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Does the greater education of STEM students equal higher salaries? The Economic Modeling Specialists Intl. (EMSI), a CareerBuilder company that specializes in employment data and economic analysis, says “yes.”
Brent Rasmussen, president of CareerBuilder North America said in an article about the best-paying jobs in 2013 that “nearly one in five employers (18 percent) reported that their educational requirements for jobs in their organizations have increased over the last five years.”
There was one exception when EMSI listed the best-paying jobs requiring an associate’s degree. A nuclear technician with the right two-year degree could earn $68,037 annually for assisting in nuclear research and production.
The salaries escalate dramatically for individuals with three specific types of bachelor’s degrees in engineering. The poten- tially best-remunerated graduate in 2013 could be a man or woman with an undergraduate degree in petroleum engineer- ing who may receive $122,242 for designing how to extract oil and natural gas, particularly that which is fracked, from underground.
Students that decide to go nuclear can do equally well. An en- gineer with knowledge of radiation and nuclear energy could get $99,715 a year, whereas a chemical engineer might earn $92,934 for being able to use skills in biology, chemistry and physics to produce fuel and related chemicals.
Coal, wind, water, oil, solar, thermal, natural gas and other emerging forms of alternative energy sectors will also require skilled personnel with degrees that will mesh with a multiplic- ity of disciplines.
These disciplines include software development, account- ing, market research, computer system analysis, network and computer system administration, information security analysis, web development, computer network architecture, financial analysis, computer programming, mechanical and
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industrial engineering, database administration, cost estima- tion and logistics.
Sequestration Blues
The tricky part in this post-sequestration era is predicting how various sectors will be affected as the spending cuts begin. The Scientific American website reports that the federal gov- ernment is the main funder of basic scientific research.
The Congressional Research Service prepared a study Seques- tration: A Review of Estimates of Potential Job Losses. A salient paragraph in the document said, “The industries estimated to experience the greatest direct and indirect job losses also dif- fered considerably. Federal government employees could face much larger direct and indirect job losses as a result of cuts to non-defense budgets (268,000 jobs) than to the defense budget (56,000 jobs).
In the private sector, employees at professional and busi- ness services firms could face the largest direct and indirect job losses (180,000) due to non-defense budget cuts and manufacturing employees might incur the largest job losses (223,000) due to DOD budget cuts.”
The report doesn’t go granular in describing the sequestra- tion’s impact. The battle will occur at research universities. Wealthy universities have a cushion with various sources of funding. The middle-sized and small universities, virtually all Historically Black Colleges and Universities, have small rainy day funds.
In a Scientific American guest blog, MIT professor of science writing Tom Levenson said, “sequester cuts will strike bluntly across the scientific community. The illustrious can move a bit of money around, but even in large labs, a predictable result will be a reduction in the number of graduate student and postdoc slots available—and as those junior and early-stage researchers do a whole lot of the at-the-bench level research, such cuts will have an immediate effect on research productivity.
The longer term risk is obvious too:fewer students and post- docs means an ongoing drop from baseline in the amount of work to be done year over year, and given that industry has reduced its demand for research-trained Ph.Ds., a plausible consequence is that some, many perhaps, of those with ca- pacity to do leading-edge science will simply never enter the pipeline, shifting instead to some other career that does not demand six years and more of poorly paid training to find that there are no jobs.”
by Frank McCoy,
fmccoy@ccgmag.com
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