Monday, December 08, 2008

Salary prospects for biology majors

This may or may not surprise you, but who do you think has the highest median starting salary and mid-career salary between those three: History graduate, philosophy graduate, biology graduate? When it comes to salary you're actually better off with an undergrad in history, philosophy, geography, any engineering, or any science other than biology. If it makes you feel better, it still beats drama and is about equivalent to an English major with $38.8K starting and $64.8K mid-career. Why is that? I'm not sure, but It probably is a consequence of supply and demand. Not much demand for biologists, and way too many graduates.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

With less and less biology left on this planet to study it would follow that, even worse for salaries, there is a decreasing demand for biologists.
Perhaps though, if there is enough biologists and the selection pressure is high enough, perhaps an engineer or two will evolve out of their ranks.

Ivan Privaci said...

I'd be interested in seeing that broken down by specific disciplines of biology. How does a "Microbiologist" score as opposed to a "wildlife zoologist", for example?

Anonymous Coward said...

Keep in mind that this is your major, not necessarily what you end up doing with it... For all we know there might be a greater proportion of life science major that end up in the service sector...

Many other majors have more direct career paths.

Anonymous said...

This is great but I just found a site that lists all of the job salary options for biology jobs as well as for companies within that industry. I encourage anyone that is considering negotiating a salary to take a look at that website.

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