[dw1]

I believe for someone to call themselves an engineer these days, one needs to have an engineering degree. IMHO.

(Of course, I am not referring to an Operating Engineer - that is an entirely different thing.)

As an R&D engineer & as a senior manager (with over 30 US patents) someone would have to be astoundingly well qualified for me to consider hiring them as an engineer without a degree in that field.

It used to be that in NY state you could get state certification as an architect without a degree, but I believe the rules changed many years ago. I had a university undergraduate classmate who has mentioned several times - including in his new podcast - that his father was a very successful non-degreed architect. Oh yeah, in keeping with the Cornell comments in the prior posts - GO BIG RED!!! That was at Cornell (and the classmate I'm referring to was communications major Keith Olbermann).

LOTS of people call themselves engineers, when in fact they are technicians or CAD designers.

This is not to say that non-degreed engineers don't exist, but in my long professional experience that category has been fading away for many years. In fact, in the later stages of my career, I saw that most of the "fresh out" engineers I hired had masters degrees because it was not all that unusual.

Being a Professional Engineer (i.e. having a PE license) requires a degree, a minimum number of years of professional experience and passing several exams (specifically the EIT "engineer in training" & PE exams). Notably, the PE license is quite valuable in Civil Engineering and related fields, but outside of that - not so much.

Getting an engineering degree is a LOT of work compared to many other undergraduate programs, but it just gives one the "tools". It is the professional experience applying those tools (e.g. being able to tell when a CAE simulation is giving you b.s. because you understand the underlying physics & math) that makes one a well-qualified engineer - knowing not just the "what" but also the "why".

It is not at all uncommon for engineers to work for several years and decide they want to move up the management ladder and get their MBA, or variations of that degree. I also know of others who study for and take the Patent Bar Exam, not to become patent lawyers but to focus on patents and related intellectual property. There are also people with engineering degrees who went into technical sales or (shudder) Marketing. I also know of at least one person who was an undergraduate Biomedical Engineer who went from that to med school.

Fyi, the German example is interesting. It is required to have an masters-level engineering degree to put "Dipl.-Ing." after one's name, although EU agreements is causing that to be often replaced with an "M.Sc." designation. I professionally worked with a lot of German engineers and they take considerable quiet pride in the "Dipl-Ing" (or "Dr.-Ing.", the equivalent of the US Ph.D.) after their names.