 Is a materials engineering degree or a materials engineering major worth it? Is it going to be worth going $40,000 in debt and spending four years grinding, studying like 10 hours a day? That's what we're going to be talking about today and let's jump right into it. First of all, what is materials engineering? Well, materials engineering is all about developing, creating and processing a range of different materials that can be used to create products. This could be anything from aircraft, drones, biomedical devices, stuff that you put into computer chips, superconductors. There's all kinds of different materials out there that can be used to meet different needs when it comes to creating new devices. Now, in the United States, every year around 1,522 people graduate with a materials engineering degree. However, there are several degrees that are very similar and I'm going to have them pop up on the screen right now. You've got materials engineering, materials science, and then material science and engineering and they are very similar. In fact, a lot of the time they're going to be competing for the exact same jobs. However, NCES, the National Center of Educational Statistics basically just groups them all together. Depending on what program you go to, there will be some subtle differences. Some are going to be more on the theoretical side of things, the scientific side, whereas some are more practical. Now, in these videos, I like to break them down into four different sections to figure out whether they're going to be worth the $40,000 of student loan debt that you'll likely have to take out. Salary, satisfaction, demand, and then X factors. And the first one we're going to go over is salary or earning potential. Now, according to pay scale with this degree, you would expect to make around $69,000 a year starting out and 117,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to the highest paying degree, which is petroleum engineering or a very low paying one and you'll see that it's on the higher paying side. Now, let's say you get this degree and you decide to become a materials engineer, you would expect to make around $93,000 a year and that's around $44 per hour. Let's say you decide to become a materials scientist. According to BLS, you'd make $78,000 a year or $37 an hour. A few other occupations you might look into with this degree that are somewhat common for people to go into if they major in this would be aerospace engineer, architectural and engineering manager, biomedical engineer, chemical engineer, or chemist and material scientist. And as you can see, all of them pay relatively well. Now, I always recommend trying to make at least $70,000 to $80,000 a year because studies have shown that that's where your happiness maxes out. And by that, I mean your happiness does in fact increase the more money you make up to a certain point. And that is around $70,000 to $80,000 a year. Of course, there's a bunch of other factors. For instance, if you live a very expensive city, it's going to be more than that. Now, when you look at how much people who graduate with an engineering degree make over an entire lifetime, it is the best by far. They make around $3.5 million over a lifetime versus 2.4 for all other degrees that go into all other careers. So when it comes to salary or earning potential engineering degrees are fantastic, you got to give them props. This one is going to get a nine out of 10 for salary. Next, we're going to be talking about satisfaction. And I like to break this one down into two different areas, meaning and then job satisfaction. Meaning is how much do you think your career positively impacts the world? Whereas job satisfaction is just how much do you enjoy doing your job on a day to day basis? So for instance, if your job was playing video games, it might have very high job satisfaction, but very low meaning. Now with this degree, pay scale has it at a 48% meaning score. And you can compare that to a really high one like radiation therapy or low one like plastics engineering technology. And you'll see that it is on the lower side. I guess this kind of makes sense. You're basically working with plastic, inanimate objects, that sort of thing. You're not necessarily helping other people at least directly all that much. Now when you look at the exact career of materials engineer, it's a little bit higher at 50% meaning score, but still that's average or below average at best. However, the job satisfaction is around 65%. And if you compare that to a higher one and a lower one, you see that it's average or maybe slightly above average. Now another thing I think that's very important to talk about is how much people regret getting their college degrees. We hear about this all the time how people will get a degree. They think it's going to be one way. And then it ends up being completely different. For instance, a lot of the time people will get a degree thinking they can get a job after just four years after they get their bachelors. And then after they graduate, they figure out that they're not going to be able to get a job until they get a master's or a doctor. Engineering though is the third least regretted type of college degree, only around 15% of people regret it. And the main reason is because the best jobs require advanced degrees. That's talking about all engineering degrees. It doesn't really break it down further. I wish there was better data on that. Maybe there will be in the future. But you know, materials might not be as popular as some of the other ones. Keep in mind here that this is extremely subjective for one person. It might be the most fascinating thing in the world. For another person, it might make them fall asleep within a few minutes. It also depends a lot on your personality and the specific job situation that you have. For instance, your coworkers, the company you work for, the industry you work in, etc. But with that being said, this one does score relatively low when it comes to satisfaction for the average person. I'm going to give it a seven out of 10. Next, we're going to be talking about demand. And this might be the most important factor out of all of them. And the reason for that is because a lot of other things tend to come from demand. So for instance, if you have a skill that a lot of business owners and hiring managers want, and there's not a lot of people out there that have that skill, they're probably going to pay you more. They're going to treat you better. They're going to give you lots of opportunity. So for the specific career of materials engineer, there's 27,500 jobs available here in the US right now. It's growing at 2%, which is slower than average, meaning over the next 10 years, there's only going to be 200 new jobs that pop up. If you look at material scientists, there's 93,000 jobs available and it's growing at 5%, which is a little faster than average. Now, luckily, when it comes to unemployment rates, STEM degrees are great. They usually have very low unemployment and engineering degrees are even better. Now, of course, everything is really weird right now in the world. So who knows what the unemployment rates are. But before this whole situation happened, STEM degrees were pretty good. Now, one thing I like to do is to search the name of the degree on a site like monster.com or indeed.com. And when you search materials engineering degree, you'll see that 10,400 job listings have that as a keyword in the job description. Compare that to a degree that's in high demand like computer science or one that doesn't have much demand at all like anthropology. And you'll see that it's definitely on the higher side. I know that 10,000 might not seem like very much, but computer science is an outlier and 10,000 is probably in the top 10 or 20%. Now, when top companies are surveyed and asked what types of majors they're hiring from people who just graduated from college, engineering is almost always either number one or number two, along with business. And when you break that down even further, you'll see that materials engineering is kind of in the middle. So it's not one that's getting hired a lot. And it's also not one that is getting completely ignored. Now, one thing that a more common degree like mechanical engineering, for instance, has that's a huge advantage is there are so many of them out there that chances are hiring managers or business owners are very familiar with the type of person that they might get if they hire a mechanical engineer. Whereas there is a lot of uncertainty if they hire someone from a degree that's more rare. It's almost like having mental real estate inside of business owner and hiring managers brains. So this gives mechanical engineers a huge advantage just because of the fact that their degree is so flexible. So overall for this one, I'm going to go ahead and give it a 7.5 out of 10. Next, we're going to be talking about X factors. And this is anything that's important that I haven't gone over already. So I mentioned before that engineering degrees over a lifetime will make around 3.5 million versus 2.4 million for all other types of degrees. Now, of course, this is like the last 40 years or so. So maybe 40 years from now, this could be completely different. But overall, that is a really good sign. And what's even better about engineering degrees is it doesn't matter what career path you end up going down, it's usually going to pay a lot better. So for instance, engineers that become artists earn $3 million over a lifetime versus the average degree that becomes an artist only earning around 2.3. Engineers that go into community or legal services will earn 3.2 million versus the average that only earns 1.8. And you see this pretty much consistently across the board engineers, no matter what career path they go into, are earning well above average. Now, there could be many different factors here. It could be that people who do engineering tend to be really smart. And so they would have been successful anyways. But if you look at degrees like mathematics or physics, they're good. They have some of that going for them, but definitely not as good as the average for engineering degrees. So I think it also has something to do with the fact that engineering focuses on practical problem solving. And it teaches you skills that are going to help you no matter what career path or what life path in general you end up going down. Now, when you look at the Zippercutter skills index, materials engineering isn't on there. However, one that's very similar would be chemical engineering and that scores 59 out of 100. You can compare that to a really good one like software engineering or one that's not so good like industrial sewing. And you'll see that it is on the higher side on top of that materials engineering has a very tiny chance of ever being automated only about 2% according to willrobotstakemyjob.com. I also think that engineering is relatively safe when it comes to outsourcing just because of the fact that you kind of have to be there in person in order to do a lot of this engineering is sort of like the middleman, so to speak, between technicians and scientists. And so they basically have to be able to do both jobs on some level. And in order to be a technician, you have to be there touching things, you know, figuring out what's going wrong and diagnosing. And it would be very difficult to do something like that over zoom. Now, one thing that's great about engineering degrees is how flexible they are. And this shows when you look at the degrees that create the most millionaires and billionaires engineering is number one. And the salary is great. Don't get me wrong. But the main reason for that is because it makes such a good segue into becoming an entrepreneur. Like I mentioned before, engineering is basically just practical problem solving. And that's basically what entrepreneurship is as well. Now, one thing I always like to tell people here, and this could be a positive or a negative depending on, you know, what frame you're coming from. But engineering is extremely tough. There's a very high dropout rate for a lot of different engineering degrees. And there's a reason for that it's because it's hard, you're going to be studying a lot, you're going to see your business major friends just parting it up all the time. And then you're just studying like crazy. And, you know, that can be tough. So keep that in mind, it could be a good thing just because there's going to be a higher barrier to entry, or it could be a bad thing, you know, it really depends on the situation. But overall, when it comes to x factors, I'm going to give this one a score of eight out of 10. So when you add everything up and then divided by four, you're going to see that it is a 7.875. That is pretty good. It can definitely work for the right person, depending on what career you're going for it might be a better idea for you to just play it safe and get something like a mechanical engineering degree or a chemical engineering degree. And the reason for that is because many of these careers can be done by mechanical or chemical engineers, whereas this isn't as much of a flexible degree. And it kind of goes back to that thing that I mentioned before, where it's just like hiring managers and business owners are very used to mechanical engineers. And so they sort of just have real estate in their heads. It's not that mechanical engineers are better than materials engineers, it's just that people are more used to seeing them. However, that does make mechanical a more flexible degree. And so if you're somebody who is a little bit worried and you're not 100% sure what career path you want to go down, you might want to just play it safe and go for one of those. However, if you've really done your research, you've done your due diligence, you've called people, you've talked to them, you know what career you're going for, and you're 100% sure about it, then this can be a great one for you. Now keep in mind, these scores are all somewhat subjective for one person, it could be a one out of 10 for another person, it could be a 10 out of 10. So take it with a grain of salt, always do your own research. And if you do want help doing research, I have a college degree ranker down in the description below and my Patreon that I've been working extremely hard on. 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, etc. that you have on the video. Share the video as well, that helps quite a bit with the channel. And don't leave, check out my other videos right here, I made them just for you.