 111/112 courses. Those students were no longer behind in coursework.

That required Blinn to tweak its math offerings to add more precalculus courses as those students were less calculus ready. We also created cohorted sections to create built in student learning communities.

It was very successful for both schools and continues to be a very unique partnership. Those students are indistinguishable from traditional TAMU freshmen in terms of graduation outcomes. In that sense TAMU got the benefit of an effective larger freshman class of ENGR students without having to put them in a seat for most core math and science courses. It was a win/win for both schools.

The academies at other institutions were not quite the same. They were built to be 100% in house at the CC with a naturally weaker student pop with a stricter matriculation policies.

Mathguy64 said:

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The origin of the Engineering Academy was with the Blinn TEAM program. One of the limitations of TEAM originally was the CoE did not allow any of those students to take any TAMU engineering courses. That put those students behind if/when they matriculated as they were rising sophomores in credit and freshmen in engineering coursework.

Kathy Banks had just come on as Dean of the CoE and worked with the Chairs of Science and Math at Blinn to open up those freshman and later sophomore engineering courses courses to TEAM students while simultaneously tweaking the TEAM enrollment to target and add in more students who were 1st generation college students and as a sidebar a more diverse student pop. The biggest change was the willingness by the CoE to open the doors to the freshman ENGR 111/112 courses. Those students were no longer behind in coursework.

That required Blinn to tweak its math offerings to add more precalculus courses as those students were less calculus ready. We also created cohorted sections to create built in student learning communities.

It was very successful for both schools and continues to be a very unique partnership. Those students are indistinguishable from traditional TAMU freshmen in terms of graduation outcomes. In that sense TAMU got the benefit of an effective larger freshman class of ENGR students without having to put them in a seat for most core math and science courses. It was a win/win for both schools.

The academies at other institutions were not quite the same. They were built to be 100% in house at the CC with a naturally weaker student pop with a stricter matriculation policies.

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Blinn is pretty much the best CC for those wanting to transfer into A&M.

The reality is pretty simple. We're neither producing nor importing enough engineering talent to meet demand, at least in ELEN.