Companies are swamping engineering deans with requests for interviews with junior and senior EEs, computer engineers, computer scientists and other technical graduates. Dartmouth extended its usual one-day engineering career day to three. EEs, CS and CE candidates sift through 10 interview requests, multiple offers and dream locations.

Daniel, the 28-year-old chief executive officer of a new college-level recruitment spin-off, CollegeHire.com (Austin, Texas), said salaries are soaring to as high as $110,000 for a graduate with a master's degree. But that, mind you, is the top of the curve: The average BSEE will start off with $44,216, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

NACE takes a more comprehensive look at the market. "The gradual slowing of economic growth is partially responsible for keeping increases in entry-level salary offers more in line with inflation," said Marilyn Mackes, executive director of NACE (Bethlehem, Pa.). Computer-science grads averaged $44,878, surpassing EEs.

But some grads from "tier one" schools — Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech and the top 10 or 20 engineering schools — routinely are getting offers above those numbers."It's like athletics," said Daniel, who was a college-recruitment manager at the Trilogy Software (Austin) before he started CollegeHire.com this year. "Like the star quarterback being recruited from high school."

Call it the Revenge of the Geeks. Engineering majors from the Class of '99 took a chance in 1994-95, when a then-stunned engineering community was just getting back on its feet after a wave of layoffs and downsizings in the early '90s. As freshmen, the Class of '99 pressed ahead with one of the most difficult curricula in their universities, betting that the profession would bounce back.

Boy, has it ever
The problem, of course, is the Great IT Shortage of the mid-'90s, a phenomenon that some engineering groups protest is purely illusionary, but that most industry groups will tell you is very real. Groups such as IEEE-USA say that the industry is overlooking prime software talent that happens to have 20 or 30 years' experience. And they point out that the semiconductor industry laid off 40,000 people last year, indicating that downsizing is an ongoing option, not a one-time occurrence, for engineering employers.

Today's graduates, blessed with little institutional memory and a wealth of confidence, are grabbing the golden ring and going for it. But the downside to all of this chaos is a tremendous spiraling of college-recruitment costs for companies. Companies spend $50,000 to $100,000 to "own a campus," said Daniel. They spend money advertising their visits and flying in their employees to conduct interviews. And they invest in T-shirts and giveaways to get students to drop by and talk to them during the campus visits. Altogether, the average cost to companies per hire is $10,600.

On the student side, there's a cost as well: time.