As far as hipness goes, it seems almost inversely proportional to income.  Stereotypical "hip" jobs are working at a coffee shop or a record store.  As such, English and History majors score pretty well on the hipness scale, both because they have no route to gainful employment, and because what gainful employment they can find doesn't care too much about silly fashions and whatnot, allowing them more time to practice being hip.

The rise of computers and the internet has, I think, actually helped the overall "hipness" of engineer types, at least by association.  In that most are stereotypical "geeks," and that the class of "geek" suffers from a good deal less stigma than it once did.

However, native-born American engineering students, and in particular graduate students, are sort of rare these days, for the reasons cited earlier.