Salary by Major

Perhaps because, despite the salary, no more people than ten years ago think the job sounds at all fulfilling?

If there were scads of petroleum engineers being graduated, wouldn’t the salaries in that field go down?At the risk of getting entangled with Mr. Blissett again, I tend to agree with Prof. Foster: More people avoid certain professions because the training, if not the job itself, seems too difficult, than because the career seems “unfulfilling.” I’ve known one petro engineer in my life, and he found his work quite fulfilling. Artsy-fartsy, litty-critty professions (and I’m in one) aren’t the only “fulfilling” careers.

Why? Teach a class in pre-calculus and you will understand. In general, entering students are not as prepared in mathematics as was the case a few years ago. The lack of a fulfilling career is a silly (perhaps wishful) argument.

Mr. Blissett, First, a BS in Engineering is normally a four year, and in some places a five year program. Law school is three years on top of usually a 4 year baccalaureate — sometimes a BA / LL B program in 3 + 3, like a friend of mine did at LSU. So that’s a minimum of six and the modal minimum is 7 years. Second, a law degree doesn’t require much mathematics. An engineering degree does. But a “career” as an engineer can be quite a blast. Especially if you’re a shootin’ fightin’ dynamitin’ mining engineer. And from the information I have, those wramblin’ wrecks at Golden Tech (aka Colorado School of Mines) have to study pretty hard. A lot harder than most pre-law History majors have to.

I think the reason, quite simply, is that one must have a certain set of skills not only to enjoy the jobs on that list, but to do well at them. Some folks stumble through life to find what they enjoy doing, but not scientists or engineers or other hard science folks. (I’m sure there are exceptions). One must possess critical skills and training in mathematics and it’s unlikely that one could get to that level of skill without enjoying it and wanting to do it. So. . .the higher starting salaries exist because the level of difficulty dramatically reduces the pool of available candidates, and at the same time, those salaries in and of themselves cannot have the effect of increasing that pool.

Teach high school for a while, and you’ll learn quickly that there are far more 9-12th graders who love math than 9-12 graders who love history/English, the two non-pre-law majors that typically funnel students into law school. AP Calculus and AP Chemistry are usually more popular classes than AP English Language or AP Literature.And even if pre-law is an easier BA than engineering, law school requires a total of seven to eight years commitment. (And as someone who used to teach freshman comp to a lot of Penn engineering undergrads, I can safely say that engineering students don’t find undergraduate English easier than undergraduate mathematics or science.) And I don’t think law school is easier than an engineering degree. It’s simply that more students find the workload worthwhile. “Easier” or “harder” — dare I say it — are relative terms, all depending on the interests of the students. For most engineers, law school would be near impossible; for most law students, engineering would be near impossible. To end on more anecdotal evidence: I teach at a high school where AP Calculus is all but required for seniors and where many of my seniors are already taking Calculus 2. (Normal load for my seniors is AP Calc, AP American History, AP Literature, AP Physics, AP Art History or AP Psychology.) The majority of our students go on to study non-humanities majors in college. Few become engineers.

I agree with just about all of the factors mentioned above. One more factor: How many jobs are out there for undergrad petro engineers? My dad (who graduated from Tulsa with a BS from petro engineering in the early ’60s, and is now retired) has commented several times that most of his replacements have PhDs.

Thank you, Mr. Blissett, for No 11. Something to ponder. Wish I do that had been your first comment. While not “data”, anecdotes, particularly an accumulation of them, can sometimes lead to some insight. I’ll share an accumulation of some of mine — my experience over 40+ years has been that among the students who usually do well in Linguistics classes (beginning & advanced beginning level where some take it for General Education/Distribution) are undergraduate engineering students. Foreign language majors, especially Romance languages, generally do not. English and History majors and Anthropology / other Social Science majors are mixed. An attraction versus an aversion to analyticity probably explains some of this, but of course Law School requires an analytic sort of mind too, which however pre-law wannagos may often not realize.

Luther said that AP Chemistry and AP Calculus are “more popular” than AP English Lit or AP English Language.He’s way, way off.In 2009, here are the numbers for AP Exam-taking in those fields:AP English Literature 273,691AP English Language 265,395AP Chemistry 81,757AP Calculus AB 182,423AP Calculus BC 57,822

In my personal opinion, this situation is enough to answer the extreme free-market position. We need more engineers and scientists. But since our society brilliantly tends to pay lawyers more than engineers, we get more lawyers. For the same reason, it’s easier to interest kids in the incredible longshot of professional sports than in teaching, which might actually be worth something more than entertaining the masses. Heaven help us.

Let me add. My son did not have math beyond algebra and geometry in high school. He took trig and pre-cal at a community college. He took all his other math in his BS college, and earned only one grade less than an A. So it is not just the math curriculum and when and where you take it.My brother in law also earned his EE. After four years working in a big oil company (entry $42,000), he quit and went back to earn a degree in something else.Could there be something else wrong with engineering education and jobs?

minnesotan notwithstanding, my experience across several institutions indicates students interested in STEM area majors predominate in honors programs. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned here that characterizes all of the above 10 fields is the “vertical” nature of their curricula. For each level X, there is an even tougher level above it that absolutely requires level X. Other majors tend to be more “horizontal” in this sense.

But Mark, is hours spent on homework really a measure of the difficulty of the work? I took a freshman seminar on Goethe. We had no homework besides the reading. But the final seminar paper — 25 pages of research and analysis — was wildly challenging. I can’t speak to college maths and sciences, but what I see at the high school level is a ton of nightly problem sets in those classes. The English classes I teach have a lot less nightly homework, but the essays, essay exams, speeches, etc. that I ask of the students are, according to the students, anyway, more difficult than anything they do in AP math and science courses.In any case, I wonder about this conversation. If the answer to the question — why so few engineering majors — was assumed from the outset — engineering is so much more challenging than any other major — why not simply write a post about that? Why ask a question when you already know the one answer you’re going to accept? And when that answer seems so painfully obvious — it’s the difficulty, stupid! — the post itself comes to seem painfully obvious.In any case, how about another question? How many engineering majors could deal with the types of situations that an inner-city social worker deals with? What do we mean by difficulty when a math problem is automatically assumed to be more challenging than dealing with hundreds of cases of child abuse, drug addiction, spousal violence, mental illness, etc., all for a whopping starting salary often under $30,000 even after a Masters degree?

At the risk of stating the obvious, isn’t the acceptance of failures and drop-outs much higher in STEM subjects than in Humanities or Social Sciences? I’ve never heard of a “screening class” in the latter, or talk of “weeding out students.” No university administrator would tolerate a situation where a large number of students failed or dropped out of a course in the humanities or social sciences, whereas such failures and drop-outs in STEM fields are interpreted as upholding the quality of the degree in the face of the declining abilities of students. At the risk of sounding contentious, humanities and social science profs are more or less told to work with the students they have, irrespective of their level upon entering the university, whereas STEM profs are allowed(?) encouraged(?) to weed out students as early as the first semester.

Nordicexpt in 27 says: “No university administrator would tolerate a situation where a large number of students failed or dropped out of a course in the humanities or social sciences…”Actually, we had a relatively high ‘drop out rate’, i.e. Grades of W in Beginning and Advanced Beginning Linguistics courses — Social Sciences, Anthropology — at my university and I never got any flak about it from the administration. This is par for such courses around the country. Indeed, we strongly discouraged freshmen from taking the beginning standard linguistics courses. Similarly, freshman sociology and psychology majors don’t take Statistics, and those courses have a higher than usual dropout rate. What Nordicexpat says may be generally the case for the Humanities, and is probably true to some extent for the Social Sciences (excluding History), but the latter do have what effectively if not intentionally amount to “screening courses”. But the SS’s range from the gooey to the prickly end and it’s the prickly end that gets ‘em. Another perspective-restorer in Anthropology is an intermediate level course in Social Organization, or “Kinship & Social Organization”. My experienced impression is that Deans and Provosts tend to see these kinds of courses as “more scientific” and higher dropout rates doesn’t bother them as much. If so that fits with Nordicexpat’s over all suggestion.

To gadget (#20): US employers hiring alien workers on H1B’s must demonstrate that they are paying them the prevailing wage for the profession they are in. Not sure where you got your numbers from, but there’s no way a mainstream engineering company can get away with hiring a foreigner for half of the cost of hiring an American. The US immigration law is specifically designed to prevent that. Don’t be so quick in blaming foreigners for your problem.

to pseudotron #31,No one is blaming foreigners. The problem lies with a Congress which permits this to happen. There is no real enforcement about paying prevailing wages. Those prevailing wages would have to rise if the H1B worker was not available. Bank of America fired 1300 programmers and forced them to train their replacements from India. The only reason for doing this is that the new workers work for less money.

My brother-in-law is a foreigner, as is my husband. He was paid $42,000, much lower than the entry pay quoted in the article but much more than his friends were offered. Another friend is an Indian engineer in touch with many other Indian engineers in the US. They will talk about the exploitation. While so many engineers are available for work in the US (no matter their nationality) and are under- and unemployed, the companies still demand additional HB visas. It’s not blaming the foreigners, it is pointing out how the companies are gaming the system. Plus they hire the workers as contractors so they do not have to pay benefits or keep them on during slack periods, and can send them home with ease. Microsot has lost a major lawsuit on that contractor designation, but the abuse is very widespread.Pseudotriton points out that his *university* was careful to follow the law, not that federal monitoring is actually strict.Let’s look at the quality of the actual engineering jobs available. The US spends most of its R & D money on war (oh, I mean defense), and that’s where the jobs are.