It's All About Money
Basic Compensation for Engineers
Engineers, scientists, and mathematicians have generally led occupational fields with higher salaries. There is no other general occupational field that makes more money. Oh sure, lawyers and medical doctors make more but when you include the other occupations within their field such as paralegals, nurses, and therapists, the average salary for the field falls below that of the engineering/science field. The average college graduate graduating with an engineering bachelor's degree makes $40k their first year. The average graduating nuclear engineer makes about $48k. Not bad when considering that the average American makes a little over $28k per year.

Salary has always been a contentious thing. Most companies keep it as a closely guarded secret. Some organizations charge you to get a look at their statistics so that you can find out how much you should be paid and what other people are being paid. Other organizations can only give you an average based on the much larger engineering specialty that you're in. The following are 1998 salaries for engineers.

Engineering Specialty	Employment	Salaries (in 1,000 US 1998 Dollars)
		Lower 10%	50% Low	Median	50% High	Upper 10%
All Engineering	1,462,000			58.2
Electrical & Electronics	357,000	38.47	47.08	62.66	80.16	91.49
Mechanical	220,000	35.29	42.68	53.29	74.22	87.0
Civil	195,000	34.27	41.8	53.45	74.55	87.35
Industrial	126,000	35.25	42.69	52.61	73.87	87.01
Aerospace	53,000	42.65	51.17	66.95	82.62	93.88
Chemical	48,000	41.38	49.36	64.76	81.52	92.24
Materials	20,000	34.89	43.89	57.97	77.73	89.6
Petroleum	12,000	42.87	56.02	74.26	93.28	115.82
Nuclear	12,000	48.83	57.16	71.31	85.46	106.4
Mining	4,000	34.93	43.35	56.09	75.65	87.38

Nuclear engineering accounts for less than 1% of engineering employment. Interestingly, it's the only engineering specialty that we could find data on that pays less if you're employed with the federal government. (The average federal salary is $67.1k compared to the median of $71.31k.) The nuclear criticality safety subspecialty accounts for even less than 0.1%; hence there's no easily obtainable data for the criticality safety community to compare. So, there's a real need for a salary survey of the criticality safety community.


Note that at 33 years, the MS salary is less than the BS salary.



Take a look at the salary differences for different engineering degree levels. It certainly doesn't make for a good argument for getting an advanced degree. The salary differences are not high enough to make up for the income lost while in school even if tuition was free. So unless there's something terribly different about the criticality safety community, there's no monetary incentive to get an advanced degree — unless one takes into account what salary differences there might be between supervising and non-supervising salaries. Taking that data into account there might be. It would be interesting to see if the criticality safety community provided an incentive. And then there's the current trend in management — don't maintain an adequate (well paid) full time staff; augment it occasionally (or continuously for some sites) via contractors. How much do contractors make? And is this enough to offset the additional expenses, lifestyle, and job availability risks? Our survey will be the first to try to do this for the criticality safety community. Maybe it's about time, we took a closer look at what salary we make and why.

Sources include the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Purdue's Engineer-Specific Career Advisory