Trisk - I have worked in the high-tech industry for way too many years now, and am currently working at HP (where I have been for 6 years).

These are definitely difficult choices for your son. Let me provide you with some insight (this from an English major who works as a Program Manager in Learning & Development, so take it with a grain of salt ). When companies like HP are hiring into a technical organization, they are going to favor the computer science/electrical engineering graduate. That said, however, the resulting beginning career is likely to involve coding, testing or customer support.

On the flip side, not all careers in high-tech require the tenicla background (take me, for instance!). There are many facets to a large organization - including finance, marketing (which means you need to have a good understanding of the technology, but not be a programmer), project management, etc. If he is interested in any of these types of area, I would say that the management courses might suit him better.

I used to teach technical support engineers how to manage their SQL Servers across the enterprise - this required pretty technical skills that I learned in my job - no school background at all. Now, I focus much more on project management and organizational effectiveness, so many of my technical skills have waned.

Another example - my DH is a prinicple software engineer at IBM. His degree is in graphic arts. No computer science and no engineering. He did, however, start out in his career in a completely different area (order processing), and moved his way up.

I guess that my point is that he shoud do what interests him. He will end up in a position after graduation, and still have MANY opportunities to learn and grow in his career.

SheFly