I graduated from the University of Texas in 1980, and went to work as a geoscientist trainee for an oil company at $12,000/year. Within a year they raised me to $20,000. At the time I felt like I was being hosed.
Now I look at those wage levels with a variety of inflation calculators from the 'net, and see that my starting salary was ~$29K in today dollars, and my raise after a year put me at ~$42K in today dollars.
That doesn’t really seem so bad for a not hot degree.
Now my nieces and nephews are pouring out of college, and I can’t relate to what they’re telling me about career starting salaries. For just out of college, $44K sounds great to me, yet we’ve hired new ones (well, Masters Degrees, but still pretty green as far as the real world goes) within the last year for $55K!
So what does a newly minted degree expect these days (I’m sure it varies somewhat by discipline and degree level)?
Depends on the field. My engineering friends made in the mid-40s, one friend got a job with a Big 4 accounting firm and started in the high 40s, but most people started between 25K-40K.
A ‘liberal arts’ type field (teaching, history, and the like) would most likely be in the 25K-35K, wheras a more science-y degree might yield 35K-45K. Some of the more in-demand degrees, or harder to obtain ones, can even be in the 50K range.
Me? Well, in theory, I have an ‘in-demand’ science-y degree, yet my current job (first one out of college) is 30K.
I started at $28,500 in 1989. Not sure what that would translate to in today’s dollars, but it was for a BSCS. Decent GPA, but certainly nothing spectacular.
Note though, it seems to depend on the field of science. Judging by the OP, and by what I’ve seen and heard elsewhere, the bio and geo majors don’t seem to do that great when they’re starting out.
Well, I graduated in 2000, started out at 44k, but quickly jumped jobs up to 60k. This was with a liberal arts degree in Communications. This was in Silicon Valley of course, so the numbers may be skewed.
Field and cost of living can affect starting salaries. In general, starting salaries in the midwest are lower than on the coasts, regardless of the field . . . but the cost of living here–though rising significantly–is lower.
Wildly varies. Emeka Okafor makes several million dollars a year playing basketball. Your average grade school teacher in the Dakotas makes under $30K a year. Police officers, social workers and other state-level employees are - at least to a significant extent - not going to see in a lifetime what Emeka Okafor will make in a year or two. Those with post-grad or doctoral degrees will do better, of course.
A starting Harvey Mudd Engineer (my alma mater) made an average of $59K in 2001. I think the school average for that year was a bit under $50K, and engineering is on the high side of the curve. I can’t find more recent data than that right now.
My wife and I graduated in 1999, she as an elementary school teacher and me as a meteorologist. I started around $27k (got lucky though, most starting salaries are in the $20-25k range), my wife started in the upper 20s, in the Omaha area. We have now moved to the Oklahoma City, and my wife is still making only around $30k, with 4-5 years of experience now (though several schoolpay-friendly bills passed last year on Election Day).
But what people are failing to take into account is that salaries reflect not only the demand for the skillset of the new grad, but also the buying power in the local economy. SF, for example, is a hideously expensive city, and according to the salary calculator on Monster.com, $74,000 in the Bay Area is equivalent to $43,000 here in DC. Not bad for a new grad, but it’s not a lot of money for this area.
Does anyone have an idea on how favorably double major graduates are looked upon in the job market? Say Mr. Business Grad is also a Philosophy Grad (or insert other liberal arts degree). How might that skew those starting salaries, if at all?
It depends on the majors and the market. For instance, biligual business workers are in more demand now than a few years ago–someone with a degree in Spanish and general business would command a higher starting salary than someone with only one degree or the other. A good friend of mine graduated years ago with a B.S. in chemical engineering and a degree in mechanical engineering. He started at British Petroleum in the low 80s, I’m told, though he ultimately took a $20K salary drop to work for a small firm trying to improve the efficiency of recycling. He did it both for the environment and because he found out industrial chemical engineers apparently did not enjoy as long an average lifespan as the rest of us.
It also depends on what you do with the degree, of course. I graduated with a degree in journalism and a degree in English. I worked in public relations for about five years, went to graduate school, and then started college teaching. The average B.A. in public relations starts out around 25K or so, but I was making double that because my skill set included desktop publishing, speechwriting, photography, and so forth, some of which I learned in school, but much of which I learned through internships or self-teaching. By graduate school, I was freelancing, which allowed me to charge even higher fees. All of this experience combined so that when I joined a college faculty, I had the skills and experience to consult and co-write a textbook. My income went up correspondingly.
Is average starting salary based on one's level of education really a useful statistic? I would think starting salary has less to do with one's level of education and more to do with connections, region, experience, luck, interview performance, and focus of education to a far greater degree than HS vs. BA vs. MA etc. (not to mention the additional factor of how crappy a job one is willing to take for higher pay).
It seems to me that the average isn't particularly telling since the range is so broad (from philosophy majors who often barely make more than high school graduates to petrochemical engineers who sometimes start in the six figures).
Does anyone have statistics that show data that shows us whether the average really means anything?