<p>you can’t ever trust college placement/starting salary surveys (such as the one G.P Burdell put up) from any school. I have a friend who works for a college, and one of his jobs is making salary surveys. The thing is, the only way to get information for these salary surveys is to ask recently graduated students, and those students are hard to track down, and most don’t want to answer the survey after they have been tracked down. The best survey my friend has ever saw had only a 20% response rate, and most of the time these response rates are far lower, around 5-10%. To prove my point, here is the full information given for physics grads from the 2009 survey: <a href=“Georgia Tech | External Redirect Landing Page”>Georgia Tech | External Redirect Landing Page;
<p>one person responded to the survey. What did you say G.P burdell? sample size of one?</p>
<p>It would be much better to look at national average starting salary information if you want to know how much you can make with a certain major. National surveys show that Physics is right below engineering/CS for starting salaries, with an average starting salary of around 50,000. This is because Physics grads are sought after because they have the skills that many employers in the software, engineering, and finance fields find valuable. My dad, who majored in physics, got a job in software engineering (he took 3 relevent courses) and has been very succecfull in the software industry. You can be very succesfull with a degree in physics (unlike the other sciences, especialy biology).</p>