Engineering as a Tool of Social Mobility: Was, is, will be, and how effective was Poly with advertising it as such?

Section 1: Introduction

Today, NYU Tandon proudly advertises the fact that its undergraduate population consists of approximately 50% Pell Grant recipients [4]. A staggering number for a top private university where the cost of attendance in 2026 reached $90,000 — an impossible economic burden for a vast majority of US families, and even more so for Pell Grant recipient families, whose maximum income is usually $50,000–$60,000 [1], with roughly two-thirds of Pell Grant recipient families having incomes of less than $30,000 [2]. Meanwhile, in the US as a whole, the figure is approximately 30% [3], which includes community college and part-time students, where Pell Grant recipients are largely overrepresented. Such high numbers at Tandon are largely because NYU's financial aid makes education for students from such families practically free, with "The NYU Promise" recently declaring that students starting in Fall 2024 or later whose families make under $100,000 will attend NYU for free [5].

This statistic would make one jump to the conclusion that NYU's generous offer of a world-class education in the city that never sleeps, basically for free to economically disadvantaged students, overwhelmingly attracts them to apply, causing such a large overrepresentation. This was my initial thought when I first heard all of this a couple of years ago, yet a quick Google search showed me that the university-wide figure is actually approximately 20%, which implies that either NYU preferentially accepts low-income students into engineering and not into other programs, or that its engineering programs (a.k.a. NYU Tandon) somehow appeal to economically disadvantaged 18-year-olds much more than business or performing arts.

The second option, appearing more plausible, raised an important question for which digging in the Poly archives might help me find the answer. Did NYU somehow strategically manage to establish the reputation of the Tandon engineering programs as a tool for social mobility? Are they simply riding the wave that Poly established before them? Or is the composition of the student body just a reflection of larger societal trends? As such, the central question with which I embarked on my archival research was: How did Poly market engineering as a path to social and economic mobility, and how did students and alumni describe their aspirations and outcomes across different eras, from 1940 until the merger?

Section 2: Scholarship Incentives

"Coming to Poly was one of the best decisions I've ever made and it may not have happened without your help. I've gotten a great education, met some amazing people, and tried to give back something in the process. I hope that in the future, I will be able to give back much more to the Poly community and know that I helped a young man or young woman begin a successful career." — Nathaniel Couldwell '02, BS, Computer Science [6]

Some of these scholarships included the Othmer Scholarship (no requirement specified), the Nicholas and Angelica Romaneli Endowed Scholarship (to students of Italian descent), the Board of Trustees Scholarship (academically superior freshmen), and many more [6][7].

Yet, Poly's scholarships, while abundant, were not necessarily targeted to socioeconomically disadvantaged students only per se. Rather, there was a multitude of opportunities, each one of which tried to attract talented individuals, often from a particular demographic or toward a particular major [8].

The scholarships and special opportunities above, while often covering full tuition, were granted to a small number of students. Yet, Poly had a system similar to NYU's, where each enrolled student automatically received merit-based and need-based scholarships. For example, in the academic year 2008-2009, while the Poly undergraduate tuition and fees added up to $32,651 per year, the "automatic" merit-based scholarship was up to $14,000 per year, and the need-based scholarship was up to $16,000 per year. The scholarships stacked, where a student with high entering test scores and GPA from a low-income family would receive the maximum from both, adding to a total of $30,000 [9].

There was also a multitude of special opportunities available to students, for additional removal of tuition burden.

To a large extent, the affordability of college could have been less of "scholarships providing incentives for students to join" and more of a push and pull between tuition and scholarships.

The graph below illustrates the fall semester tuition rates at Poly across four decades, clearly showing how rapidly education costs grew [10].

(*Thinking of having a line for NYC minimum/average wage and a line for US minimum/average wage for these years from secondary sources, to highlight how, in the past, low-income scholarships were somewhat unnecessary, as any student working a minimum wage job over the summer could have fully paid their annual tuition.)

Section 3: Students’ Aspirations for Engineering

The start of this section will be a brief contextualization of a 2021 sociological paper, "Social, Economic, Personal, Family, and Institutional Influences on Engineering Students' Choice of Degree Program" [11].

• Then I will include information from a secondary source book, Understanding the Educational and Career Pathways of Engineers, published by the National Academy of Engineering in 2018, specifically Chapter 2: "Factors That Influence Decision Making of Engineering Students and Graduates" [12]. [Aliased as UECPE for later sections.]
• Here, picture inserts from Polywogs (1–2 per Polywog) that have some sort of information on what the vibe was like in 1940, 1970, 1980-something, and 2009 [13].
• Also, a graph of the 1940–2026 timeline with important engineering-related events that might have inspired someone to pursue engineering (space race, Cold War tech, invention of color TV/photos, spread of the internet, etc.)

Section 4: Post-Graduation Job Security Incentives

The bulk of this section's background will come from UECPE Chapter 1: "Characteristics of Engineers and the Engineering Workforce" and Appendices C–E, all of which focus on the workforce and jobs [12].

• This section will need a lot of reputable secondary sources on the topic of employment rate, salary, etc., that I cannot find in the chapter.

• So far, this is the least researched portion of the project, as Poly archive materials didn't include too much useful information (some Polywogs included minuscule information about career outcomes). Thus, it will be more of a broad picture for the US as a whole, focusing less on Poly per se, but contextualizing what industries were geographically close to Poly, leading students to work in those fields.

• Here, I will discuss how engineering historically has had a lot of professional communities where people without prior connections could easily develop a robust network for their future career [14], as illustrated in the Alumni Association polywog picture below, with a dozen professional societies mentioned in polywogs.

[picture below is just a placeholder]

Section 5: Social (In/Disin-)centives for Being an Engineer: View of Engineering by the Collective Subconscious

Brief intro: A positive feedback loop — engineers affect how society views engineering, which affects who wants to become an engineer, which further affects society's view of it.

• Shows how the student body of Poly continuously changed from the 1940s to the 2010s and to now. [Pictures from Polywogs, maybe some juxtaposition of societies and clubs] [13]
• Then, the trends within the US as a whole need some sociological papers describing how the archetype of an engineer changed. [Secondary sources TBD.]
• I took a list of sports teams from all five Polywogs, and I will juxtapose the teams over the years below. Supposedly, the preference for team sports over individual sports is highly correlated with the extraversion/introversion character trait. Thus, through the sport teams at Poly over the years, I want to trace the change in the "academic hermit index" [13].

Section 6: Summary

• Will include one interesting statistic in the conclusion. After manually counting the number of women in the senior class of the 1970 Polywog, it came out to be 13 out of 305 [13]. Yet in the 1970s, there were already quite a lot of women in engineering nationally. I will use this as a starter for my conclusion to show that sometimes Poly reflected society and its changes, sometimes it was ahead or walking behind, and sometimes the trends at Poly did not follow bigger trends in the US as a whole.
• Rest TBD

Section 7: The afterword of venting: The social mobility in the age of AI?! Is higher education still a smart economic investment?

The graph below, published by Anthropic (developers of the LLM Claude) on March 5, 2026, illustrates the view of the future held by Silicon Valley CEOs and shared by many government officials and business executives. It is somewhat of an illustration of why finding a job in 2026 as a fresh graduate is harder than ever, and why there are huge layoffs among many large corporations that were previously dream jobs for many of these young graduates [15].

For the last couple of years, the "engineering" degree that a math-loving person in high school would choose to pursue if they had no particular preference and just wanted a high salary and decent job security was computer science. The CS hype grew especially quickly during the time of COVID, when it was fairly common for a self-taught programmer with a few simple GitHub projects to land a six-figure job (I personally know two such individuals, one of whom did not even have a college degree and just decided to "code on the side a little" while working as personnel at a hotel).

As such, 18-year-olds across the US and across the globe got increasingly carried away by the wave of the CS hype ocean, which, even on its own, could have eventually become a whirlpool of an oversaturated job market. But then, on November 30, 2022, a little company named OpenAI released its model ChatGPT-3.5.

[Narrative to be developed:]

• AI gets smarter, replaces simple-code coders
• FAANG and the like realize they hired too many underqualified people and have large layoffs
• AI hype grows, companies hire fewer people
• LLMs are getting better and achieve the level of a pretty smart undergrad on a lot of tasks
• AI hype grows further, with many people starting to believe that AI is going to replace "mathy jobs" soon
• Meanwhile, LLMs only "became good at math" after being connected online to Wolfram Alpha, with anyone using them to solve even a sophomore-level engineering homework assignment knowing that they have no clue what they're talking about
• Real threat or not to job security — short discussion, both in case AI actually does advance and in case LLMs see only marginal improvements
• How will this impact students' view of engineering as a career and their desire to pursue it?

Questions For Reviewers

• Are there any big-picture elements that should have been included but weren't, or anything that didn't quite fit? Which sections should be expanded, which ones cut, and which ones added?
• Is the picture quality sufficient, or should I increase resolution with AI upscaling or retake the photos?
• Does my historical argument come through clearly enough, or does it get lost among the data and sources? If so, where does it feel weakest?
• Is the balance between Poly-specific archival material and broader US trends working, or does the project lean too heavily in one direction?
• Section 7 (the AI afterword) extends beyond the archival scope of the project into present-day commentary. Does this section strengthen the exhibit by connecting history to the present, or does it distract from the historical core? Should it be shortened to a brief coda?
• For Section 4 (Post-Graduation Job Security), I found limited career outcome data in the Poly archives. Are there other types of primary sources I should be looking for that some else found and thinks might be of help?

Bibliography

Primary Sources

[6] "Named Scholarships Gifts" brochure, front. Poly Archive, Scholarships Folder. No date (appears to be early 2000s).

[7] "Named Scholarships Gifts" brochure, back. Poly Archive, Scholarships Folder. No date (appears to be early 2000s).

[8] "Polytechnic University Scholarships" triplet brochure, inside middle and right sections. Poly Archive, Scholarships Folder. No date (appears to be early 2000s).

[9] "Financing Your Education." Poly Archive, Tuition Folder. 2008.

[10] "Poly Undergrad Tuition" handwritten ledger. Poly Archive, Tuition Folder. 2002.

[13] Polywog yearbooks (1940, 1970, 1980s, 2009 editions). Poly Archive. [Specific pages/editions TBD.]

[14] 1940 Polywog yearbook. Poly Archive. [Specific page TBD.]

Secondary Sources

[1] "Is There an Income Cutoff on Eligibility for Financial Aid?" Saving for College. https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/is-there-an-income-cutoff-on-eligibility-for-financial-aid

[2] Congressional Research Service, R45418. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45418

[3] "Pell Grant Statistics." Education Data Initiative. https://educationdata.org/pell-grant-statistics

[4] "Why CUE." NYU Tandon School of Engineering. https://engineering.nyu.edu/academics/departments/civil-urban-and-environmental/why-cue

[5] "NYU Sends Out Offers of Admission to the Class of 2029." NYU News, March 2025. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2025/march/nyu-sends-out-offers-of-admission-to-the-class-of-2029.html

[11] "Social, Economic, Personal, Family, and Institutional Influences on Engineering Students' Choice of Degree Program." 2021. [Full citation needed — author(s), journal, DOI.

[12] National Academy of Engineering. Understanding the Educational and Career Pathways of Engineers. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018. Chapter 2: "Factors That Influence Decision Making of Engineering Students and Graduates."

[15] "The Growing Impact of AI on the Labor Market." Anthropic Research, March 5, 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts