<p>No, you must be dense… to quote the original poster:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That answer to which is that Germany (and India and China and…) place more prestige on careers in engineering than the population of the United States does.</p>
<p>If someone asks you what you do here in the US, if you say engineer, they generally reply “Oh you must be really smart.” If you reply “I work as an investment banker” they reply “Wow! That must be exciting! You must make a killing!”</p>
<p>Now, onto your string of arguments. Point number 1 is just plain fact and no one is refuting it. Yes, a direct comparison between the salaries of engineers here and in other industrialized nations will show that usually US engineers get paid more. However, the whole point of comparing relative salaries is to show how engineers are paid compared to other professions in different economies. The fact is, in Germany, while engineers are paid less, they are paid more in comparison to the rest of the country’s job force than engineers in the US. The difference is that the average salary in the US is higher. That doesn’t tell us anything about the relative value of an engineer in the US versus another country unless you normalize it to the regional norm.</p>
<p>Look at it this way, the average engineer in California gets paid a lot more than the average engineer in Cincinnati. Does this mean that all the engineers working in California are worth more or are better or have more prestigious jobs than those that work in Cincinnati? Not at all. It is merely a function of the cost of living of the area. If you compared the salaries to the average salary of the region (throwing out careers like movie star that would greatly skew things), you would find that their relative salaries are the same. The same thing goes for comparing US engineers to foreign engineers.</p>
<p>Now how does this relate to the original question? Well, in areas where engineers are paid better in relation to other careers, there will tend to be more students gravitating towards engineering, and the most apt students are less likely to take their engineering degrees and apply them to jobs that DO pay better since there are fewer of those. That is why the talk of relative salaries is being used.</p>
<p>A higher absolute salary tells us nothing. You need to know the local averages and trends to really draw conclusions.</p>