Starting salary offers for college graduates rise 3.5% - Feb. 10, 2011
So you want to get a Liberal Arts degree and borrow money to do it?
Project your future earnings, based on $36K/yr. If you get a job at all.
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While the association's survey didn't break out starting salaries for individual liberal arts majors, offers were up a whopping 9.5% to $35,633 for the group as a whole. That compares to a steep drop of 11% last year.
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One point of reference, my former company was looking to hire an admin asistant's assistant (that's right the assist to the assist) to help with compiling spreadsheets, package reports, etc. Nothing real demanding nor did it require a degree. The starting salary was....$32K/yr! That was 3+ years ago. So in this case, it would have been more effective to take an Excel class at the JuCo than to go to college.
For engineers...and others...
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Business majors noticed the biggest bump, with the average salary offer rising nearly 2% to $48,089.
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Graduates majoring in engineering -- typically one of the highest-paying fields -- didn't see a big change overall, with the average starting salary down a mere 0.3% but still high at $59,435.
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Mechanical and Electrical still top the list of engineer starting salary...(typically Chem Eng is at the top).
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Certain engineering majors, however, saw significant jumps, with electrical engineering majors receiving an average salary offer of $61,690 -- up 4.4% from the previous year. Offers for mechanical engineers climbed 3.8% to $60,598.
But it didn't pay as much to graduate with a degree in civil engineering this year, with starting salaries in that field slipping 7.1% to $48.885.
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What the survey doesn't tell us is the number of hirings in each of these fields. I would gamble that engineering is at the top of the list for numbers of hires.
Unless things have changed in the last 5 years, there is still a shortage of engineers...that is, the number of engineers graduating hasn't increased proportionally with the number of engineering jobs available or that will be come available.