 Is a computer engineering degree worth it? That's what we're gonna be talking about today, but before we get 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 how you can avoid some of the common financial mistakes that so many people end up falling for. That sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already. Go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. And with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. We are gonna be talking about computer engineering and the first question is, what the heck is computer engineering? Now, as with just about any engineering degree, you're gonna be studying a lot of math, physics, and chemistry. However, you'll also be studying things like control systems, systems analysis, and databases. You'll be learning a lot about computer technology, of course, like software and hardware, but there's gonna be an emphasis on the hardware side of things. Now, a really easy way to think about the difference between hardware and software is let's say you are a software specialist. You might work at Google and program different algorithms on YouTube and hopefully you're programming algorithms that are gonna boost the channel. That would be really nice. Whereas with hardware, you might work at Intel on processors that make the computer faster and more efficient. Now, with computer engineering, there's around 8,000 graduates per year and there are so many different jobs that you can go for with a computer engineering degree. Sure, you can definitely work on hardware but you can easily get a job working on software as well. Many computer engineers end up going into coding and becoming software engineers. So, when evaluating these degrees, I like to break things up into four different sections and the first section we're gonna be talking about is salary or earning potential. So, computer engineering graduate can expect to make around $74,000 a year starting out and $123,000 in mid-career pay. Now, you can compare this to a really high-paying degree like petroleum engineering or a really low-paying degree like recreational therapy. And you'll see that computer engineering is definitely on the high-paying side of things. This is a skill set that is going to pay you very well. Now, one career path you might go into, which is pretty obvious, is gonna be a computer hardware engineer and they make around $117,000 a year. Another career path you might go down is becoming an electronic engineer and they make around $101,000 a year. Like I mentioned before, you might become a software engineer or a software developer and software developers make around $107,000 a year. So, as you can see, pretty much all the different career paths that are common for people who graduate with this degree end up going into jobs where it's pretty easy to make it to the six-figure level. Now, according to US Census, engineers on average throughout an entire lifetime make around $3.5 million, which is way higher than the average of $2.4 million for all different types of degrees. And this gets even better if you go into a computer or math-related profession, they make around $3.7 million over a lifetime. So, this one is obviously really well-paying and when you're talking about averages, a job that's established and the average person making a really good amount of money, engineers make good money and computer engineers make higher than average than your normal type of engineer. So, this is really good. I'm gonna go ahead and give this one an 11 out of 10 rating when it comes to salary or earning potential. Next, we're gonna be talking about satisfaction and as always, I'm gonna go over job satisfaction as well as meaning. So, first of all, when it comes to meaning, this is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world. So, you might have a career where you make tons of money, but you're miserable, or you might have a career where you're paid to play video games all day long and you really enjoy it, but you don't really think that it's positively impacting the world and so it might have a low meaning score. Now, when it comes to computer engineering using the same source, PayScale, they have a 46% meaning score, meaning 46% of the people thought that their job significantly positively impacts the world and this is pretty average when you compare it to a meaning score that's really high. Usually healthcare-related degrees have very high meaning scores and then one that's really low like plastics engineering technology. So, relatively speaking, the meaning score isn't amazing, it doesn't really pop off the page and I'd say it's even a little bit below average when you compare it to other engineering degrees. Now, when you look at PayScale again, you see that computer hardware engineers have a job satisfaction score around 71%. You can compare this to a really high job satisfaction score like clergy at 90% or a really low one like parking lot attendant at 41%. And you'll see that when it comes to job satisfaction, this one is going to be above average and you tend to notice when you're looking at different degrees that demand has a lot to do with job satisfaction. So, when you get a degree where there's a high amount of demand for the skills you learn that accompany that degree, you're gonna see that companies tend to treat you a lot better. They tend to pay you more, they give you more bonuses, there's all kinds of different perks that you have with these tech-related companies, for instance. And so, I'm not surprised to see that the job satisfaction score is higher than average, even though the meaning score isn't that impressive. And when you look at the least regretted types of majors, at least according to Zippercruiter, engineering degrees are the third least regretted. Only 15.91% of people who got an engineering degree regret it and it's because the best jobs required advanced degrees. Now, one of the things that I'll say when it comes to meaning is when you get a degree where there's really high demand, you will have the option to work for all kinds of different jobs. So the skills that you learn are gonna be high in demand. And so if you go into a job where you're kind of just not feeling it, you feel like you don't really have a sense of purpose in that job, well, you can get a few years of experience under your belt and then you can probably work for just about any company and any industry in the world. And so eventually you'll probably be able to find a job that has high satisfaction and high meaning. On top of that, when it comes to happiness, many studies, lots of research has shown that your happiness does actually increase as your salary increases up to a certain level. So usually this is gonna be around $75,000 to $80,000 a year and it might be a little bit higher than that or a little bit lower than that depending on where you live. But this is something to also keep in mind is that you wanna try to go for careers where you can make at least $75,000 to $80,000 a year because that way you're gonna end up maximizing your happiness. Now with that being said, a lot of the time meaning, satisfaction, et cetera is gonna have a lot to do with the industry that you work in and the company that you work for. On top of that, satisfaction is extremely subjective depending on your personality. For some people this might be 10 out of 10, they absolutely love working on computer hardware and for some people it might be one out of 10. And listen, if you don't like math, if you don't like engineering, that sort of thing, don't go into an engineering degree just because it pays well or because your parents want you to. But with that being said, I am gonna give this one a score of 8.5 out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next we're gonna be talking about probably the most important thing to think about and that is demand. The reason why demand is so important is because pretty much everything else comes from demand. I mean, at the end of the day, economics is all about supply and demand. Right now there are certain skills that tons of companies need. They need people who have these skill sets and so if you have those skills, which computer engineering is gonna teach you a lot of these really valuable skills, then guess what's gonna happen? They're probably gonna pay you better. They're gonna have a much better experience. You're gonna have all these crazy perks, like look at the people at Google, all the perks that they get. There's all these different restaurants they have on site. They get all these free lunches. They get lots of time off. They get extra pay in the form of stocks sometimes. You can take free classes on the side from some of the smartest people in the world. They get to hear free speeches as well. I mean, the list of perks and benefits that you get at some of these companies is absolutely ridiculous. A friend of mine just started working at a Fortune 50 company recently and he went from a company that was struggling and it was in an industry that's not doing very well to a company that's doing extremely well right now and the difference is like night and day. He was doing basically the same exact job at both companies but the company that's a Fortune 50 company that's doing really well and it's one of those types of businesses that treats their employees well. I mean, the benefits he gets are just insane. Whereas the company he was working at before he would work super hard and he basically didn't get any rewards for it. So I think you guys get my point. Demand is probably the most important thing because it's gonna increase the score of all the other factors. So with that being said, if you become a computer hardware engineer, there's around 71,000 jobs right now. It's only growing about 2% which is slower than average meaning over the next 10 years there's gonna be around 1,100 jobs that open up. If you become an electronics engineer, there's around 328,000 jobs which is quite a bit. However, it's still only growing around 3% which is pretty average meaning over the next 10 years there's gonna be 10,800 jobs that pop up. However, if you become a software developer there's 1.4 million jobs available right now. It's growing at 22% which is insanely fast for something where there's already 1.4 million jobs meaning over the next 10 years there's gonna be 316,000 new jobs that pop up. So when you first look at these numbers they might be a little bit disconcerting because you see that some of the engineering careers aren't growing all that fast. However, when you look a little bit more deeply into it what you see is that computer engineers oftentimes end up going into careers that don't necessarily have anything to do with computer hardware engineering. There are tons of different technology related careers where the skills that you learn as a computer engineer are gonna be very easily transferable into that type of career path. Now, one test that I really like doing when I'm looking up this sort of thing is looking on monster.com or indeed.com and just typing the degree in to see how many people have that degree listed in their job listings. So for instance, when you type in computer science degree into monster.com you'll see that 141,000 job listings pop up. And when you type in anthropology degree only around 829 pop up. For computer engineering degree around 56,000 jobs pop up, which is very, very good. So when it comes to demand this one is also gonna be excellent. We're gonna give this one a 9.5 out of 10. Next on the list we're gonna be talking about X factors and this comprises basically anything that we didn't mention before. So we're mainly gonna focus on skills, flexibility and how easily outsourced or automated these careers in this degree would be. So first of all, we mentioned before that according to the census engineering degree graduates in general are gonna earn a lot over a lifetime way higher than the average of 2.4 million. However, when you look a little bit more closely and you see what career path they end up going down you're gonna see the engineering degree graduates earn even more when they go into technology. And actually all across the board people who graduate with engineering degrees tend to do really well even if they go into an art related career. So if they go into arts and media they're gonna make $3 million over a lifetime whereas somebody who graduates with an art degree only makes around 2.2 million. And that is, hold on for a moment. About 36% more. Wow. So you see here that people who graduate with an engineering degree tend to do well no matter what career path they end up going down. Now that could be for a lot of reasons it could be just correlation or it could be causation. Maybe you learn a lot from your engineering degree that is gonna help you in your life or maybe people who tend to go for engineering are smarter and more ambitious in the first place and so they end up doing well no matter what career path they go down. Who really knows? I think it's probably a combination of both. Now when it comes to the actual skills you learn ZipRecruiter does have a skill index and it shows that the skill of computer engineering has a score of 61 out of 100. Compare that to a really high score like software engineering and a really low score like industrial sewing. And you see that this is definitely on the higher side. So when you learn the skill set of a computer engineer it's going to be skills that are very highly valued on the market. Now I like to be very clear here that there are lots of skills out there that you learn that have value in my opinion but when it comes to how much companies are willing to pay people or how popular that particular skill is at this particular time in history that's a different story. Now when it comes to the likelihood of being automated technology degrees, engineering degrees in general you're not very likely to have these degrees get automated. So for instance computer hardware engineers have about a 22% chance of automation according to a study and according to the human poll there's a 29% chance. Computer occupations in general have about a 22% chance overall which is relatively low. Now when it comes to outsourcing it's much more difficult to tell because there's just so much uncertainty especially right now everything that's happening in the world. I will say that when you look at other countries the value of an engineering degree has tended to go down. So for instance when you look at India you'll see that a lot of people graduate with engineering degrees and they're not nearly as valuable as people graduating with degrees here in the US. That could possibly be because it has so much hype around it. You know, everyone says you either become a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer and so there's a lot of hype around this degree and this career and so a lot of people end up going into it and then it becomes saturated. So who knows what's really gonna happen in the future. You might have a lot of really smart engineers coming from other countries and they take up the jobs that are here in the US. On top of that I will say that when it comes to difficulty you're gonna see the engineering degrees are almost always at the top of the list. When I went to college I lived in a scholarship hall that had around 50 different guys in it and there were pretty much people in every different type of major out there. And I can tell you that the people who had the hardest time were the ones who went into engineering related degrees. These guys would be studying pretty much all the time and when you'd see them they'd have like dark rings around their eyes. They never socialized or went to parties or anything like that. It's very difficult. So if you go into engineering just realize it's gonna be tough. However, a lot of the time it's going to pay off. When you look at the degrees that create the most millionaires engineering comes in as number one. And the reason for this is more than just the salary you get paid. Sure, you have a lot of job options out there where you're gonna get paid a very high salary. I think one of the biggest reasons for this is because engineering teaches you practical problem solving and that can be really good if you decide to become an entrepreneur and start your own business. So a lot of people who get engineering degrees end up getting a job working a few years and then once they've got some experience and they've built some skills they go off on their own and they start their own business and that's where you can make a lot of money. That's where it becomes very easy to become a millionaire. So with that being said the score here is going to be eight out of 10 when it comes to X factors. So some of the pros here the salary is gonna be excellent and there's gonna be a lot of different occupations that you can go into. You can make good money right off the bat which is nice because a lot of people want to enjoy their youth. It's also very flexible, career wise it's gonna be a very well respected degree even if you decide to go into a completely unrelated career. Some of the cons here are gonna be that it's an ever evolving field so you're gonna have to stay up to date with the latest technology and technology is evolving really fast. Now if you go into the technology industry it's great, there's tons of opportunity but it does have an issue with ageism and that's basically where they like to hire really young people. So when people get to a certain age they tend to kind of just like phase them out which is very controversial there's a lot of controversy over that and so you know someone might work really hard for a company for 10 or 15 years and then they end up getting phased out when they get a little bit too old to learn some of the newest evolving technology. There are ways to counteract that of course and I've talked about that in other videos but it's still an issue. There's also gonna be quite a bit of workload related stress depending on the career path you go into. A lot of the time the skills are highly sought after there's a lot of demand for them but that also means that there's not very many people who have those skills and so you are gonna be asked to do quite a bit. And on top of that it's a very difficult degree to get just objectively speaking engineering related degrees are tough. I'm just gonna speak for myself but I don't think I would have been ready at 18 years old to take on an engineering degree curriculum. I kind of wanted to enjoy my time in college especially the first few years I wanted to kind of go out, socialize and enjoy the college experience. So overall the score here is gonna be 9.25 out of 10. This is an excellent degree one of the best that you can possibly get. There's tons of demand out there for people who have these types of skills. Of course this is extremely subjective for one person this might be a one out of 10 and for another person this might be a 10 out of 10 but I try to be as fair as possible when I'm evaluating these different types of degrees. And this one really does stand out there's just a lot of flexibility there's a lot of different career paths that you can go down the skills that you learn are highly sought after. With that being said if you don't wanna wait for the video to come out for the particular degree that you're looking at check out my college degree ranker down in the description below. It's gonna be behind my Patreon paywall. You will have to pay for it but if you don't wanna pay for it you can always just wait for me to get to the degree that you're trying to evaluate. I've been working super hard on this right now as of recording this video it is version 1.1. I'm hoping to update it pretty soon. I'm kind of a little bit delayed on updating it just because of the fact that we have all this stuff happening in the world and that's probably affecting the job demand right now. And so I don't really know what's gonna happen. I mean, if I take all the time to update it and then a week from now something happens all that information that I gave you is pretty much worthless. But I am working on making it even better in the future. It's still version 1.1 but I'm pretty proud of what I've done at this point and I can confidently say it's probably the best resource out there. That being said, if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms most importantly, share the video with all of your friends. And if you haven't done it already, please don't leave. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.