Back in May we highlighted [4] a report from Georgetown that endeavored to show which college majors were most likely to help students land high-paying jobs upon graduation.
While this would be important under any circumstances, it’s especially important today. Why? Two reasons, i) far from a steady creator of breadwinner jobs, the US economy routinely churns out bartenders and waiters [5], while the BLS has a habit of “vanishing” the jobless and creating what we’ve called a “statistical mirage” which makes it appear as though unemployment is falling even as the labor force participation rate plunges [6] to multi-decade lows, and ii) graduates are now leaving school with more debt than ever and without decent employment, that debt burden leads to all manner of problems including the postponement of household formation.
The report was unequivocal. To wit: "STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), health, and business majors are the highest paying, leading to average annual wages of $37,000 or more at the entry level and an average of $65,000 or more annually over the course of a recipient’s career.”
Setting aside the glaring question of whether one wants to count $37,000 a year as “high paying,” the point is that STEM jobs are apparently where it’s at these days unless you plan to become a bulge bracket CEO, a benchmark rate manipulator, or perhaps a doctor. And for anyone out there wondering where the best STEM jobs are, Bloomberg has you covered. Below, find the graphics (which you can click on to access the interactive versions) and some attendant commentary from Bloomberg:
[7]
[7]
From Bloomberg:
A decade ago, Richard Myers was the director of the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he enjoyed the fruits of a rich endowment and his pick of faculty members and graduate students. So he left behind some befuddled scientists when, in 2008, he left Palo Alto, Calif., for Huntsville, Ala., to launch an independent research lab, the HudsonAlpha Institute.
“‘My God, you’re leaving Stanford for Alabama?’” Myers recalls colleagues asking. “‘What’s wrong with you?’”
Huntsville may not seem like an obvious place to base a center for genomics, a branch of biology concerned with DNA sequences that requires expensive hardware and even greater investment in human capital. Alabama ranks in the bottom 10 U.S. states for educational attainment and median income.
Yet Huntsville, nestled in a hilly region in the northern part of the state, turns out to be a great place to recruit high-tech workers. As of May 2014, 16.7 percent of workers in the metropolitan area held a job in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics—STEM, for short—making it the third most technical workforce in the country after San Jose, Calif., and Framingham, Mass., a Bloomberg analysis of Labor Department statistics shows.
Huntsville is one of a growing number of smaller U.S. cities, far from Silicon Valley, that are seeking to replace dwindling factory jobs by reinventing themselves as tech centers. Across the Midwest, Northeast, and South, mayors and governors are competing to attract tech companies and workers.
Much more in the full post here [7]
