<p>I am very interested in aerospace, chemical and petroleum engineering but I cannot decide which one I should major in. I love all of them, but I just can't pick between them! Does anyone know which have a higher salary? Or, more importantly, which one has the highest job prospects? Although I love all of them, I will probably end up choosing the one that I have the highest chance of getting a job after college. Does anyone know which one has the best job prospects? I know they're all really hard majors...thanks!!!</p>
<p>Download the 2011 report from this web site: [Center</a> on Education and the Workforce -](<a href=“http://cew.georgetown.edu/whatsitworth/]Center”>What’s It Worth?: The Economic Value of College Majors - CEW Georgetown)</p>
<p>Starting with page 112, you can see median engineering salaries by degree type for lots of Engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>For the three that you mentioned, the order of median earnings is 1) Petroleum, 2) Aerospace, 3) Chemical, with #2 & #3 being nearly the same. PetE is off the charts, which is likely filling those college programs to capacity, presumably resulting in a glut of petroleum Engineers and salaries closer to the others over the mid-term future. Just a guess on my part. I could be wrong.</p>
<p>There is no information in the report regarding job prospects.</p>
<p>Hope it helps.</p>
<p>Petroleum engineering is one of the best paying jobs out there. You have to be willing to live in Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, or maybe a few other states. </p>
<p>Aerospace is also great if you get in with a company like Boeing.</p>
<p>You’ll change your mind later, no matter what you choose now.</p>
<p>Truth is, you can’t make up your mind because they aren’t differentiated enough to you, what you need is to:</p>
<p>1: study more about each of them, what classes you’d take, what research is being done, what the job prospects are like, where you’d live, etc.
2: personal experience with each of them. You may take a chemistry class and decide you hate everything about it. You may cover basic fluid mechanics or thermodynamics in an intro physics class and decide you don’t like it enough to build a major on it, etc.</p>
<p>30+ years ago an aspiring model airplane enthusiast in the little nation of Elbonia - now a member of the European Union - decided that it would really not be a good idea to study aerospace engineering. After all, there were only a couple dozen aircraft companies in the world (before the mergers and so on) and do you really need a lot of aerospace engineers?</p>
<p>So, he decided to study something slightly more employable and ended up in Civil Engineering. After he graduated he realized there was nothing left to build in Elbonia, so he moved to the US and studied his new-found love, Computer Science. He is happily employed writing software.</p>
<p>One of his relatives did study Aerospace Engineering and for 20+ years had some awesome jobs designing spacecraft systems in the US. The joy ended prematurely when he was laid off along with a few hundred others when a project they were expecting to get the contract on fell thru. He now works in the green energy field…</p>
<p>Bottom line: consider job opportunities well before you consider salaries. The US is down to a dozen companies that do anything with aircraft or space, and I would be very weary of having to depend on my livelihood on a very cyclical, very politically oriented job picture. </p>
<p>As a friend who worked for NASA on the original Space Station said “it ain’t no fun watching your job debated on C-SPAN every night”.</p>
<p>you don’t have to choose right now. you can apply as undecided major, you can even switch in your second year since most engineering degree the first two year are very similar for any program.</p>
<p>I think chemical or mechanical (with aerospace specialization) has more diverse jobs. like those people can work in a factory, for a designing firm or a lab, or even in the petroleum industry. but a petroleum engineer can not work in a factory, or a lab. sure a petroleum engineer get paid more, but for the first few years of work, they are often not in the big cities… simply because oil fields are in the country. there is some office work in the large cities but most office jobs want you to have field experience.</p>