Monday, September 15, 2014

Morning tidbit: 538 on why STEM is TE

Ben Casselman, an economics writer for 538, Nate Silver's data website, has written "an economic guide to picking a college major". Here's a rather lovely paragraph:
All STEM fields aren’t the same 
Politicians love to tout the importance of science, technology, engineering and math majors. But when it comes to earnings, the “S” majors don’t really belong with the “TEM” ones. Engineering majors are nearly all high-paying. So are most computer and math majors, and math-heavy sciences like astrophysics.3 But many sciences, particularly the life sciences, pay below the overall median for recent college graduates. Students who major in neuroscience, meteorology, biology and ecology all stand to make $35,000 or less — and that’s if they can get a full-time job, which many can’t. Zoology ranks as one of the lowest-paying majors of any category, with a median full-time wage of $26,000 a year. 
3. There are a few exceptions to this. A few technology-related majors, such as “communications technologies” and “computer networking and telecommunications” are relatively low-paying. But these are mostly lower-level, technically oriented majors. 
His data set comes from the New York Federal Reserve. Here's what they had to say about chemistry:

Interesting data, more later. Read the whole thing. 

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