Which college major pays $67,000 a year?
April 9th, 2011, 8:50 am · 34 Comments · posted by Mary Ann Milbourn for the Orange County Register
Looking for a college major that pays and has good job prospects? Think engineering.
Engineering students got four of the five best-paying offers in the National Association of Colleges and Employers Spring Salary Survey for the Class of 2011.
The top-paying major? Chemical engineering whose majors received an average salary offer of $66,886. The average was based on 10 or more job offers for students graduating with bachelor’s degrees.
Among the top 10, computer science, information sciences and business systems networking were the other best-paying non-engineering majors.
“That four of the top five top-paid majors are engineering and all received average starting salary offers in excess of $60,000 strongly indicates the continued high demand for these graduates,” says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. “Furthermore, the entire top-10 list underscores the interest employers have in hiring technical majors.”
Humanities grads tend to get lower wages when they first graduate, but top out on average just as high over the course of a lifetime. (Study done at UBC in the 90's). When you take into account how much it costs to train a humanities vs a sciences grad, it's considerably more cost-effective to train someone in humanities, because we cost so much less to teach, but wind up paying, overall, just as much in taxes over our lifetimes (because our earnings average out the same).
ReplyDeleteI would rather bore a hole in my own brain than work in any of those fields above. I'd rather clean toilets. I'm not kidding.
ReplyDelete@ nn: "There are no uninteresting fields, just uninterested [and uninteresting] people." - G.K. Chesterton.
ReplyDeleteWhatever happened to "let nothing human be alien to me"?
@nightly norm
ReplyDeleteIf you knew mechanical engineering you could design a widget that would bore that hole for you, thus reducing slop in the drilling.
@nightly: and I would rather teach a robot to bore holes in your head than write dozens of pages on character motives in Wuthering Heights, count how many rhetus perianders were caught in my net, test the emotional aptitude of a statistically valuable sample of individuals, or convince the last to old men who speak Ayapaneco to quit being mad and talk to each other so I can record their language before it (meaning: they) dies.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, we have varied desires and abilities in the human race, and not all career decisions are made to maximize economic gain (for the individual or for the society). This would be a boring world if we were all engineers, or were all gene-typed into our career fields by a computer.