Electrical Engineering is useless? Assuming you majored in it, I find it almost impossible to imagine believing this statement.

Not only is electrical engineering possibly the hardest engineering degree offered, it is probably also the most important. I mean, honestly, pretty much every advancement in computer technology is a direct result of EE. The rest is mostly physics. And honestly, at the high end of EE, there's very little difference.

What can I say. The coherence of a degree depends entirely on the set of classes you elect to take. Personally, I took a pretty wide variety, and enjoyed learning a lot of different things.

I got a masters degree in Electrical Engineering, mostly digital systems work. I learned to build a large number of highly interesting things. In fact, built a lot more in EE than I ever did in CS. Despite the fact that I now work writing web software, my degree is still highly applicable.

I agree with you on the difficulty, believe me. If you make it through that curriculum almost anywhere, you are the real deal. Read my reply to falsestprophet for the rest of the response.

Please explain. I have a few friends studying it and they seem to think they are going to make 80k starting.

Electrical engineering is interesting from an applied physics/mathematical standpoint. From the point of view of day-to-day work, a large segment of it has been reduced to providing a life support system for the microprocessor, which, you guessed it, runs software. Almost every EE I know is a programmer. Analog electronics, one of my early interests, has been pretty much reduced to power supply design and maybe some mixed-signal modem design. On the low end, there are advances in materials that enable Moore's law, but this is more applied physics than EE. Control theory jobs are almost nonexistent outside academia.

A lot of the higher level mathematics is cool: I personally liked dsp and stochastic systems but it got repetitive. Most CS programs offer similar math anyway. I wanted to go deeper into how the math was developed.

In short, the traditional electrical engineering field is being heavily encroached by software and the high end math isn't interesting enough. Which is why, if I had to do it all over, I would have done math, CS, physics, a lot of chem, and maybe an EE course or two. Boucher is right, it is a very difficult major, but boot camp is difficult too. I just wish it were more relevant to what is going on.

Sorry, I didn't address the 80k hopefuls. I would say that given the economic trends (ee is easier to outsource than software and is being replaced by it) that the long-term growth prospects don't look good salary wise.

The 80 k entry salaries are dubious unless they plan on using their school name to get a non-ee high paying job (read consulting, hedge fund, finance, etc). 60 is probably more realistic in my area (mid-Atlantic east coast) at the high-end entry level. In the most inflated market (the valley), seems like 100k is reasonable after 3-5 years experience (non consulting). A lot of them want advanced degrees. Of course, most of the jobs are software: http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...

Well, engineering is never useless if you goal is to get a high starting salary engineering for the man.