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

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....