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Computer Engineering Degree Most Valuable
Anonymous Squonk writes "CNN reports on the National Association of Colleges and Employers quarterly salary survey. Computer Engineering degree holders once again command the highest starting salaries at an average of $53,117, but Chemical Engineering is gaining rapidly, and Computer Science graduate's salaries are up 8.9% over the year before. Most of the other geek disciplines rank high on the list as well." While starting salaries for some degrees are up, the overall situation is not very good - indeed, your salary may be decreasing.
Wow, that starting salary must be appreciated by all 5 graduates who were able to find jobs.
Honestly, until something is seriously done by the government and companies (determing a percentage that can be offshored, completely redoing the tariffs in the so-called "free trade" agreements, etc.), it's difficult to make a case for going to a college or university. To train for what? Everyone behind a desk is vulnerable to being offshored.
Thankfully, Lou Dobb's program is putting the spotlight on this issue each evening! Tonight, he's going to focus on the companies who are the worst abusers of offshoring. Last night, he focused on the owner of a Tool and Die shop who is complaining that "free trade" has ruined his business and it's about to go under. His specific complaints were that tariffs on his stuff going to China is 29.9%. Stuff coming from China to the US has a tariff of 3%. In Mexico, they freely use and dump chemicals that he would go to jail for dumping. This is free trade? Our elected officials agreed to this? Holy cow! The playing field is not level or even close to being level.
Until the tariffs are equal and labor/enviromental issues are equal with our trade partners, America is going to continue to lose jobs, companies, and wealth. Our future is slowly being flushed down the porcelin convenience. Our own beloved industry - IT - has near double-digit unemployment. Good luck to new graduates trying to enter.
I'd rather know about the money I'll be making five to ten years into the job. If the company has starting salaries too high, chances are they aren't going to be around that long.
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Yeah, but she has a masters versus a regular batchelor of science, or what have you. Most psychology majors I know have very low paying jobs with social services.
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When I started college over 4 years ago, the average salary of a grad (from my school, for my degree) was over $60,000/year.
When I graduated last year, it dropped below $40,000, and it was extremely difficult to find a job. I have a friend with the same computer related degree with a 3.92/4.0 gpa who still hasn't found a job yet. And yes, I know that gpa doesn't always equate to ability/productivity, but this guy is really good.
I'm glad to see that things are back on the upswing for technology, even if this is just a start.
What is the difference between Computer Engineering and Computer Science? I had always thought they were different names for the same subject. Does Engineering deal mostly with the hardware aspect?
at a Fortune 500, and I'm responsible for our campus recruiting program.
The majority of candidates we are seeking are those with Comp Sci degrees. To any kid entering college now, take my advice - go to Washington University in Saint Louis.
We're hired from universities all over Canada and the United States, and I can tell you that the quality of hires from Washington University is far beyond that of any other school, including Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, etc.
Just one HR executives advice...
This comes as a bit of a revelation to me. I sat and compared these figures to to my school (Georgia Tech's) published figures on average offer granted to graduates in each field, and Tech comes out consistently about 4-5 thousand higher than these figures.
If you're an out of state student.. like me.. this gets eaten up by extra loans quickly, but if you're fortunate enough to be in-state this can probably be a real help.
The sad(der) part is that nursing and elementary teaching are in the bottom five of the list with both of them going down.
Nurses and Teachers are the people who should be paid better. Oh well.
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Lots of money is great, but what about the people who have a love for computing?... To me as long as I am happy with my work, the people I work with and I dont have to worry about where my next meal comes from then thats all the beans. If youve noticed, a lot of people are getting into the field JUST for the money, I'd like to see maybe 5-10 years down the road all the high money chasers go and the people who actually WANT to do this type of work stick.
One thing to remember is that salaries are very region dependent, so a Computer Engineering degree may not command the highest starting salaries in your region.
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I find that most computer related degrees are "chasers." They mix well with other skills. They allow you to computerize something such as a medical thing, or an automotive thing, as you make a tool. Afterall, computers are only tools. What good is a tool without a purpose?
Well at least thats the way on the software side. I got my MSCE (oh yea, thats Masters of Science in Computer Engineering...) while working for an automotive Company. I have not changed fields and am probably not making nearly as much as I could. But I fear for job stability so I hang around.
Besides, we are adding more and more electronics to cars plus they are several automotive network technologies such as LIN, CAN, J1850, CCD, etc. Automotive field is not too bad a place for a CE.
Notwithstanding, our managers are also smoking The India Pipe(TM).
From what I recall - the college new hire salary for IBM computer engineers (B.S. degree) was ~$45-49k in 1999, $50-53k in 2001. Not sure what the current value is, though I'd expect it is in the $55k range.
MBA, MS degrees command different jobs and different salaries than what was on the survey.
The real shame is that the elementary ed teachers starting salary dropped significantly. These are people our society depends on, and it it very difficult to keep the best people for the job in there if they can get (and need) better paying work doing other jobs that don't require as much skill or talent.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Yeah, but if the beginning salary is too low - are you willing to work there for five to ten years to make your way up to what you could/should have been making when you were hired?
I'm in this exact case. I keep hearing, "you'll be rewarded down the road" and "if we're around in five or ten years, you'll have a great position because you'll have been here from the beginning." I'd rather be making a "competitive" salary now instead of hoping to get enough raises over the years to equal what I could find elsewhere.
Me first. Company second. Anyone who believes otherwise is delusional.
"You're never going to get rich working to make someone else rich."
This was told to me while I was working as a software engineer commanding a decent salary. But I wasn't making the real money. That job belonged to my boss, who saw it fit to pay me a skim from his profit for a job I performed.
What was I to do? Whine? Talk about how "greedy" he was? Criticize him for his lack of technical skills (compared to mine)?
All of that is excrement. Instead, I chose to become an entrepreneur. I found partners, made deals, and now am in the process of opening my second restaurant as well as selling things over television and Internet. I think about business all the time, and work suddenly has become very, very fun. Life itself feels like a massively multiplayer game.
Oh, and here's another piece of advice that I learned that I wish someone had told me earlier: Anyone will loan you any some of money as long as they are convinced that it's in their best interest to do so.
Stop working for someone else. Find partners. Find investors. Find a way that you can make a business work. It's exhilirating and fascinating. And you won't go back once you are free.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Wow, that's amazing, because I recently returned from a career fair here at Caltech, and nearly every job needed a heavy programming background. The problem (for you) is, that they want other skills too.
Your REAL problem is that an increasing number of students majoring in physics, chemistry, math, etc have learned to program pretty damned well. That gives us a huge advantage - we can take a job that uses either our science knowledge, programming skills, or more likely both. Companies get somebody with a wider range of skills.
As such, I think the best idea is a major in the physical sciences or better yet, EE, with a CS minor (or double major).
I guarantee you this - if you had an EE/CS double major, or even EE major/CS minor, you'd be beating companies away with a stick. Particularly here in California.
Maybe it's just that good in the US, because holy crap that's a high average starting salary. Here in the UK the current average computing starting wage (based on my own experience and that of my friends) is something like 20k GBP (37k USD). I have a high-pass degree in Computer Science from a well respected university, but with the current computing job climate it would be seriously hard to get a job paying more than 25k GBP (46k USD) as a starting wage. (Hell, I'm not even on that much yet - far from it!)
It's extremely annoying, given that mechanics and plumbers (or even totally unskilled jobs like shunting boxes around a warehouse, which I did for a year or so a while back) can earn you almost as much as it's possible to earn with a degree these days.
The value of degrees has been reduced due to the UK government's insane scheme to get more and more people to go to university. We don't need more people to go to university - we need to make it harder to go to university so that only the people who really want to do it (and have the skills) can go, rather than lowering the difficulty of getting a degree so that the people who loaf it through university can also get degrees. It should be HARD to get a degree - I'm not saying it was easy, but I think it could have been harder. A degree should mean something, but these days I'm not sure it really does, because "everyone has one".
My youger brother decided not to go to university, and is an apprentice quantity surveyor in the building trade. He's a very intelligent guy, but it's just not worth him getting a degree. In five years time, I will be absolutely unsurprised to hear that he's earning considerably more than me (which he almost certainly will be).
Degrees aren't all they're cracked up to be, and the "extra" money you earn for having one barely covers the cost of going to university for four years in the first place.
I'm glad I have a degree, but it's not the big money earner it's cracked up to be - jobs are just too scarce at the moment. Personally, I blame the people who did computing degrees around the time of the dot com boom because they needed a degree and heard it was "where the money was". Now, there's a surplus of computer qualified people around, meaning that plenty of us who are actually really enjoy computers and are good at what we do can't get jobs because the gold-rush crowd are still hanging around.
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At my school U of MD at College Park, computer engineering is usually considered the hardest major in the school, followed by EE, and then CS. The irony is that you'll ask a CS major if he could hack EE, and he'd almost certainly say "HELL NO!", and if you asked the EE whether he could do CS, he'd respond the same way.
Neither engineering nor CS have any sort of GPA requirements. If you can keep your head above water, they'll keep you. Naturally, GPAs are lower because the classes are harder.
The reason CE is considered so hard is that they hit you with the hardest CS courses (Operating Systems comes to mind) and you get more than a bit of EE (which, of course, is not trivial either). CS and EE afford you the luxury of only having to know EE or CS, not both (well, except for a bit of cross-training, not enough to impress anyone).
However, don't confuse this with "CEs can program better than CS majors at UMCP". They can't. Their knowledge of more esoteric languages like Lisp and Prolog ends up suffering in the process, and they're missing out on quite a bit of algorithm theory.
I'm a CS/Econ double major, and it's like accounting and economics. Yes, I've taken a massive amount of statistics and finance courses, but that doesn't mean I'd be the better accountant of a guy with a business degree in finance. Ditto for CE and CS - he's got harder courses, but it doesn't make him a better programmer, because I've got more of them where it counts.
In other words, the two majors aren't at all the same, and the idea of using CEs as the "better" cheap labor for coding isn't thought-out very well. (No, this isn't in response to the parent, but it's something I needed to say). I have no interest in being some kind of lowly code slave, which is why I got the Econ degree, too.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Anyhow, there's no one solution for each person in my mind. Whether you at your job or some other guy at another job would benefit from collective bargaining (e.g. joining a union) is a decision best made by the individual. Then there's the professional organizations like the Programmers Guild as well. But it's obvious to me that SOME type of professional organization is needed - I mean every other profession, except maybe McDonalds workers, have some type of professional organization, be it a union or more like the AMA/ADA/ABA. And our bosses sure as hell have Chamber of Commerce like guys in Washington DC making sure H1-Bs visa caps rise, or at least are not lowered and things like this. The ITAA is the main association that does this, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth give them millions a year to mostly screw IT workers in Washington DC. Plus they have a PR department that gets news media articles written that said there was a massive shortage of IT workers in the late 1990's and H1-B visas needed to be raised. In fact that's a standard line they are paid to push like tobacco lobbyists who say smoking is not bad for you, these people are still saying there's a shortage or will be soon, they always say that, they're paid to say that.
Finally I should point out that there is a lot of corporate funding for organizations like the IEEE, USENIX (SAGE), ACM and so forth. In some respects it's kind of ridiculous, it would be like having HMO's pay for and to some extent control the AMA. But anyhow, if you're in these organizations it's good to talk to other people and educate and agitate about it, but there has been internal politic problems in the past, and while doing some of that is good, you should also keep in mind that there are avenues and organizations available to you outside of them, like the Programmers Guild and other organizations. And if you don't like any of them, and know others who are dissatisfied, you can always start your own organization, web site, whatever.
a companies best interest is to pay you the absolute bare minimum that it takes to keep you around, and not a dime more.
you need to negotiatie up front for the best compensation possible. all future raises will be based on that going forward.
... hi bingo
Being a recent CS graduate from a large State university, and currently working in data entry I wish all of you better luck than I have had. The competition, at least here is insane. I had 18 interviews last year and was passed up on them all. Worked at an italian restaraunt for a few months, now am doing data entry for about half what I spent on my college tuition. Though, I have a few friends that have become very successful with their degrees. The key to their advancement, they all worked networking jobs throughout college, I didn't. Thus the experience is lacking on my resume. I wish all those seeking CS or engineering degrees the best of luck, and get as much experience as you can. For those that do find jobs are doing very well for themselves.
Your post betrays a poor understanding of psychology, game theory and human nature. In a trade where your productivity is a direct function of the number of hours on the job, such as flipping burgers and slinging lattes, it's approximately true, expecially as you can at least hope to make some of it up in tips for having a good attitude. In a trade where productivity varies wildly, such as computer programming, and is a direct function of ability and motivation, it's vital to keep people motivated. Which is why good employers tend to pay 20% over the going rate, and issue share options. 20% is a small price to pay for 50% extra productivity.
Tony.
-- "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- Juvenal
Averages are just that, the average, not the minimum. Also, the min and max vary a whole lot when you take a national average. Why? Because cost of living varies a whole lot. There are plenty of places where 35k is fine. I live in one of them, Tucson Arizona. On 35k you could easily afford to own a 1500+ square foot house, a deceant car, and have enough left over for some goodies.
Now of course in the bay area, 35k is practally poverty, you'd be sharing an apartment, maybe even a room, with someone just to make ends meet. So, all things being equal, the same job will pay more there.
Basic economics dude.
So lets look at this from a logic point of view. I'm going to try to validate your argument through use of formal logic. As a refresher, an argument is valid when, if all the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.
So let's translate the first premise:
To think if I only made $53k out of college, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. (O, P)
That's:
O > P (this notation means if O then P)
Now the conclusion:
Good thing I didn't waste my time and energy on a useless college education. (W, C)
C > W Conclusion (If I go to college, I was time)
Now, there's an implied premise: If I went to college, I'd be making straight out of school money. (C, O)
C > 0
Okay, now let's look at the truth table:
O P W C O > P C > O C > W
1) F F F F
2) F F F T F F
3) F F T F
4) F F T T
5) F T F F
6) F T F T F F
7) F T T F
8) F T T T
9) T F F F
10) T F F T F T F
11) T F T F
12) T F T T
13) T T F F
14) T T F T T T F
15) T T T F
16) T T T T
Oops! It appears that line 14 has a false conclusion but has all true premises. This means the logic is invalid. Roughly translated, this say that you can go to college, make out of school money, *AND* have it not be a waste. Gee, who would have thunk it.
Now, if you had added the premise that the only reason to go to school is not make more money then you'd have a technically valid argument. However, I would you and I would still disagree that the only reason to go to school is to make more money. In other words, having a valid argument doesn't mean the premises are true, just that the line of reasoning beginning with the premises is good.
Now, I might suggest that going to school might help you either articulate your arguments better or realize that money is not the only reason why you'd want to learn. Maybe that's a set of life-skills that would be useful for you.
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