 So you're wondering if a nuclear engineering major or nuclear engineering degree is worth it? Is it going to be worth the $40,000 in student loan debt that you'll probably have to take out in the four years of school where you're going to be grinding, studying like 10 hours a day? That's what we're going to be going over in this video and we are going to jump right into it. First of all, what exactly is nuclear engineering? Nuclear engineers are going to be studying the processes, systems, and instruments that are used when it comes to deriving some kind of benefit, usually in the form of energy from nuclear engineering, nuclear energy, and radiation. Now, of course, there's going to be a lot of engineering involved in that, but you're going to be studying a lot of physics and chemistry as well. Now, what I like to do is go over four different categories. And the first one is going to be salary or earning potential. The other three categories will go over here momentarily, and they're going to be satisfaction, job demand, and x factors. So when it comes to how much you're going to earn with this degree, you can expect to make around $73,000 a year starting out and 124,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to the highest earning degree, which is petroleum engineering and one of the lowest earning, and you'll see that it's definitely above average. It's one of the best degrees. Everybody's different when it comes to how much money they need in order to survive. You know, you might be a minimalist that lives off of $15,000 a year and you're totally happy, but the average person is going to be happiest when they're making around $70,000 a year. And that's what studies have shown. So I always just give a general advice to people who are asking to aim for careers where you can make at least $70,000 to $80,000. And of course, that's going to be different if you live in like San Francisco, maybe it'll be $100,000 there. And you can see that this degree is easily going to get you to that point. In fact, you'll be there pretty much right after graduation. Now, if you become a nuclear engineer, they make around $113,000 a year, which is $54 an hour. Another career path you might go down is becoming a mechanical engineer. They make $88,000 a year, which is $42 an hour. So engineers in general make really good money and nuclear is one of the higher paying specialties within engineering. So according to the Census Bureau, engineers over a lifetime, at least over the last 40 years, who knows if this will be true in the next 40 years, make around $3.5 million, which is much higher than the average of 2.4. So when it comes to salary, all signs point to this one being really good. I'm going to give it a score of nine out of 10. Next, we're going to be talking about satisfaction. And this is extremely subjective, but I try to break it down into two things you can sort of measure, which are meaning and job satisfaction. So when it comes to meaning, this is how much you think your career positively impacts the world. And so when you look at nuclear engineering, it has a 63% meaning score on pay scale. And you can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one. And you see that it's above average. If you look at the specific career of nuclear engineering, you'll see it's 67%. So again, a little bit higher. And then if you look at job satisfaction, it's also 67%. And you can compare that to a good one and a bad one. And you'll see that both of them are above average. Although it really isn't that far above average, it's kind of on the lower side when you compare it to some of the other engineering degrees. Now, when it comes to how much people regret getting their college degree, engineering degrees in general are the third least regretted type of major. It's only around 15% of people who graduate with a degree regretted. And the main reason is because the best jobs require advanced degrees. Now a lot of the time when people imagine graduating with an engineering degree, they think they're going to be some amazing like Tony Stark, Iron Man sort of person. And the super cool jobs where you're going to be designing new stuff in many cases are going to be at the master's and the doctoral level. But at the same time, most of the time, engineering degrees at the bachelor level are still going to be able to get a job and you can work your way up to those positions later on. Now with that being said, I always like to say this sort of a disclaimer. This whole list is subjective, especially job satisfaction. That could be completely different from person to person. For one person, it's 10 out of 10. For another person, it's negative 10 out of 10. Satisfaction can also change depending on your environment. So the people you work with, your boss, the company you work for, the industry you work in, the career path you decided to go down, all sorts of different things. And if that wasn't enough, it also depends on the person. So if you're somebody who absolutely hates math, you probably do not want to get an engineering degree just because I recommend it in a video or just because the salary is really high. You always want to find a good balance there. Go for something that you're going to be able to make money from. It's not going to be a scam. But at the same time, you also want to do something that you enjoy. But with all that being said, I'm going to go ahead and give this one a 7.5 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next, we're going to be talking about demand. And this is probably the most important out of all the factors that you can consider. The reason for this is because demand pretty much creates everything else. So at the end of the day, economics is mostly just supply and demand. There are certain skills that business owners and hiring managers are looking for. And if you have those skills, then they'll want to hire you. And if enough people, you know, want to hire people, and then there's not enough people to fill those jobs, then they're going to pay you even more to incentivize it. So when you look at the career of nuclear engineer, you'll see that there's 16,400 of them right now. And over the next 10 years, it's expected to decline by 13%, meaning there's going to be 2100 less jobs available. That is a very bad sign that that's that's not good at all. When you look at a similar career, like mechanical engineer, you see that there's 316,000 jobs available, and it's growing at about average at 4%. Now, it's really difficult to tell with everything that's happened in the world today. But before the whole situation that's happening right now came to be, you can see that when it comes to unemployment rate, engineering degrees tend to do pretty well. STEM degrees in general have pretty good unemployment rates, not that many people end up unemployed. And engineering degrees are one of the better ones. And when you look up nuclear engineering degree on monster.com, you see that 1145 job listings have that as a keyword. And you can compare that to computer science and anthropology. And you'll see that it's definitely on the lower side. However, this is not a perfect test. There are other factors outside of people actively looking for those who graduate with this major. There are many business owners and hiring managers out there that if they saw you graduate with this degree, they'd be much more likely to hire you just because that they know engineering grads are very smart and very hardworking. Engineering degrees tend to be well respected in general. And so they'd be much more likely to hire you even if the job has nothing to do with engineering in the first place. However, one big problem with nuclear engineering specifically is it's probably the least sought after type of engineering out of all of them. There simply are not that many jobs out there for nuclear engineers. And it's arguable whether the skills you learn translate as well as something like mechanical engineering, for instance, to jobs that are somewhat unrelated. So for instance, when big companies are surveyed, they usually say that they are looking to hire people who graduate with engineering degrees. However, nuclear engineering specifically is the least sought after one. And the energy industry in general, whether you're talking about nuclear engineering, petroleum engineering, or environmental engineering is very unstable. There's so many other factors that go into it that are completely outside of your control, political factors, wars, the price of gas, the country live in. There's a lot of things that can affect how much opportunity there is out there for people who go into the energy industry. So it's extremely unstable 10 years from now, maybe nuclear engineering will be like the hottest thing, or maybe it'll be almost nonexistent. Nobody really knows. So overall, I'm going to give this one a seven out of 10 when it comes to demand. Next on the list, we're going to talk about X factors. And this is anything that I didn't talk about before, but I still think is really important. Now one thing that is remarkable about engineering degrees is remember when I said that engineering degrees make around $3.5 million over a lifetime, that's much higher than the average of $2.4 million. But the amazing thing is that it pretty much doesn't matter what career path they go down engineers that become artists, for instance, still make $3 million over a lifetime and you can compare that to a math major who only makes $2.4 if they go into the arts. So there's something really magical about engineering degrees that makes them extremely good no matter what career path you end up going down. Now what that is exactly nobody really knows. Some say that, you know, if you're really smart, so you probably would have been successful even if you didn't get an engineering degree. Some say that getting an engineering degree is so difficult that it teaches you practical problem solving skills that help you no matter what career path you go down. Nobody really knows it could be correlation or causation. I think it's a little bit of both and engineering degrees are one of the most flexible I'd say probably second only to business. Now when it comes to the zip recruiter skills index, they don't have nuclear engineering as a skill, but one that's pretty close would be mechanical and that ranks 77 out of 100, which is on the higher side when you compare it to software as well as industrial sewing, which is a good one and a bad one. So this basically shows that there's a lot of demand for the skills that you learn as an engineer. Now another thing I like to look at is how easily something would be automated and pretty much universally people agree that engineering is not one of the professions where you have to worry too much about that. So for instance, nuclear engineers, 7% chance that they're going to be automated according to willrobotstakemyjob.com. If you become a nuclear engineer, that's one of those careers where you want your job to be boring because if it's not boring, that means that there might be a Chernobyl happening. And I pretty much think that no matter how good automation gets, nobody is going to trust a robot to look after a nuclear factory, something that could potentially go off and expose hundreds of thousands or millions of people to radiation. Now one thing that I always like to mention is engineering a lot of the time will make a really good segue into becoming an entrepreneur. And you can see this because engineering degree graduates make up the most millionaires in the world as well as billionaires. And the only way you're going to become a billionaire is probably to start your own business. And many millionaires also go down that same route. So you could argue that engineering teaches you practical problem solving skills, which at the end of the day, that's what entrepreneurship is all about. You also want to keep in mind here that engineering is extremely difficult. Okay, so I lived in a scholarship hall about 50 guys, I'd say maybe five to 10 of them were engineers, and they would just be studying all the time. Okay, they didn't really have very much fun. So keep that in mind, there's a very high dropout rate when it comes to engineering, it's going to be one of the toughest things you ever have to do. But at the same time, you could look at it as a positive, that means that not anybody can do it or not anybody would be willing to do it. And so there's going to be more of a barrier to entry. So with that being said, altogether, I am going to give this one an x factor ranking of eight out of 10. So the overall score here, when you add all of them up and divide by four is 7.875 out of 10. That's pretty good. You can definitely make a career out of this one. If you're the right type of person, it's not going to be like a home run where if you get this degree, you're going to be good to go pretty much no matter what. However, as long as you've done your due diligence, you've done your research, you've contacted people in the career path you're trying to go down and you've asked them what they recommend, and they said they do recommend getting this degree, and it can be a good idea for you. I will say that a lot of the career paths that you would go into at this degree, like nuclear engineer, for instance, you could also become with a chemical engineering degree or mechanical engineering. And so that does create a lot more competition for you. Unfortunately, that also means that if you're a mechanical engineer, and then maybe you just take extra nuclear engineering classes on the side, that might be a better option because of the fact that it's going to be much more flexible. It's always a good idea to plan ahead. And I highly recommend doing that. I think you should definitely read forums and just do as much research as you can. But at the end of the day, sometimes the best laid plans, you know, don't work out. And so that's always nice to have a degree that's relatively flexible so that you can go down a different career path pretty easily if things change. Now, if you're still waiting for me to do the video that you want me to do, and you don't want to wait around for me to do it on YouTube or, you know, some other platform, you can check out my college degree ranker down in the description below and my Patreon. That is basically, in my humble opinion, the best college degree resource that you can find. I've basically done hundreds of hours of research and put together all of the best information into a very easy to read spreadsheet that you can check out there. 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