Certification Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 40) TECHNIQUES IT Degree ROI: Which Majors Make the Biggest Salary? DANIEL MARGOLIS When you’re in college, it’s easy to put off thinking about your post-graduation job options. All the work involved in directing a college career can feel like a full-time job in and of itself, so who has time to pore over job listings and rewrite your resume? While in school, the prospect of a post-graduation job and salary might seem more like a hazy assumption than a reality for most students. But it makes sense to put some real thought into the earning potential of any given degree. Obviously, the major a student selects will have a big effect on that. he said. “They need them to have machines work and, therefore, have applications work.” Computer science follows closely in terms of demand and salary potential, because the degree signals to employers that an individual is a broadly educated, well-rounded IT professional capable of taking on a variety of job roles. The same doesn’t necessarily hold true for information science and systems, however. “It gets a little bit more specialized, where these are folks who will actually work in centers and know how to make disparate applications work together,” Mueller said, adding that this skill is particularly useful in working in technical support. “That really is a growing industry.” After this comes computer systems analysis. “These are people who will design work flows and talk about the needs of applications,” Mueller said. “They do the front work and then work to make processes better. So, it’s process improvement, and then when you bring a new piece of code in, it’s how you make that work, teach people and redesign how work is done.” Ranking the Majors The National Association of Colleges and Employers ranks the earning potential of computer science majors as follows (in descending order): computer programming, computer science, information science and systems, and computer systems analysis. Those rankings are current as of September and represent feedback from hundreds of universities and employers. Bruce Mueller, chief people officer, instructor and executive director of the Career Management Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said these rankings hold true at IIT. “Our experience is similar to those [rankings] based upon the job offers and starting salaries that the students are receiving in the computer field,” he said. Computer programming (or, put another way, code) has been dominant for a long time, Mueller said. Because of this, “[companies] need software folks — people who know how to manipulate code, install applications or ERPs, customize applications and make different applications work better together,” Engineering and Everything After The salary that a degree is likely to earn can vary from company to company. “If you’re working for Google or Yahoo or a start-up, General Motors or even an insurance company, they all can pay a little bit different,” said Jerry Houser, Ph.D., director of the California Institute of Technology’s Career Development Center. Houser added, however, that the going rates various IT majors earn are similar enough to draw some general conclusions. 40 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE December 2007
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