 is a chemical engineering degree worth it. That's what we're going to 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 going to lead you to success. And we also go over how you can avoid some of the common financial traps that so many people end up falling for. If that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. Now with that being said, let's jump right into it. First of all, we have to define what is chemical engineering? Chemical engineering is all about transporting and transforming materials into useful objects. Now there's obviously going to be a lot of chemistry involved here, but you're also going to be studying mathematics, science, and physics. Around 11,000 people graduate with this one every year, so it's one of the more common engineering degrees. Next, we're going to be talking about salary or earning potential. Now, most people know that engineering degrees pay really well, and chemical engineering is one of the better paying ones. With chemical engineering, you'll make 73,000 a year starting out and 128,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to the highest earning degree and a really low earning degree, and you'll see that it's definitely on the higher side. If you become a chemical engineer, you'll make around $108,000 a year. There's a lot of different career paths you can go down with this degree. It's relatively flexible. If you do want to become a chemical engineer, you'll likely have to move somewhere in order to get your first job. You could also potentially become an engineering manager later on in your career, and they make around 144,000 a year. As a chemical engineer, you can work in a lot of other engineering specialties, like let's say you become a biomedical engineer, they make around 91,000 a year. So as you can see, a lot of different career paths you could go down, and all of them are going to pay decently well. I always recommend going for a job where you can make at least $75,000 a year because studies have shown that your happiness maxes out around 75,000 to 80,000, meaning the more money you make, the happier you are up to a certain point. Now overall, it's no secret engineering degrees tend to pay extremely well across the board. Over a lifetime, people who get a college degree earn around $2.4 million, but those who get an engineering degree earn 3.5 million. That's the highest out of any type of degree, and maybe 20 or 30 years from now it might be different, but right now engineering degrees do really well. On top of that, a lot of people who go into engineering end up becoming entrepreneurs later on, and that practical problem solving skill that they have comes in handy. And so this one is a no-brainer. I'm gonna have to give it a 10 out of 10 when it comes to salary. Now when it comes to satisfaction, I always like to go over meaning as well as job satisfaction. Meaning is how much you think your career positively impacts the world, whereas job satisfaction is how much do you enjoy doing your job on a day-to-day basis. In the short term, job satisfaction tends to win out, but you could argue that long-term meaning is actually more important. So for instance, for a chemical engineering degree on pay scale, when we look at the meaning score, it's around 56%. You can compare that to a really good one and a bad one, and you'll see that it's either average or slightly above average. Now if you look at chemical engineering grads who become chemical engineers, you'll see that they have a 61% meaning score, and their job satisfaction is 73%. You can compare that to a really good one and a bad one, and you'll see that it's definitely above average here. Now with that being said, one of the great things about becoming an engineer is it tends to be a very well-respected and flexible degree. You might get a chemical engineering degree, but you end up becoming something completely unrelated like a marketer. So the point here is that if you get tired of becoming a chemical engineer, you don't wanna become one, you have a lot of other options. Engineering is the third least regretted type of degree, only around 15% of people would get it regretted, and the reason is because some of the best jobs are gonna require advanced degrees. However, I always like to say here, job satisfaction meaning extremely subjective. It depends on all kinds of different things. Everybody's different. For one person, it could be a 10 out of 10. For another person, it could be a one out of 10. Or even within the same career, you know, maybe the industry that you work in or the company you work for, the people you work around, the place that you live in. So it's very subjective, but overall being as fair as I can, I'm gonna go ahead and give this one an eight out of 10 when it comes to satisfaction. Next, we're gonna be talking about demand, and this is basically how much demand there is for certain skills that people learn with various types of majors. It also has a lot to do with the popularity of degrees. So there's some degrees that are really good where they used to be really good. They got extremely popular. So many people went into them, and now they're kind of saturated and overrated in my opinion. That is true for some extent with engineering degrees and specifically getting an engineering degree in order to become an engineer. And by that, I mean when you look at chemical engineers, for instance, there's around 32,000 jobs and it's only growing around 4%. That's pretty average. And if you look at a lot of other technology and mathematics careers and health degree careers, for instance, you're gonna see that they're growing way faster. Another one would be an engineering manager, which there's around 198,000 and they're growing at 3%. Same thing with biomedical engineer, there's 21,000 and they're growing at 5%. Now, when I first saw this, I thought, you know what? Hey, engineering is really overrated and it kind of makes sense because it's been hyped for decades. But what I didn't realize is a lot of people get engineering degrees and then they end up going into completely unrelated careers. And it's okay because engineering degrees are pretty much universally respected. A lot of business owners and hiring managers love to hire people who get these types of degrees like engineering and physics. And the reason is because they know they're getting somebody who's a good problem solver, they're very hardworking and they're probably really smart as well. So just realize that if you're trying to become a chemical engineer by getting a chemical engineering degree, it's gonna be pretty hard. It's not impossible by any means but just know that there's not all that many jobs out there and so you really need to plan ahead and make sure you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. So for instance, if you look on monster.com and you type in chemical engineering degree, you're gonna see that only around 2000 jobs pop up. You can compare this to a computer science degree where there's a ton of demand or something like anthropology where there's not very much and you're gonna see that it's kind of on the lower side. Now that doesn't mean that companies aren't hiring people who have engineering degrees. I really like this survey that the National Association of Colleges and Employers did where they basically asked a bunch of different businesses what types of college degrees, college majors that they're looking to hire. Engineering was the top one of course and if you break it down even further, you can see that chemical engineering was in the top six. So there are a ton of companies out there that are looking to hire people that have engineering degrees and chemical engineering is relatively flexible. It's not one of the most flexible ones but it's decent. Depending on what career you wanna get into, you might end up having to move somewhere in order to get your first job like I said before but in many cases you won't have to so overall all things being equal, I'm gonna give this one an 8.5 out of 10. Next we're gonna be talking about X factors and this is anything that we didn't mention before that has to do with skills, flexibility, automation, how easily outsourced something is, how difficult it is, et cetera. Now one thing I like to point out with engineering degrees is when it comes to salary or how much someone earns over a lifetime, they're very good. The average degree is gonna earn around $2.4 million over an entire lifetime whereas engineering is around 3.5 million. That's by far the highest one out of all different types of degrees and you can see that it's pretty much across the board. Doesn't matter what career path you end up going down, engineers tend to earn really good money. So for instance, if you get an engineering degree and you become an engineer, you'll make around 3.6 million. If you go into management, you'll make around 4.1 and even if you go into an art related career, you'll make around 3 million over a lifetime. Compare that to a random degree that goes into arts and they only make around 2.3 million. So this really shows you how good engineering degrees are. Now, of course, this could be correlation or causation. It could be because engineers are just super intelligent and so they tend to do really well no matter what career path they go down or it could be that engineering tends to teach you extremely practical skills that you can use in the real world to solve problems and do a lot of good. I tend to think it's a little bit of both honestly but overall engineers tend to do really well. Now, if you look at the skill of chemical engineering on the zip recruiter skills index, you'll see that it's around 59 out of 100. And you can compare that to one of the best skills and one of the worst skills and you'll see that it's definitely well above average. The one thing I will say about chemical engineering as a skill is that it's a little bit too niche and narrow. So if you want to stay in your degree track and work as a chemical engineer, a lot of the time you'll find that you'll end up having to move somewhere in order to get your first job. However, like I said before, there's a lot of other options for chemical engineer grads other than going into engineering. Pretty much all of the engineering degrees tend to be relatively flexible, mostly because they're just highly respected. You see that engineering degree grads have a very low unemployment rate and that's because even if they don't end up working as engineers, they'll end up getting a job offer from somebody. And when it comes to the likelihood of automation, pretty much all of the engineering degrees are future proof. They're not very likely to be automated. For instance, chemical engineers have a 1.7% chance according to WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com. And same thing goes when it comes to outsourcing. Chances are that you're gonna have to hire somebody in person in order to do a lot of these jobs. So for instance, let's say you became a food scientist, you worked for Coca-Cola and you wanna design like the newest soda that everybody loves. Well, you can't taste a soda over Zoom. I mean, that's kind of obvious, but it's something that you have to be there in person in order to do. On top of that, there's gonna be a lot of communication. You'll likely have to use your hands and touch and manipulate things. And so that's again, something very difficult to program a robot for. In fact, you will likely be the one that programs the robots if anything. On top of that, engineering came in as number one on the degrees that create the most millionaires. Now, don't get me wrong, a lot of those people probably became millionaires from getting a job and then investing for 10 or 20 years and then they eventually get to a net worth of one million. But I also think a significant amount of those people ended up starting their own business because engineering tends to teach you practical problem solving. And at the end of the day, that's 80% of entrepreneurship right there is solving people's problems. So a lot of people will work a few years in the industry, get some experience, get some skills, and then eventually because of the fact that you're working on the cutting edge, you'll recognize a really good opportunity to start your own business and take advantage of it. And you'll likely have a much higher chance of success just because of the fact that your skills are so unique. Now with that being said, engineering and especially chemical engineering is known as being one of the most difficult types of degrees that you can get. I don't wanna scare any of you off like that. I just wanna warn you that it has a very high dropout rate and the reason for that is because it's very difficult. But with that being said, I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a score of nine out of 10 when it comes to X factors. So some of the pros here, the salary is excellent. You're gonna be making way more money than you need in order to be happy, at least the average person to be happy. The job satisfaction tends to be relatively high. It's going to be very difficult, especially when you're in school. And then even after you graduate, you're gonna have to keep on learning pretty much throughout your entire career. And I guess that could be a positive or a negative depending on the person. Although it is very high paying, chances are you won't get those really good jobs until later on in your career and you'll likely have to move somewhere. But overall, I'm gonna give this one a score of 8.875 out of 10. This is an excellent one for the right person. Don't pick this degree just because I said it's good or just because it has a high salary or anything like that, that would be ridiculous. Make sure you do your own research. Make sure it's something that interests you. You don't wanna go into something just because it pays well. I always recommend basically thinking about the goal and then working your way backwards from there. Find a career that you're interested in and then work your way backwards on what steps you need to take in order to get there. And the best way to do that is to just talk to people who are currently in that career and ask them what their opinion is. There's some careers where networking may or may not matter. Same thing with doing internships, joining clubs, all kinds of different things. So take the guesswork out of it and just ask people who are in that career already and they'll tell you exactly what you need to do. Now if you want help finding your college degree and you don't wanna wait for my videos to come out and check out my college degree ranker down in the description below in my Patreon. I worked really hard on it and I think it'll help you out quite a bit. I'm always gonna be updating it as well as things happen. Gently tap the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, share the video with your friends that really helps the channel out a lot. And before you leave, check out my other videos right here, I made them just for you. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.