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A cursory review of the numbers makes me think this is a scam. > Hard sciences such as Physics and Biology pay rather less well than I would have expected. In

A cursory review of the numbers makes me think this is a scam. > Hard sciences such as Physics and Biology pay rather less well than I would have expected. Interestingly, when I used the calculator to search for a BS in Physics, it says "No Statistics for that Degree". I also find it a bit hard to believe that optometrists and lawyers make out better than doctors, or that the lifetime value of a Physician's Assistant masters is $300,000 more than the lifetime value of an MD. Finally, having perused the Occupational Outlook Handbook more than a few times, this reeks of blatant plagiarism. The text appears to be heavily rewritten, but all the facts come from the OOH and even the outline of each article is identical to the OOH. This exercise casts a dim light on SEO as a profession. Scams on top of scams.

patio11 16y ago
The numbers/graphs were very definitely not taken from the OOH. They're from the same underlying data source as the OOH, the BLS national salary study, and they're both calculated differently and substantially broader in scope than the numbers presented on the OOH. It should not be surprising that the OOH and this site have the same number for e.g. median salary of accountants, since they both use the BLS data set and presumably have the same understanding of the word "median", but the point of the site is to get a generalizable numbers for the degrees, where the OOH hsa 100% focus on the job categories and generates no statistics whatsoever for degrees. There may well be rewriting of OOH facts on some of the pages. I likewise haven't read the several hundred pages in detail (I wrote the CMS but wasn't in charge of the freelancers who filled it out).
ylem 16y ago
I don't know about scam, the search page itself is definitely lacking--all I found was geophysics. It could be that the original analysis is good, but the web page is lousy. When looking at median salaries for physicists, on the BLS site (where this data is taken from: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm), it is $103,000 which isn't all that bad (if you can get a job). But, the problem with the proxy that the author uses (given job, extrapolate major) is that it doesn't account for fields where relatively few people actually get jobs in that field, but tend to migrate to other fields--depending on what field they migrate to, then the salary may be much higher or lower. Take physics for example. The fraction of physics PhDs who actually get jobs as professors is rather small. The fraction who go on to national labs is small--even the numbers for industry (doing physics) is small and many people leave for other fields (programming, financial engineering, management consulting, etc.)--So to get accurate numbers, what you need to do is to survey people at companies and ask them what their degree is and what their salary is....

patio11 16y ago

The numbers/graphs were very definitely not taken from the OOH. They're from the same underlying data source as the OOH, the BLS national salary study, and they're both calculated differently and substantially broader in scope than the numbers presented on the OOH. It should not be surprising that the OOH and this site have the same number for e.g. median salary of accountants, since they both use the BLS data set and presumably have the same understanding of the word "median", but the point of the site is to get a generalizable numbers for the degrees, where the OOH hsa 100% focus on the job categories and generates no statistics whatsoever for degrees. There may well be rewriting of OOH facts on some of the pages. I likewise haven't read the several hundred pages in detail (I wrote the CMS but wasn't in charge of the freelancers who filled it out).

ylem 16y ago

I don't know about scam, the search page itself is definitely lacking--all I found was geophysics. It could be that the original analysis is good, but the web page is lousy. When looking at median salaries for physicists, on the BLS site (where this data is taken from: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm), it is $103,000 which isn't all that bad (if you can get a job). But, the problem with the proxy that the author uses (given job, extrapolate major) is that it doesn't account for fields where relatively few people actually get jobs in that field, but tend to migrate to other fields--depending on what field they migrate to, then the salary may be much higher or lower. Take physics for example. The fraction of physics PhDs who actually get jobs as professors is rather small. The fraction who go on to national labs is small--even the numbers for industry (doing physics) is small and many people leave for other fields (programming, financial engineering, management consulting, etc.)--So to get accurate numbers, what you need to do is to survey people at companies and ask them what their degree is and what their salary is....