You have been reading this blog and thinking something is broken. The oversupply, the pay compression, the credential treadmill, the churn. It looks like a system failing its people. It is not failing. It is working. Every piece is doing exactly what it was built to do. The problem is that none of it was built for you. See Reason #60.
Start with the universities. They do not cap enrollment because enrollment is revenue. Mechanical engineering is the most popular engineering major in the country, which means it is the most profitable pipeline to keep open. See Reason #4. Every undecided freshman who defaults into ME is a tuition-paying seat for five or six years. See Reason #1. The department does not ask whether the market can absorb the graduates. The department asks whether the lecture hall is full. It is. The department is working as designed.
ABET accredits the programs. It does not limit them. It audits syllabi and faculty credentials and capstone rubrics. It does not restrict the number of seats, does not lobby for title protection, does not enforce scope of practice, and does not intervene when the graduate-to-opening ratio reaches two and a half to one. See Reason #13 and See Reason #34. Its job is to certify quality, not to manage supply. It certifies. The pipeline fills. ABET is working as designed.
Employers benefit next. A permanent buyer's market means they can post "entry-level" with three years of required experience and still fill the seat. They can run six-month temp-to-perm auditions and call it due diligence. See Reason #45. They can hold raises to 3% because ten qualified replacements will accept the same number tomorrow. They can classify you as overhead and budget you accordingly. See Reason #23. The surplus is not a problem for them. It is a procurement advantage. Hiring is working as designed.
Staffing firms sit in the middle and profit from the churn. Every contract placement, every temp extension, every conversion fee is a transaction that only exists because the pipeline keeps refilling and companies keep hedging. The more volatile the hiring cycle, the more valuable the middleman. Staffing is working as designed.
The professional societies collect dues, host conferences, and publish journals. They do not negotiate pay floors, restrict entry, or enforce title protection the way the AMA or the ABA do. ASME will sell you a membership and a networking lunch. It will not stand between you and the employer who just cut your team by 40%. See Reason #13. The society is working as designed. It was designed to be a trade association, not a guild.
The party line holds it together. See Reason #39. Recruiting pages publish reassurance. Outreach organizations push the pipeline forward. When enough doubt accumulates, someone writes a "debunking myths" article to steady the next cohort. See Reason #59. The messaging is working as designed. Its job is not to inform you. Its job is to keep you walking forward.
Now step back and look at the whole machine. Universities profit from your tuition. ABET profits from accreditation fees. Employers profit from your replaceability. Staffing firms profit from your churn. Societies profit from your dues. The outreach apparatus profits from your optimism. At every stage, a stakeholder extracts value from the surplus, and at no stage does any stakeholder have an incentive to reduce it. The oversupply is not a market failure. It is the market. You are not a participant in this system. You are the input.
This is why so many reasons on this blog can all be true at the same time without anyone fixing any of them. The people who could intervene, the universities, the accreditors, the professional bodies, are the same people who benefit from the status quo. The employers who complain about "talent shortages" are the same employers who offshore junior work, refuse to train, and post fifteen-year experience requirements for roles they gutted a decade ago. See Reason #25 and See Reason #55. Nobody is confused. Everybody is comfortable. The only person absorbing the cost is you.
You thought the system was supposed to serve you. It serves itself. You are the subsidy it runs on.
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