Mechanical engineering is not about to vanish. It is doing something slower and more depressing. It is sliding into the background while still insisting everything is fine. By now you have already seen the oversupply arithmetic and the way “entry-level” quietly turned into a sorting game for the already experienced. See Reason #1 and Reason #34.
On paper, the story still sounds reassuring. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 9% growth for mechanical engineers from 2024 to 2034, with about 18,100 openings per year, most of them simply replacing people who retire or leave (Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2025a). At the same time, U.S. institutions awarded 36,224 bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering in the 2020–2021 academic year alone (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2022). That is before counting master’s and doctoral graduates.
In Reason #34, we did the math. When you add in initial H-1B entrants in mechanical-engineering occupations (2,714 in FY 2024), unemployed but experienced MEs still in the pool, and roughly 1,455 Mechanical Engineering Technology graduates who often compete for the same requisitions, you end up with about 45,700 people for 18,100 seats (American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE], 2024; BLS, 2025b, 2025c; NCES, 2022; U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services [USCIS], 2025). In other words, roughly two and a half mechanically trained candidates for every projected opening, year after year. That is Two and a Half MEs, and it is not a mood; it is a ratio (ASEE, 2024; BLS, 2025a; NCES, 2022; USCIS, 2025).
History already gave you a template for what this kind of slow imbalance looks like. The Western Roman Empire reached its greatest extent under Trajan in the early second century, then spent more than three hundred years thinning out before the convenient textbook date of 476 CE. Historians describe “late antiquity” as a period when political control decayed, tax systems strained, and armies hollowed out while daily life in many cities still looked ordinary for generations (Fall of the Western Roman Empire, 2025). Rome did not fall in a weekend. It stopped renewing itself while going through the motions.
Mechanical engineering is in its own late-empire phase. The job titles, departments, and conferences are still there, but the frontier has moved. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 lists the fastest-growing roles in areas such as AI and machine learning, sustainability and environmental protection, business intelligence, data analysis, and other software-heavy or systems-focused jobs, many expected to grow 30% or more in just a few years (World Economic Forum, 2023). Mechanical knowledge now shows up inside those roles as a constraint to respect or a platform to build on, not as the center of gravity. You already met this dynamic when you saw innovation drifting to batteries, power electronics, controls, and infrastructure while the mechanical parts mostly stayed the same, just a little lighter or cheaper each revision. See Reason #7 and Reason #35. Your equations still matter, but they no longer define where the growth and prestige live.
Below that frontier, the line goes flat. For mechanical engineering technologists and technicians, BLS projects “little or no change” in employment from 2024 to 2034, with around 3,200 openings per year, again mostly to replace people leaving rather than to staff new demand (BLS, 2025d). ONET reports a median annual wage of about $68,730 for these roles (National Center for ONET Development, 2025), compared with $102,320 for mechanical engineers (BLS, 2025a). The day-to-day content is familiar from your own experience: test fixtures, qualification rigs, drawings, engineering change orders, DV/PV loops, and line support, now sliced across technicians, overseas design offices, and automation tools instead of anchored in a well-defined mechanical group. That is the environment you have been reading about all along: baked-in pipeline mismatch, custodial engineering around decisions made elsewhere, and long “temp-to-hire” auditions that let companies ride the boom-and-bust cycles without committing to you. See Reason #14, Reason #25, and Reason #45.
Meanwhile, the education pipeline does not narrow. NCES data show degrees in mechanical engineering rising over the decades, while total U.S. employment is projected to grow only about 3.1% from 2024 to 2034, much slower than the prior decade (BLS, 2025e; NCES, 2022). The Occupational Outlook Handbook notes that average growth across all occupations over that period is about 3%, which means many fields are only barely outrunning population growth (BLS, 2025f). Mechanical engineering sits in the middle: not collapsing on the chart, but constantly fed by new graduates into a job market that already has two and a half of you for every “opening” it claims to offer.
In that context, all the earlier pieces start to line up. The field is oversaturated, so “preferred” requirements quietly become mandatory. Internships either do not exist, or they collapse into seasonal technician work that does not carry over (Reason #5). The curriculum hardens around a timeless core that recruiters treat as generic, while more adaptive fields update their syllabi as the frontier moves (Reason #2). The absence of a protective guild or strong licensure shield makes it easy to blur titles between engineer and technologist without raising pay (Reason #10 and Reason #13). When downturns hit, some people end up as “unemployed engineers,” a label that reads like a joke even to them (Reason #44). And when you finally realize what you have trained for, you are already deep enough into your career that walking away means starting over (Reason #46).
From the inside, a dying profession does not always feel like decline. The requisitions still post, the CAD licenses still renew, and the conference lanyards still pile up. The decay is in what those trappings actually buy you. Each year, more of the interesting work migrates into software, data, and systems; more of the remaining mechanical work is standardized, automated, or pushed down to cheaper labor; and more of your value is tied to a degree that thousands of new people get every spring, in a field that no longer sits at the center of anything important.
Rome survived its fall as a memory and a tourist site. Mechanical engineering will survive your career as a background discipline, a supporting bullet on someone else’s slide deck. You just will not get the empire you thought you were signing up for.
References:
American Society for Engineering Education. (2024). Engineering & engineering technology by the numbers, 2023. https://ira.asee.org/by-the-numbers/
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025a). Mechanical engineers. Occupational Outlook Handbook. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineers.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025b). Unemployed persons by occupation and sex (annual averages). U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat25.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025c). Data tables for the overview of May 2024 occupational employment and wages. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/oes/2024/may/featured_data.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025d). Mechanical engineering technologists and technicians. Occupational Outlook Handbook. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineering-technologists-and-technicians.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025e). Employment projections: 2024–2034 (News release). U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025f). Occupation finder: Occupational Outlook Handbook. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm
Fall of the Western Roman Empire. (2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire
National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Table 325.47. Degrees in chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering conferred by postsecondary institutions, by level of degree: Academic years 1959–60 through 2020–21. In Digest of education statistics 2022. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_325.47.asp
National Center for ONET Development. (2025). 17-3027.00 – Mechanical engineering technologists and technicians. ONET OnLine. https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/17-3027.00
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (2025). Characteristics of H-1B specialty occupation workers: Fiscal year 2024 (Annual report to Congress). https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/ola_signed_h1b_characteristics_congressional_report_FY24.pdf
World Economic Forum. (2023). The future of jobs report 2023. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/
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