CRA Bulletin

This updates an earlier post.

There are many sources for salaries in the information technology sector. Most focus on specific occupations or types of industry. The National Association of Colleges and Employers report starting salary offers to new college graduates at the bachelor’s degree level. The survey collects data from college and university career services offices.

The graph presents the starting salaries offered to computer science majors, adjusted for inflation to 2006 dollars. The effect of the “dot com” boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s is evident. Three other items are worth mentioning. The first is that starting salary offers since the end of the IT bubble have been about 15% higher than those before it. Second, graduating computer science majors consistently receive some of the highest starting salary offers among all majors, exceeded only by a few of the engineering fields (see the table below the graph). The third point is that the drop in offers seen in 2006 was reversed in 2007. In current dollars, computer science majors saw a 4.5% increase in salary offers between 2006 and 2007.

More information:

(Has to be purchased) NACE Research, Starting Salary Offers: Historical Perspective Update 1990 to 2005 (Bethlehem, PA, 2007).

The press release for the 2007 NACE Salary Survey is available at http://www.naceweb.org/press/display.asp?year=&prid=264

NB: There is a newer bulletin item with more data.

College graduates with computer science majors received an average salary offer of $53,051 in 2007, according to survey results from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). As in previous years, this made computer science one of the most well-paid among all majors. Many majors saw increases higher than inflation and NACE predicts a healthy job market for new graduates in 2008, as well.

The press release for the 2007 NACE Salary Survey is available at http://www.naceweb.org/press/display.asp?year=&prid=264

Many undergraduates who graduated in 2004 received slightly higher salaries than their 2003 counterparts, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) year-end Salary Survey.

According to a CNN article on the report,

If [figures for computer science] sound enticing, it’s probably because computer science graduates are long overdue for a pay increase.

“They haven’t seen an increase since 2001 and this is the first year, in all four reports, that they showed an increase,” Koncz says. “With the economy coming back, they are just starting to regain the ground lost in those two years.”

The CNN article is online at http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/21/pf/college/starting_salaries/.

The press release for the NACE survey is online at http://www.naceweb.org/press/display.asp?year=&prid=197.