There are technical fields in government military labs and warfare centers that are desperately short of engineers and/or PhDs, even with the cuts - where entire divisions have nobody under the age of 60. The problem is that they now have a smattering of 25 year old fresh out of college types, but then there is a huge hole in the middle. The Navy actually hired a lot of people out of the auto industry to try to fill that.
Going into defense has been “uncool” for quite a while (if you wanted to get laid, you tell girls you’re going to work for Solyndra, not the Naval Research Lab or Lockheed Martin), and there was a long period of time where Wall Street was siphoning off science and engineering talent for people to be “quants.”
I believe law firms hire and send scientists and engineers to law school to help beef up their in-house knowledge and court expertise.
Even more so now: look at the ads from proprietary trading companies-- they all want physics and engineering grads to do financial calculations.
If we hadn't farmed out all manufacturing and a lot of high tech work overseas because of idiotic macro economic policies, perhaps they could work in more productive fields.
The Left complains that the US has 'favored' the financial industry. In fact, it's just that the financial industry is the only one that hasn't been completely mauled by out of control taxes (corporate, state and local) and strangled by an exploding regulatory system.