As Kaylie Mattingly entered her final year in the University of Washington’s civil engineering department, she figured it couldn’t hurt to survey the job landscape, even if she was still nine months away from graduating. It would be a casual start to her search, she thought, with the “hardcore” job hunting to come closer to summer.
But almost immediately after sending off a few applications, Mattingly received four offers from local firms by early November. All four companies wanted answers by Thanksgiving, some hoping she’d start part-time before finishing school in June. It was a bit of a shock to Mattingly, who accepted a position with Perteet, a Washington-based consulting firm that frequently works with public agencies.
“We’re talking almost a year in advance, accepting a job offer,” she said. “I just think that’s wild.”
The desperate clamor to hire Mattingly, 22, is a symptom of a larger shortage of civil engineers facing contractors in Washington and across the U.S. Opportunities for work are abundant at every level as regional, state and federal governments pour money into new transit lines, highways and bridge rehabilitation. Yet, matching the scale with enough qualified workers is proving difficult. As more contracts hit the open market, fewer people are graduating with civil engineering degrees while thousands more retire each year, contributing to the phenomena of decreased competition and higher prices.
“It’s a perfect storm situation,” said Marsia Geldert-Murphey, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “We’ve got a large increase that are going to be leaving the profession, and we do not have that large influx to make up for it, in addition to this generational influx of funding.”
It’s a national problem but one felt acutely in Washington, where large projects are underway at every level: Seattle is overhauling its waterfront, Sound Transit is spending billions on a new light-rail system, the state is planning nearly $17 billion of work over the next decade and a half, the federal government is pumping billions more into state and local infrastructure. Already, the number of civil engineers per capita is second only to Alaska, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“I’ve seen a lot of construction companies set up a pretty big presence in Seattle in the last 10 to 15 years because they know this place is growing like crazy, and they know there’s a lot of work here,” said Steve Muench, professor at the University of Washington’s department of civil and environmental engineering. This year, the school moved its career day up in the calendar to meet the industry demand.
Yet, at both the University of Washington and Washington State University, enrollment is either flat or declining, a stark contrast to engineering fields focused on robotics or AI that are booming. In an industry already grappling with an engineering bottleneck, the college-level trends portend struggles into the future, threatening to curb the ambitions of an ambitious state.
The Washington State Department of Transportation began noticing fewer bids for large contracts in late 2022. While the department once expected to receive six bids per design-build project — in which the contractor both designs and builds the road or bridge or fish passage — the average dipped to 2 1/2 . At the same time, the submitted price estimates skyrocketed.
In a September survey conducted by WSDOT asking around 100 contractors or industry representatives why they declined to submit a bid on design-build projects, 36% cited a lack of capacity.
“If their staff is fully booked with work, they can’t legitimately bid for a job that they can’t do in a timely fashion because they’ll have deadlines that they can’t meet,” said Jim McDonnell, director of engineering with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
The staff shortages are at every level, but McDonnell has heard of particular challenges when it comes to engineering. He recently surveyed 28 state departments of transportation, and all 28 said they were struggling with a lack of civil engineers. Some posted vacancy rates of 25%.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts the country needs to add 25,000 civil engineers a year just to keep up with attrition. But the need is almost certainly higher with the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The number of available civil engineering jobs is set to grow 5% in the next decade, above the 3% average, also according to the bureau.
In 2021, just 21,000 people earned a civil engineering degree, a drop of just under 1% from the year before, according to Data USA.
It’s a reality Washington’s two largest public colleges are seeing.
The University of Washington graduated 138 students from its civil and environmental engineering school in 2023. That’s down from 167 in 2021 and roughly the same as the 2018 number — even as other engineering degrees have seen rapid growth.
Washington State University has seen sharper declines: In the last four years, enrollment dropped 35%, from 518 in 2019 to 339 in 2023. WSU has reduced its faculty size in the same period, not filling vacant positions, said Professor Xianming Shi.
“That’s the No. 1 issue on my mind,” said Shi.
When Mattingly was in high school and then community college as part of a Running Start program in Yakima, no one ever explicitly recruited or pitched her on civil engineering. She was interested in transportation infrastructure, knew she liked math and wanted to make a positive mark on the world, but it was only through Google that she found civil engineering as a way to combine those interests.
Mattingly’s story is illustrative of the field’s broader problem of communicating its importance. Unlike more modern forms of engineering, there are few after-school programs or initiatives to reach young people.
“A lot of students who want to do engineering, they want to do robots,” said chair of UW’s civil engineering department, Bart Nijssen. “Nothing against that, but that is the image they have of civil engineering at times, that it’s not really thought of as something, let’s call it, sexy.”
On top of that, the median pay of around $90,000 doesn’t stack up. Combined, the field doesn’t draw like it used to.
The American Society of Civil Engineers has acknowledged the trend and in August, published a list of strategies to reverse course. Among the suggestions: Examine pay, increase flexibility, create a smoother pipeline from high school into college and others.
As more than a trillion dollars from the federal government flows through the country, not changing the narrative about civil engineering, ASCE warned, could “threaten the overall impact of this generational opportunity.”
