Its a common line of thinking when one is navigating engineering school- "engineering is a good foundation, but it doesn't pay enough in the long run." Engineers typically have some of the highest starting salaries for graduates, and yet the pay curve generally flattens out by the time they hit mid-career. This trend can keep away prospective engineering students, but more importantly it causes engineers to plan career pivots before they even enter the profession.
When an engineer becomes dissatisfied with sluggish pay increases, the traditional next step is to jump ship and go into management. What engineer hasn't said at some point, "maybe I'll go back and get an MBA"? Engineering management, project management, product line management, or, for the more extroverted engineers, sales is an option. These are all valuable roles, but it typically causes the engineer to disengage his mind from the technical problems he had been working on during his early career, and which he presumably wanted to work on considering he decided to study engineering in the first place. With so many hard, technical problems to solve in the world, why are those equipped to solve them being driven away?
I think its a compound problem. Salaries are a measure of how much a business values an employee, and its clear that businesses don't tend to value technical depth built over a long career. But I also think that technical career paths are poorly defined, making it difficult to reward engineers within the organizational structure.
How many senior engineers out there are making $250k+? That's a number much more likely achieved by senior management. Sure, good managers are hard to come by, but in my experience, great engineers are a true rarity. There are a lot of theories as to why managers have higher salaries, but I haven't heard anything really enlightening. My personal theory is that manager's metrics are more often tied to dollars, and so execution can be quantified more easily in terms of impact on the bottom line. This overshadows the fact that the entire business is enabled by products built by the technical experts, whose metrics have units other than "$". This problem is amplified by the imperative to book orders to get return on investment as fast as possible, leading to myopic product development decisions- a lack of long-term development and, instead, a path of risk-averse iterations which are more easily handled by cheaper, early-to-mid-career or less competent engineers.
The second part of the problem is one that may be easier to address for some companies, but impossible for others. A typical technical career path may look something like- engineer (1-5 years), technical lead (5-18 years), ......., Principle Engineer (18-25 years), and then Chief Engineer (25 years until retirement.) It is during that stretch of time between Tech Lead and Principle Engineer that so many engineers switch paths. Once you reach TL, whats next? 10+ years of staying in the same salary range and taking your 3%/year raise, if you're lucky. Big companies can address this challenge by moving lead engineers to higher priority projects, or by cross-training them in other product lines. Often, though, these moves are not accompanied with anything approaching the raise that one might get if they leave the technical career path altogether. And small companies have difficulty finding new roles for employees, and many find themselves waiting for someone to die or retire (and then hoping that those positions are actually back-filled, which isn't always the case.)
Rewarding talented engineers for building technical depth is a problem which needs to be solved in order to face the tough technical challenges the world is dealing with. I'm not sure what the answer is yet, but I'm frustrated with my options when I look forward in my career and I know many other young engineers are as well. Its a platitude that America needs more scientists and engineers, but I think the key is rewarding technical talent for staying technical. Otherwise, any increase in engineering graduates is just going to be offset by increases enrolment in MBA programs, just with a 5-10 year lag.
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