 Is a civil engineering major or civil engineering degree worth it? That's what we're going to be talking about today, and let's jump right into it. First off, what exactly is civil engineering? With civil engineering, you're going to focus on planning, building, and implementing large infrastructure projects. Besides engineering, a lot of the skills you're going to run into are going to be computer science, surveying, project management, and analytical problem solving. Now there's around 13,000 people that graduate with this degree every year at a bachelor's level. Now there's four important components we're going to go over, but first thing we're going to talk about is going to be salary. So with this degree, you would expect to make around 61,000 a year starting out in 103,000 in mid-career pay. If you became a civil engineer, you would make around $87,000 a year, which is around $41 per hour. Another career path you might go down is becoming a surveyor, and they make around 63,000 a year and $30 an hour. And there's a bunch of other related careers. I'm going to go ahead and leave a list of them up on the screen and you can check them out if this is a degree you're interested in. And you'll see that most of them are relatively well-paying, and when you look at engineering over a lifetime, you see that it's the highest paying type of degree. They make around $3.5 million over a lifetime, whereas the average degree is going to make $2.4 million. Now of course, this is data from about 40 years ago up till now. This is the census data, but you know, maybe the census data 40 years from now will show that other types of degrees are more lucrative. Now, I always recommend that you try to go for a career where you could make around $75,000 a year because studies have shown that your happiness increases on average up to about 75 to 80,000 a year. And then after that, you don't really increase in happiness as you make more money. So it's always a good idea to maximize your happiness. And so most people are going to be happiest once they're making around 75 to 80,000 a year. And this degree can definitely get you to that point. So overall, engineering degrees pay really well. The salary score is going to be nine out of 10. Now, when it comes to satisfaction, first, we're going to talk about meaning and civil engineering degrees have a 65% meaning score, which is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world. You can compare that to one with a very high and a very low meaning score. And you'll see that it is on the higher side. So this is a degree that leads to careers where people find a lot of meaning. If you look specifically at the career of civil engineering, you'll see that it has a 68% meaning score. So even better. And if you look at the job satisfaction, it's 71%. And again, you can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one. And you'll see that it is on the better side. Now, when it comes to how much people regret their degrees, engineering is the third least regretted type of degree. Only around 15% of engineer graduates regret their degree. And the main reason is because some of the best jobs require an advanced degree like a master's. And I do want to emphasize here that this is the most subjective section by far for one person that could be like a one out of 10 and another person that could be like an 11 out of 10 amazing best career ever. So take all this with a grain of salt, your job satisfaction meaning could also have a lot to do with who your manager is, who you work for, the company you work for, industry you work in, your coworkers, etc. There's so many different things that can impact this. But with that being said, I am going to give this one a score of 7.5 out of 10. Next, we're going to be talking about demand. And when it comes to engineers, demand is a little bit weird. So for instance, when you look up the job of civil engineering, you'll see that there's 329,000 jobs available right now. And it's only growing at about 2%, which is slower than average. That means over the next 10 years, only 5,500 jobs are going to pop up, even though there's tons of people graduating every year. So if you look at that, you would probably think there's a huge imbalance and there's a ton of unemployed civil engineers. Well, there may not be that many jobs specifically for civil engineers, but people who graduate with a civil engineering degree generally are able to find a job in a related career. And these types of careers tend to be relatively high paying as well. And generally speaking, when you look at unemployment rates with the different degree types, you'll see that engineering degrees tend to be on the lower side. STEM degrees in general, but engineering degrees aren't bad. And when you look up the keyword civil engineering degrees on monster.com, you'll see that about 8,700 job listings have that keyword in the description. You can compare that to a degree that has tons of demand like computer science with 141,000 or one that doesn't have very much demand at all, an anthropology at under 1,000. And you'll see that it's pretty decent. I know that might not seem very good, but 8,700 is definitely on the higher side. Computer science is kind of like a freak outlier. And one thing you'll notice here is even if businesses aren't actively looking for people who have civil engineering degrees, a lot of the time, if you apply to just a random job that's like, you know, pretty well paying like a business job, for instance, and you have a civil engineering degree, you're more likely to get hired than if you had a degree that might not be as well respected. A lot of companies have the philosophy that they're going to hire engineers and they're just basically going to hire the smartest and hardest working people they can, and then they can teach them how to do the specific skills required for the job later on. So with that being said, the score here is going to be 8.5 out of 10. Next, we're going to be talking about x factors, and that is anything that we didn't go over before, but I still think is important. And the first thing we're going to go over is I mentioned before that engineering degrees in general over a lifetime are going to make around 3.5 million. Not only that though, engineering degrees that go into completely unrelated careers still tend to earn a lot more than even the degrees that are related to that career. So for instance, engineers that become artists will make around $3 million over a lifetime. Engineers that get into community and legal services will make 3.2 million over a lifetime. So you see the engineers almost all across the board are going to be making more money over a lifetime than a lot of different types of degrees pretty much no matter what career path they end up going down. Now a lot of people will say it's correlation or causation, you know, maybe it's because engineers are just really smart and people who are able to do those degrees are just really smart in the first place. Nobody really knows, but I tend to think that it does teach you some skills that are useful no matter what career path you end up going down. Now, speaking of skills, Zip Recruiters skill index has civil engineering at 61 out of 100, and you can compare that to a really high one and a really low one, and you'll see that it's definitely on the better side. On top of that, when you look at the likelihood of automation for pretty much any type of engineering degree, it's always going to be pretty low. So for instance, in this case, it's 1.9%. And I've mentioned this before, but I doubt that engineering-related careers would ever be able to be fully outsourced just because you have to be able to communicate really well in person. There's a lot of tangible and intangible skills involved there, a lot of creativity involved, a lot of the time you're going to have to actually be on site so that you can touch things and, you know, fix issues. So I highly doubt that an engineering related career would ever be able to be fully outsourced. Another thing is that engineering degrees tend to create a ton of millionaires. And in my opinion, the reason why is because so many people end up starting their own businesses when they get an engineering degree. A lot of the time engineers are kind of on the cutting edge of technology. And so it's very easy for them to see problems that can be solved. And that's basically what entrepreneurship is. It's practical problem solving. So if you're somebody who might want to start a business in the future, this might be something for you to look into. I always like to mention that engineering-related degrees are very difficult. So you've got to know what you're getting yourself into. Very tough. You know, if you want to go to college and just party all the time, engineering is going to be tough for you to accomplish that unless you're a genius. But overall, I'm going to give this one an X factor score of nine out of 10. So when you add all those up and you divide it by four, you're going to get an overall score of 8.5 out of 10. This is a great degree for the right person. As always, make sure you do your due diligence, research it, reach out to people who are in careers that you're interested in, figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, what your passions are, what your natural talents are, and figure out what types of careers align with that. Don't just go into this one because I recommend it or because I say that it's high paying or anything along those lines, that is a bad idea. But if you want some help doing research on college degrees, you can check out my college degree ranker down in the description below. On that, I basically compiled a list of all of the most important factors that you should consider, in my opinion, when you're looking at different college degrees. So if you don't want to wait for a video to come out that you're waiting for, you can just check out my college degree ranker down below and there's a good chance that you'll get your answer and it is in my Patreon. All right, guys, share the video with your friends, hit that like button, I mean, gently tap the like button, sorry, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. that you have on the video. And don't leave, check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.