| VTBoy, your stats must be for new graduates only.
Yes, engineering BS graduates make more than any other BS graduates. But that is hardly the whole story.
Taken as a long term whole, the engineering profession has become about the least stable and least professional field. Bell Labs, IBM, Hewlett Packard - once the bastions of professional engineering employent, no longer exist.
Engineering has for the most part become contract and migrant work in the US. Typical commercial firms don't offer long term engineering careers. It's a job not a career now. You might start out very well after graduation, but by the time an engineer is 40 or 45, they are very rarely still able to find work. And it has always held true that engineers' salaries level off (flat) after 20 years of experience - while your business major classmates are going much, much higher.
How hard it is to study a field in college has nothing to do with salaries. How important the work is to human advancement has nothing to do with salaries either. You can ignore this or complain about it or accept it as reality.
Unless you own your own business, your salary will be a function of supply and demand and the the productivity of whatever work you are doing. If there was a huge profit to be made in implants, then the salary of those designers would be commensurate. Thats why the guys designing XBox games make more.
Oh, BTW, the highest paid engineering graduates out of MIT are the ones who go and work for investment firms on Wall Street; their work has nothing to do with engineering design at all. Wall Street hires them because they figure they are smart, hard workers, and used to pressure. |