 The highest paying engineering degrees. That's what we're gonna be talking about today, but before we jump into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success. And we also go over some of the common financial traps that so many people fall for. Now if you're new here and you haven't done it already and that sounds like something that interests you, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss an opportunity. Now with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. Today, we are gonna be talking about the highest paying engineering degrees. I've already made a few videos about what engineering degrees I think are the best. And in those videos, I talked about more than just salary. We went over the job satisfaction and all kinds of other things like demand. However, in this video, we are gonna be focusing on salary. There are a lot of engineering related degrees and engineering related majors out there that there might not be very many graduates every year, but they can still be pretty good opportunities and they have a really good salary. So with that being said, let's jump in right away. Number 10 on the list is going to be nuclear engineering. Now this is gonna be all about either breaking down or combining different atomic nuclei. I know this is not about creating nuclear bombs or anything like that. This is all about energy production and the energy industry. Now with this degree, you can expect to make around $73,000 a year in your first five years after graduating and then after 10 years, also known as mid-career pay, you're gonna be making around 124,000. Now, of course, you could become a nuclear engineer and you'd be making around 113,000 a year according to BLS. There's 16,400 jobs available, but it is declining at negative 13%, meaning in the next 10 years, 2100 jobs are going to disappear. Now the thing about any energy related career degree is that it's not gonna be very stable. It's highly volatile. A war, the market dropping, regulations, laws changing, anything like that can disrupt your entire industry. Now from my research, most nuclear engineering jobs are actually relatively chill. You're not gonna be worked really hard, have to do super long hours or anything like that, at least not usually. And as a nuclear engineer, you kinda hope that your job is boring, let's be honest. Because your job, generally speaking, if you're working in an electrical plant, is to make sure that the next Chernobyl doesn't happen. Now there's a lot of other jobs you could work in. For instance, you could be a waste management expert and get rid of different nuclear waste. You could get a job working with nuclear submarines where you'd be working on naval propulsion. You could also do a lot of research and development. There are a lot of job opportunities out there besides working in the energy industry specifically. And depending on what career path you go down, you might end up going back and getting a master's. Overall, unless you know exactly what you're going for, exactly what career you wanna get into and exactly how you need to get there, I would recommend not going into this one. That's because of the negative job outlook and I've been asked about this one several times in the comments section. I might make an entire video on it, but if you wanna speed things up and just watch this video, overall I kinda don't recommend it. I think a lot of the other engineering degrees are gonna be better. Number nine on the list is going to be computer systems engineering. Now this one is basically gonna be kind of a combination of computer science, engineering skills, math skills of course, and then a little bit of maybe IT skills as well. So information technology. And it's gonna be used to figure out how technology fits into the larger scheme of an organization or a business. Now this one you can expect to make around $74,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is $124,000 a year. There's a ton of different career paths that you could go for with this one because of the fact that you're gonna be specializing in skill sets that are gonna be in the technology industry. There's gonna be a lot of different opportunities out there. One career path you could definitely go for would be a computer systems analyst. They make around $90,000 a year. There's 632,000 jobs available. It's growing at 7% which is faster than average. And that means over the next 10 years there's gonna be 46,000 new jobs available. You could also become a computer hardware engineer where they make around 117,000 a year. There's 71,000 jobs available so quite a bit less. It's growing at 2% which is slower than average. And that means over the next 10 years there's gonna be about 1,100 jobs that pop up. Now I know with these technology degrees it can be very confusing because all of them almost sound like the same thing. So I like to compare them so that you can get an idea of what you would be doing with one over the other. So if you were to get a computer science degree for instance you'd probably go into more information technology related jobs or software development, software engineering related jobs. Whereas computer systems engineers are gonna be working with maybe some low level software engineering, software development like some low level programming but for the most part they're gonna be working with hardware. So with computer science you might go work at Google or Facebook and become a software engineer. Whereas with computer information systems you might work at Intel and design the next processor. Overall this is a relatively rare major. There's not that many graduates that you can find all over the country. On top of that you could probably get into these same exact jobs, do the same exact careers by getting a computer engineering degree and you'd have access to a lot of others as well. So this can be a really good one to get into if you know exactly what you're going for but overall you'd probably just wanna go for computer engineering instead. Number eight on the list is going to be marine engineering. So this is gonna be engineering that's all about anything in the ocean. So boats, ships, oil rigs, et cetera. With this degree you can expect to make around $74,000 a year in your first five years and 125,000 in mid-career pay. One career you could go into is becoming a marine engineer or a naval architect. They make around $92,000 a year. There's 11,800 jobs available. It is growing pretty slowly at about 1% so there's only gonna be about 200 jobs that open up in the next 10 years. Now with this degree there's basically two different types of marine engineers and there's two different areas that you could go which are gonna be completely different. So you could be a marine engineer that is actually on the ship itself and you're kind of like almost like the ship's mechanic but you have a little bit more knowledge than your average mechanic. So it's gonna be a very hands-on type of career where you know about the ship, you know everything about the ship and all the mechanical workings within it but you can also work on it if need be. If you're a fan of sci-fi you can think about it like this. Whenever you're watching a sci-fi movie they always have an engineer on board the ship. Now this engineer ends up working on the ship in just about every single season that you see. Even though they're an engineer and they're not a mechanic they still end up working on the ship itself. This is kind of the same thing. You're gonna be spending long periods of time away from your family in the middle of the ocean floating on a ship. So this might be great if you're single and you don't have to worry about taking care of a family or anything like that. However, as you're getting older and you wanna have a family this is gonna be a real drain on your work-life balance. But it will probably pay you extremely well especially if you're good. Another type of common marine engineering is more of a desk job where you're gonna be focusing on maintaining and upgrading ships within a fleet. This one probably won't pay quite as well but you're gonna have better work-life balance. Overall the big problem with marine engineering is a very common problem when it comes to different engineering related majors and that is that it's a little bit too specialized. So if you get a mechanical engineering degree for instance you could potentially become a marine engineer but if you become a marine engineer it's gonna be a little bit harder for you to become a mechanical engineer. Engineering degrees in general are pretty good so you don't have to get that specific in order to find a job. So getting too specific with an engineering related degree can actually be a bad thing sometimes. Number seven on the list is going to be aeronautical engineering. So this one is actually gonna be the degree that my dad got so shout out to dad if you're watching this. And basically aeronautical engineering is a subset of aerospace engineering. Aerospace is gonna be aeronautical as well as astronautical and that's basically aeronautical is gonna be things that fly within the confounds of the earth whereas astronautical is gonna be things that are flying outside of the earth, outside of the atmosphere. Now with an aeronautical engineering degree you can expect to make around $71,000 a year starting out and $125,000 a year in mid-career pay. For all intents and purposes, aeronautical and aerospace engineering degrees are pretty much combined at this point so you could become an aerospace engineer and they make around $116,000 a year. There's 66,000 jobs available and it's growing at 3% which is as fast as average meaning over the next 10 years they expect around 1,900 jobs to pop up. So pros to this one is that if you're somebody who really likes airplanes, jets, helicopters, spaceships, rockets, et cetera, that's pretty freaking awesome. I mean, if you like that, this is gonna be a awesome job for you. If you work as a government contractor there's probably gonna be really good job security that'll be one of the most common jobs that you're gonna see. Overall, if you love aviation, aerospace, all that sort of thing, if you're one of those people who's obsessed with airplanes like my dad, this is gonna be a great option for you. Next one on the list is going to be chemical engineering. So this one is gonna be focused on producing, designing, extracting all kinds of different materials, liquids, solids, as well as gases in some cases. So with this degree, you can expect to make around $73,000 a year in your first five years and 128,000 in mid-career pay. According to BLS, chemical engineers make around $108,000 a year. There's 32,000 jobs available and it's growing at 4% which is about as fast as average meaning over the next 10 years there's gonna be 1,400 more jobs popping up. Now chemical engineering overall is one of the more flexible degrees on this list meaning there's a lot of different pathways that you can go down. For instance, you could become a petroleum engineer which is something we'll be talking about very soon. There's a lot of money in the natural gas industry. You could get into process engineering which is all about making sure that a particular process that is being done on a mass scale is safe, itself regulates and all that sort of thing. Making sure there isn't a bunch of extra reactions going on when you mix two chemical compounds together that you don't want. You could also go into nanotech which focuses mostly on solar cells, batteries and semiconductors. You could also go into biology which is basically where you're gonna be doing a lot of the same work as somebody with a biology degree but you're gonna have more of a focus on solving problems whereas biology degrees have more of a focus on figuring out how things work. So it's a little bit more practical, a little bit more applicable to the real world and so therefore companies are much more likely to hire you. Overall, this is a pretty good one. It's not as flexible as some of the other degrees that I've mentioned in some of my other videos like mechanical engineering for instance. However, it is relatively flexible. It's pretty good overall. I would recommend going into this one if you're someone who's really interested in chemistry and you don't wanna get like a chemistry degree or a biology degree. Number five on the list is going to be electrical power engineering. Now this one is gonna be kind of like electrical engineering but it's gonna focus much more on electrical systems. So this one is a little bit more hands-on when it comes to electronics whereas an electrical engineering degree would be a little bit more theoretical and on the design side of things. Now with this degree you would expect to make around $73,000 a year starting out and 130,000 in mid-career pay. One career path you could go down is becoming an electrical or electronics engineer and they make around 101,000 a year. There's 328,000 jobs available. It's growing at 3% which is as fast as average meaning there's gonna be about 10,000 jobs that pop up in the next 10 years. Now again, there's a lot of different directions you could go with this but generally speaking, a lot of people who graduate with this degree are gonna end up kind of becoming very hands-on. They're gonna be working in the field. So it's almost like they are a technician or a mechanic or kind of a trades person that also has that higher level engineering knowledge. So if you're somebody who really likes working with your hands, this might be a good one to look into but overall I think you could do the same exact jobs with just an electrical engineering degree so I would probably go with that one just to be safe because it's more flexible. Number four on the list is going to be systems engineering. Now systems engineering is basically kind of a combination of engineering skills with some business skills and management as well. Now that is a really, really good combination. You're gonna be focusing on designing, maintaining and integrating complex systems throughout their life cycle. So with a systems engineering degree you'd expect to make around 74,000 a year in your first five years after graduating and 132,000 in mid-career pay. There's a ton of different career paths you could go down. One that you could end up doing is an industrial engineer. They make around $88,000 a year. There's 295,000 jobs available. It's growing at 10% which is much faster than average meaning there's gonna be 30,000 new jobs in the next 10 years which is excellent. So the way to explain this one is imagine you work at Tesla and Elon Musk just gets this wild idea in his head. He's gonna design a car that can fly over traffic because he's really tired of all the LA traffic. So to design this car they're gonna have several different teams of engineers that are working on each individual part. So for instance the engine and all that sort of thing is probably gonna have a bunch of mechanical engineers. The hardware within the car is probably gonna have a bunch of computer engineers and electrical engineers and in the software side of things the interface on the screen for instance that you're gonna be touching in order to activate helicopter mode is gonna be designed by software engineers. As a systems engineer you would basically kind of be overlooking all of these different teams and you would possibly be in a management position where you make sure that all of the different teams work together. So you're gonna kind of be like a jack of all trades where you have a pretty good idea of what everybody's doing but most importantly you're bringing them all together and making sure they're working together to create the best possible final product. Number three on the list is going to be chemical engineering mixed with materials science engineering. Now we already talked about what chemical engineers do but materials science is gonna be focused on solid product solid materials. They're also gonna have a little bit more of a science type focus meaning you know white lab coat in the lab sort of thing whereas chemical engineers probably wouldn't be as science focused. So with this combination you're gonna be making around $74,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is gonna be 137,000. Materials engineers make around $93,000 a year. There's 27,000 jobs available and it's growing at 2% which is pretty slow meaning there's only gonna be about 400 jobs that pop up in the next 10 years. Now there's a ton of different directions that you could go with this skill set. It is relatively flexible. You could go into metallurgy. You could become a process engineer. You could become an industrial engineer. You could even go into becoming a research scientist. Now one thing that I think is really interesting is quantum computing and how semiconductors are basically making that possible. A really good YouTuber Jake Trand did an entire video on quantum computing and I thought it was really awesome and all of that was made possible by semiconductors that were probably created by a chemical engineer or a material science engineer. Number two on the list is going to be electrical engineering and you guessed it, combination with computer science. I knew it. So electrical engineering is gonna be all about any sort of electrical circuit, electrical system, anything that has to do with electronics. Computer science is gonna be more about the actual study of computers and computation as well as having a focus on math and algorithms. Now you can see why this would make an incredible combination because you basically have kind of the software side of things with someone who can also work on the hardware side of things, the electrical side. Now this combination you can expect to make around $101,000 a year starting out and $152,000 in mid-career pay. Now you pretty much have to be a genius in order to get both of these degrees at the same time especially if you did it in four years that would be insane. But there's a ton of different career paths you could go down with this. The sky is the limit. You could basically get just about any job that you wanna get in the tech industry. And the tech industry is one of the best industries out there it has the most opportunity. One career path you could go down is becoming an electronics or electrical engineer. They make around $101,000 a year. There's 328,000 jobs available and it's growing at 3% which is as fast as average. That means over the next 10 years there's gonna be around 10,800 new jobs available. Now remember what I was talking about earlier with the systems engineer where you kind of have this problem where the hardware people and the software people don't really understand each other and so you have to make sure that they're on the same page. Well that probably wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if you have this combination because you truly would understand both sides. And so that makes this degree totally invaluable if you're somebody who really gets the hardware side as well as the software side companies are gonna just love you. An example of a company that would love you would be Apple and you would be someone who would help them to design their overpriced new phones. Number one on the list is going to be Petroleum Engineering and you probably guessed it, this one is the highest paying engineering degree. Actually it's the highest paying degree period. Now with this one you're gonna be working in the natural gas industry probably helping to extract and refine oil. Now with this degree you're gonna start off making around $92,000 a year and mid-career pay is an insane 182,000 on average. Petroleum engineers according to BLS can expect to make around $137,000 a year. There's 33,000 jobs available. It's growing at 3% which is about average but kind of on the low side of average and that means over the next 10 years there's gonna be 1,100 jobs available. Now with this one you do have to be extremely careful like I mentioned before it is part of the energy industry which is extremely volatile. Nobody knows for sure what's gonna happen with this industry. A lot of people think it's gonna be disappearing in the next five or 10 years. I've done a lot of research on this industry and I'm not saying whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not trying to start that conversation. All I'm saying is it's probably not gonna go away in the next five to 10 years. In fact it'll probably be here for our entire lifetimes. There's a lot of great efforts being made in solar and trying to design electrical cars with their batteries and all that sort of thing and that's awesome. But we're still a very long way away from getting away from gas powered cars. But like I said it's very volatile, a war could happen, policies change, presidential elections can change things, senators can change things, all kinds of different regulations can happen and these could absolutely destroy the industry. In 2014 for instance there was a huge price crash and a bunch of people ended up getting fired or laid off that were petroleum engineers and they worked in the energy industry in general. Now things did end up recovering after that so that was kind of the good news but it did happen and a lot of people lost their jobs. Another thing that's affecting this is a lot of the baby boomers that have been working in the petroleum industry for decades are going to be retiring soon and that is gonna open up quite a few new jobs here. Nobody really knows what's gonna happen though, I'm just here to kind of tell you guys what I've read with my research. Now one thing that I mentioned here about a lot of these degrees is many of them don't have that many graduates every year. A few of them that I mentioned have less than 500 graduates for instance which means the survey data which we rely on in order to figure out what these numbers are is probably quite a bit off. Some of these degrees have less than 500 and in some cases even less than 100 graduates every year and so we largely rely on survey and census data for these numbers and that's probably off just because of the fact that you don't have a big enough sample size. So take some of these numbers with a grain of salt and realize that if there aren't that many people graduating with a degree every year that is generally speaking not a good sign. However, I have been working extremely hard on a project over the last few months where I basically rank all of the different degrees and I've collected data from what I believe are the best sources all across the internet to rank these degrees on the most important factors. So I created version 1.1 of the college degree ranker which takes into account what I think are the two most important things which are demand and salary. On later versions I will include all kinds of different metrics like flexibility and all that sort of thing but right now I decided to just create an objective ranking of the basically the job growth, how much opportunity there is within some kind of job or some kind of degree as well as the salary. I actually hired somebody on to help me with this project because it was so much work and I created a Patreon down below that you can access. I'm also working on some other projects there where I reveal my investment portfolios and all kinds of other stuff that you guys ask me about quite a bit. Unfortunately there's only so much I can do on YouTube as a platform just because of the fact that YouTube is good for a certain type of content but there's other types of content that it's not so good for. Now if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and before you leave check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.