UIUC Aero Engineering salaries below average?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Well, this probably won’t make you feel better, but in 2007, the average reported salaries for chemical engineers at MIT was only 58k, which was actually lower than the national average of $59.3k for starting salaries of ChemE’s nationwide in 2007. That’s right, lower. Nor was the sample size particularly small, with 24 data points. Now is it likely attributable to location, as Massachusetts (and the general Northeast) tends to be a fairly expensive and hence high-paying region of the country. Again, this ain’t some scrub school we’re talking about here, this is MIT. </p>

<p>[College</a> grads see higher starting salaries this year - Jul. 12, 2007](<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/2007/07/11/pf/college/starting_salaries/index.htm]College”>College grads see higher starting salaries this year - Jul. 12, 2007)</p>

<p><a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation07.pdf[/url]”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation07.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I believe this all gets down to a point that I’ve made before on other threads: that, with the possible exception of EE/CS, there seems to be very little salary premium associated with engineering jobs from graduating from a top engineering school. Granted, the type of employers do matter, as the ‘top’ engineering companies tend to recruit only at the top schools; but the sad truth is that those ‘top’ engineering companies don’t really pay much more than the mediocre engineering companies, and in many cases, may actually pay less. (which begs the obvious question of what really makes them the ‘top’ engineering companies). Incidentally, I am convinced that this is why so many engineering students from top schools such as MIT decide not to take engineering jobs, but instead decide to enter more lucrative fields such as consulting and finance. After all, why work hard to slash your way through the MIT’s extremely difficult ChemE program, only to end up with a lower than average ChemE salary?</p>

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<p>RacinReaver, your girl friend with 0 yr experience and just a BS received $65k in PHOENIX?? That’s like getting paid $100k in Cali or NY for an entry level job. no engineering company in DC would pay that much to hire and train a n00b for over 3 yrs. What company was that?</p>

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<p>General Dynamics. She declined the job since she got into a grad school she liked and wound up getting a summer internship there where they gave her a rental car, and paid for her extended-stay style hotel room (the kind with a little living area and kitchen) in addition to paying her something like $25 an hour.</p>

<p>And Phoenix is quickly becoming more and more expensive. Housing is getting to be more of a premium as more people from CA move out there (the same way Vegas is getting more expensive). She was also offered a job from Raytheon for similar pay here in southern California.</p>

<p>sakky, take a look at the list of places MIT ChemE grads went to. Included are: JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers (haha, owned), McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, and possibly others whose names I don’t know. Also not seeing many oil companies, which is probably where most ChemE departments get their increased rates of pay. Looking at CMU’s stats, I’m seeing a lot fewer financial companies and more traditional engineering jobs…and the average salary is considerably higher! <a href=“http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/Career/employ/salary/ChemE.pdf[/url]”>http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/Career/employ/salary/ChemE.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>First off, to be fair, the CMU figures you are showing are from 2008, whereas the MIT figures are from 2007. ChemE starting salaries nationwide rose by a whopping 6.2% from 2007-2008.</p>

<p>*Chemical engineering grads’ average offers rose 6.2 percent to $63,749. *</p>

<p>[Best</a> entry-level salaries for new grads - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/04/28/cb.salaries.grads/index.html]Best”>Best entry-level salaries for new grads - CNN.com)</p>

<p>Furthermore, I think that actually proves my point. CMU is a top engineering school, and yet in 2008 even CMU’s chemical engineering grads made less than 5% more ($66.6k vs. $63.7k) than did the average chemE grad nationwide as a starting salary. That’s really not very much at all, which only goes to show that there really is very little advantage, at least in terms of starting salary, in going to a top school if you’re going to be an engineer. The guy who goes to an average engineering school is going to end up with a salary that is going to be basically the same as the guy who goes to a top school.</p>

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<p>Actually looking at your post earlier there in the thread, I’m not sure what point you were trying to make other than GOOD ENGINEERING SCHOOL DOESN’T MEAN YOU MAKE TONS OF MONEY (which I don’t know if everyone necessarily believes anyway). He was asking why Aerospace engineers were making less than other engineers. I mean, if I was in a pretty difficult department and making significantly less than my peers at the same school in very similar majors, I’d wonder why my prospects were worse than my friends.</p>

<p>Also, you always seem to assume people just go into engineering just for the money. Most people I know that went into non-engineering fields post-graduation were either not interested in engineering to begin with and just wanted something impressive on their resume, or they burned out on engineering and just wanted to get completely out of the field. They were generally also the people doubling or minoring in a business/econ related field. Couldn’t it also be that these people at MIT and other such top engineering schools aren’t there actually to become engineers, but to use it as a stepping stone to a different career?</p>

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<p>No, I think he was asking why do UIUC aerospace engineers make less than engineers at UIUC. I am simply pointing out that you shouldn’t always assume that, even at top schools, all engineering majors will make top dollar. </p>

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<p>Well, let’s be honest - why else would you do it? Why else put up with the pain? People are free to major in something that is far less stressful. If you wanted to study something technical, you could always major in a science. So why choose engineering, if not for career purposes? </p>

<p>The OP wanted to talk about salary, which means that he clearly is interested in the money. If he didn’t care about the money, he wouldn’t be asking any questions about it. </p>

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<p>Of course! But that leads to the same line of thought that I have asked before on other threads: why does it need to be that way? In other words why does engineering have to be the stepping stone to something better? Why can’t engineering itself be that ‘something better’? </p>

<p>Look, let’s be honest. If engineers were getting paid $150k+ to start, people would be coming out of the woodwork to become engineers. Lest you think that’s a ridiculous sum to pay guys coming right out of school, hey, that’s what the hedge funds and venture capital/private equity firms are paying people fresh out of school.</p>

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<p>My goodness. I suspect Aero/Astro majors are there because they love the field, not because they plan to maximize their starting salary.</p>

<p>Here is a link showing enrollment at UIUC Engineering
[College</a> of Engineering Facts | Engineering at Illinois | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign](<a href=“http://engineering.illinois.edu/about/facts.php]College”>http://engineering.illinois.edu/about/facts.php)</p>

<p>Aero/Astro has about 400 undergrads, meaning the survey probably had at most 40 grads to survey. Assuming they had access to every grad’s data, that’s still not a lot of survey points, and a handful of grads going into the service or grad school would pull a starting average salary way down.</p>

<p>A school like UIUC gets national recruiters, meaning that if someone wants to relocate for the highest paying, or best/most interesting job, they can. Some of those jobs will be big bucks jobs on the coasts. Some of the most attractive jobs for an aero grad, however, are NASA or research type jobs that won’t pay the big bucks. Those jobs are in demand and they don’t have to offer top dollar.</p>

<p>Some grads may choose to stay in the midwest, where salaries are somewhat lower. Companies offer X bucks for their entry level jobs, plus or minus a relatively minor premium for certain grads, experience, etc. What they offer is partly based on where they are located. When you look at a school’s average salaries, you have to keep this in mind. UIUC grads are more likely to stay in the midwest than CA grads, and this fact will be reflected in average starting salaries.</p>

<p>OP, if this is a huge concern, call UIUC and ask them for info from past year surveys. They’ve been doing salary surveys for decades.</p>

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<p>@sakky- thank you for redirecting back to my original focus. However, if you look at my OP, i think i started off by immediately saying that I am not just interested in engineering for the money, but a discrepancy of that magnitude needed to be addressed.</p>

<p>@ Treetopleaf - Thank you. In my original post, I really wanted to know if the lower salary average was a reflection on the quality on the Aero program at UIUC vs. other top-tier engineering universities.</p>

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<p>You do it because you like practical technology, sakky. That’s why you go into engineering. If I wanted money, I’d have gone into medicine, business, or law. I could have done any of the three, I definitely had the stats, but I wanted to put pencil to paper, do math, and create awesome machines or buildings or something. To me, that’s cool. Many people share my view.</p>

<p>As to general aerospace engineering jobs, I’m not sure why the “average salary” is so high, but I know there’s a huge discrepancy in manned spaceflight salaries versus defense space applications salaries. Maybe more UIUC grads choose to work for NASA or a NASA contractor to do the starry-eyed dreamer gigs (nothing wrong with 'em, I almost took one myself), and those pay less than being a civil structural designer (generally noted to be a low-salaried position). Defense applications and commercial applications pay a little better.</p>

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<p>Based on what’s currently happening in the US financial markets, I expect this sort of thing won’t be quite as common for a while, at least until the economy turns around.</p>

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Ditto to what aibarr said. I believe there was even a thread a month or two back about why we went into engineering:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/544409-i-study-ied-engineering-2.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/544409-i-study-ied-engineering-2.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The majority of the posters on that thread said they were actually interested in the field.</p>

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<p>Nah, I’m afraid I have to disagree, for as I’ve said before, you don’t really need an engineering degree to work on practical technology. Many of the most important technologies were built by people who don’t have engineering degrees, or heck, don’t have any degree at all. Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, Facebook, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Boeing, SpaceX, - these firms were all founded by people who never earned engineering degrees, and in many cases, never even graduated from college at all. Heck, GM was founded by a guy who dropped out of high school. If you want to talk about specific technologies, then allow me to point out that innovations such as the Segway, Xbox and Nintendo Wii were designed by people who don’t have engineering degrees. Hence, I would argue that if you want to work on practical technology, you should just go right ahead and do that. You don’t really need an engineering degree.</p>

<p>Perhaps more importantly, I think we can all agree that many engineering students don’t really work on practical technology while they’re in college, often times because they simply aren’t interested in it in the first place. For example, I’ve met many ME students - from top schools - who don’t actually know how to fix their own cars, and don’t care. I’ve met numerous EECS students who don’t know how the Internet networking technologies really work - heck, in some cases, don’t even know how to properly set up a simple WiFi network in their own apartments - and they don’t care. Now, granted, some of them do know, but many do not. Many engineering students - particularly at the top schools - are far more interested in research and theory, perhaps because they want to go into engineering graduate school, than they are in actual practical technology. Many others are, as RacinReaver said, more interested in just using engineering as a stepping stone to another career, and don’t otherwise care about engineering itself. And of course, many other engineering students are basically just interested in the high starting salary and/or ‘backup career’. I would say that only a minority of engineering students actually truly care about working on practical technology, as evidenced by the fact that relatively few students are actually building or designing anything practical while they’re in school. You would expect that if they actually cared about working on practical technology, then they would be doing just that as a side-hobby while they’re students. Why not? That’s what the founders of Facebook did; the company was founded in their dorm rooms. {But of course they all ended up dropping out of college anyway.}</p>

<p>The point is, I don’t really see the notion of being interested in practical technology as being aligned with wanting to get an engineering degree. As I’m sure we’ve all seen, there are far too many engineering students who don’t really care about working on practical technology. And of course there are plenty of people who work on practical technology who don’t have engineering degrees. </p>

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<p>Well, there is one industry that is actually paying $100k+ for engineers just to start. Ok, it isn’t the $150k+ figure that the private equity firms are paying, but it’s still pretty darn good. Why can’t other engineering companies do the same? </p>

<p>[Oil</a> engineers strike it rich - Sep. 17, 2008](<a href=“Oil engineers strike it rich - Sep. 17, 2008”>Oil engineers strike it rich - Sep. 17, 2008)</p>

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<p>Thank you for HIJACKING my thread. I appreciate your passion, but this is not the thread devoted to talk about why someone should/n’t choose engineering.
ATTN: Any UIUC engineering alum that have information about the aero program.
I would really like to know what you think about the salary thing or it in general.</p>

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<p>Being interested in the field is not the same thing as working on practical technology, and neither are the same thing as actually getting an engineering degree.</p>

<p>I’ll give y’all a case in point. To this day, I still don’t know what the heck the Maxwell Relations actually mean, something that all chemical engineers must learn, but to this day, I still haven’t found a single engineer in industry who actually feels confident that they understand them, much less be able to tell me what they actually mean in a real-world setting. Heck, I know people with PhD’s in ChemE from top schools, and even they’ve admitted that they don’t really understand the M.R.'s. Honestly, what the heck does it mean when you say that the partial derivative of entropy with respect to volume at constant pressure is equal to the partial derivative of pressure with respect to temperature at constant volume? To this day, I still don’t know what that actually means.</p>

<p>[Maxwell</a> relations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_relations]Maxwell”>Maxwell relations - Wikipedia) </p>

<p>Look, I can agree that many students will enter engineering because they are actually interested in the field. But the sad truth is that engineering curricula then force you to learn numerous topics that, frankly, are not practical and that have nothing to do with the actual engineering job. Not once have I ever heard of a chemical engineer in industry who had to actually derive a Maxwell Relation out on paper as part of the job. Heck, I’ve never heard of chemical engineers who have ever had to derive any equations as part of the job. Yet that’s precisely what you have to do to survive an engineering exam. {For example, I distinctly recall that the answer I submitted to one of my exam questions - just one question - was literally 4 entire pages of equations, completed in 20 minutes. What’s practical about that? What does that have to do with working on interesting technologies?}</p>

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<p>Dude, you don’t own this thread. If you don’t like my posts, then just don’t read them.</p>

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<p>Don’t you think getting a certain engineering degree would be necessary though? The examples of Dell, Oracle, and Apple I could understand. But if somebody wanted to create their own type of medicine, wouldn’t a degree in chemical engineering be necessary for credibility?</p>

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I can’t agree to that. I was heavily involved in the ASCE Steel Bridge Competition and somewhat involved with the Concrete Canoe competition, which is as practical as you can get. You design the bridge/canoe AND you physically build it. Many of my ME classmates entered an SAE (I think) event and designed, built, and raced the vehicles they built. I believe some of the chemEs I knew entered a similar competition where they had to design and build a chemically powered vehicle.</p>

<p>I’m going to pre-empt you and acknowledge that these are not part of engineering curricula usually. However, some schools have incorporated them as elective courses. I also believe more engineering courses should implement a practical side in addition to the theoretical side. My structural analysis class had as one of the labs to do a mini-version of the steel bridge competition.</p>

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I will just say that it’s true for some cases and not true for others. I think you can agree to that.</p>

<p>P.S. If a moderator is reading this, can s/he cut out the posts unrelated to the original topic and put it into a new thread?</p>

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<p>ExplorerCY, I’m a UIUC alumna, and while I didn’t go for aerospace engineering, I did interview and receive offers within the aerospace industry. As I said in my previous post, I think there may be many reasons for the skew of the salaries, and I don’t think they have anything to do with the quality of the program.</p>

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<p>^^^Thanks.</p>

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<p>I suppose they think that by exercising one’s mind, one is more able to tackle tough problems. Engineering school isn’t a trade school, it’s an education.</p>

<p>ExplorerCY, you are using the wrong metric to evaluate the aero program at UIUC. I was there this spring and visited a lab where a team of about 24 were building a remote control jet airplane, complete with uplink and telemetry. The grad student giving the tour said there were a couple of undergrads working on the project. I thought that was neat.</p>

<p>I knew an aerospace engineering major while I was there, many moons ago, and he (ROTC) joined the USAF with hopes of being a pilot. My husband’s good friend got the degree too, and was made one job offer back in the days when engineering was in a serious slump. Jobs specific to that field are limited, and that may have something to do with starting salaries. And again, if many go into grad school, as you would expect from a great program, and if they reported their stipends, then those numbers would bring the average down.</p>

<p>But seriously, call them and ask!</p>