This is a commentary specifically on if requiring more education is necessary. I think, like many things in this life, "it depends".
First, I think we need to all be careful of our own bias here, myself included. It's human nature to believe that our own experiences are more valid than someone else's. So, if I only have a Bachelor's degree and have had an excellent career, I would be convinced that this is all anyone else needs. If I went into more debt to get a Master's degree and I don't feel it paid off, I'd probably tell people it isn't worth it. If I did get a Master's degree and thought it was very helpful in my career, I'd tell other people to do that. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to view our own experiences objectively, and it's hard to know how much is simply good (or bad) luck, for example engineers who graduated with Master's degrees in 2009 may have been unable to find a job at all through absolutely no fault of their own. So, I think a critical point is to not discount other engineers' experiences in this area as invalid, simply because it doesn't match your own.
So, I will share my story, not to convince you either way, but to add another voice to the discussion that you can use to come to your own conclusion.
My career (15 years) has been in private practice structural engineering consulting, and my university alma mater offered a 5 1/2 year program where you could graduate with both a Bachelor's and Masters in architectural engineering. I have never worked in academia, unless you count my short stint as a TA in college to earn a few extra bucks.
I went with the structural option in my major, so in addition to a thesis, the last 1 1/2 years was full of unique material-related courses, since as in-depth masonry design, wood design, design of advanced structures such as cable-supported, forensic structural engineering, advanced concrete and steel (in my education I had 3-4 courses in each outside of the standard analysis course), and more. I would not have been able to take those advanced courses had I stuck with only the Bachelor's degree option, and from what I've seen in many civil engineering programs, those classes aren't even options.
As a result, when I walked into my first job (structural design at an architecture firm) and one of the first tasks I had was to design a masonry screen wall, my preliminary design was ready in a day for review, whereas some of my colleagues needed to spend weeks learning (and their managers spending hours teaching) things I already knew. That's just one example, similar things happened many other times, resulting in significant raises and more responsibility than many of my peers in my first couple of years of work.
So, for me, as a non-academic, private practitioner, the effect on my career with the additional degree was both immediate and positively affected the long-term trajectory career through financial rewards and faster promotions. I feel like I had a "head start" because of the extra classes, and because my professors were experts in these different material fields, I feel like I learned faster and more quickly in college from focused effort in a specific material area than I could have possibly learned from my early managers, who were more generally-focused engineers balancing multiple projects, in multiple materials, with limited budgets, supervising multiple EIT's.
I also think this is one of the reasons in the structural field that many of the higher-end firms in the industry are only hiring students (or strongly prefer students) with a Master's degree.But, I also believe that extra degree - and perhaps, more importantly, the timing of getting that extra degree (and if you or an employer pays for it) - is not the same for everyone. I know more than one really good engineer who was a B student in school because the teaching style there (mostly lecture as opposed to hands-on) wasn't compatible with their learning style. Yet, now more than one of those are running their own company, hiring students who, on paper, have much better grades than they did. This goes to another commenter's point that academic performance in school doesn't necessarily correlate to "real world" performance.
And, if you're a student who is not fairly certain of the area in civil engineering you want to go into, getting an extra degree without work experience is almost always a bad idea. Why? Because in the event that area isn't a good fit, you'll be forever tied to a field that isn't your passion, based on a decision you made at the age of about 20. I think those of us over 20 can agree that we made some questionable decisions when younger...... And, as other commenters have said, for some people an M.Eng in project management or MBA might be a better fit than a masters degree.
So, for me "it depends" and should be a decision based on individual circumstances. If our goal is to make better engineers as an industry, we'd be very well served to have a model where all students can get work experience before getting an advanced degree.
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Stephanie Slocum P.E.,M.ASCE
Founder
Engineers Rising LLC
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