is an aerospace 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 mistakes 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 that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out with that being said let's jump right into it what exactly is aerospace engineering so aerospace engineering is anything that has to do with aircraft and spacecraft so aeronautical engineering would be aircraft anything that flies through the air and then aerospace engineering comprises aeronautical engineering with astronautical which is anything that flies through space so we're talking about airplanes helicopters jets spaceships as well as flying saucers of course and you can work on things that are tiny that fly through the air like a bullet or a drone as well as things that are really large like a blimp around 4 000 people graduate with this degree every year so next we're going to be talking about salary or earning potential with this degree you can expect to make around 70 000 a year starting out and 119 000 in mid-career pay you can compare that to a really high paying degree or a low paying one and you'll see that it's definitely on the higher side of things if you were to become an aerospace engineer they make around 116 000 a year and one great thing about engineering degrees is even if you were just to get an associate's degree you could probably become an aerospace engineering technician and they still make around 66 000 which is well above the national average however let's say you decided you didn't want to work on airplanes anymore what other engineering career could you work in well you could become an electronic engineer and they make around 101 000 a year still pretty good and there's a lot of different career paths you can go down some of the common ones i'll have pop up on the screen right now and you can pause the video and read them if you'd like to and i'll also remind you that going down an engineering career path you're going to make more money on average over a lifetime than any other type of degree so for instance all different degrees and all different career paths end up making around 2.4 million dollars over a lifetime engineering degrees on average will be 3.5 as you can see that's way higher than average and they do it in a multitude of ways some of them are going to work a normal 9-5 job their entire careers and they can definitely make a lot of money doing that some of them are going to start their own businesses but overall you're not going to be surprised that this one ranks extremely high when it comes to salary or earning potential i'm actually going to give this one a score of 11 out of 10. this is one of the highest on the entire list now when it comes to satisfaction i always talk about job satisfaction and meaning and that's basically how much you enjoy doing your job and then how much do you think your job positively impacts the world so when it comes to meaning you see that aerospace engineering graduates are around 57 and you can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one and after comparing them you'll see that it's probably average or slightly above average when it comes to meaning so let's say you go into a very specific career which is aerospace engineer with that one you can see on pay scale that their meaning score is around 64 and then their job satisfaction is going to be 71. again you can compare those to a really good one as well as a bad one and you'll see that it's definitely above average now i can speak on this one because my dad did get an aeronautical engineering degree which is a type of aerospace engineering basically way back in the day before aerospace was a thing and i can say that people who love airplanes really really love airplanes like it's their number one passion in life so if you're one of those people who is just obsessed with jets and airplanes and flying and all that sort of thing you're probably gonna love becoming an aerospace engineer still to this day my dad watches endless hours of videos on youtube of people flying like mini helicopters and flying airplanes around and doing tricks and all kinds of stuff like that now when it comes to how much a person regrets getting their college major engineering degrees are without a doubt one of the least regretted in fact they're the third least regretted out of all types so you see here that only around 15 percent of people who get engineering degrees regret it and the main reason is because the best jobs require advanced degrees so to make a comparison here with this specific degree you'd probably think like let's say you want to be a rocket scientist and work for nasa maybe a bachelor's in aerospace engineering might not be enough i can't say for sure maybe you can get into nasa i'm just like making this off the top of my head some of the best careers out there the ones that are really high positions for instance you might have to get a master's or a doctorate however overall you do see here that engineering degrees in general tend to have a low level of regret now one thing here that's worth mentioning is a lot of the time people will get a specific engineering degree like aerospace engineering for instance and then they'll end up going into a completely unrelated career and the great thing about engineering degrees is they tend to be really widely respected so for instance you might go into a marketing career and you graduate with an engineering degree and they'll be happy to see you hiring managers business owners like to hire people with engineering degrees because they know they're getting somebody who's very smart very hard working however when it comes to satisfaction this is going to be the most subjective section by far i mean for one person this could be amazing you know for my dad for instance it's probably like 10 out of 10 but for me it would maybe be like i don't know three four out of ten but with that being said i'm going to give this one an 8 out of 10 overall when it comes to satisfaction score next on the list we're going to be talking about demand and this is basically how many owners hiring managers businesses etc want people who have the skill set that this degree is going to teach you now if you look at aerospace engineering specifically as a career right now there's 66 000 jobs available and over the next 10 years only 1900 new jobs are going to be created and it's growing at around 3 which is average it's not amazing and that's actually one of the big critiques that i have with engineering degrees a lot of people go into engineering thinking that they're going to be an engineer and then they graduate and they end up going down a completely different career path because they didn't know what they were getting themselves into luckily with engineering degrees you're usually going to get saved because a lot of hiring managers and business owners will want to hire you but that's just a problem with all degrees in general as people don't know what they're getting themselves into and that tends to happen when you're trying to make people figure out what their life purpose is at 17 years old now engineering is a stem degree and they tend to have some of the lowest unemployment rates of course we don't have any data for 2020 specifically because everything's going nuts this year but in 2019 it was one of the lowest i think it was the second lowest out of all different types of degrees second only to health now if you search aerospace engineering degree on glassdoor.com you'll see that over 7000 job listings pop up that's pretty good that means there's quite a bit of demand for it and if people aren't specifically looking for aerospace engineers that doesn't necessarily matter because if they see that someone applied to the job and they have that degree they're probably going to be pretty impressed with it and they'll likely give you a chance hiring managers and business owners love hiring people who graduate with engineering degrees because they know that they're getting somebody who's smart and hardworking and a national survey of large businesses showed that engineering degrees were the number one type of degree that big organizations and corporations were looking to hire so overall i'm going to give this one a score of 8 out of 10. next we're going to be talking about x factors and when it comes to x factors i like to focus on how likely it is that something is going to be automated outsourced as well as the skills that you're going to learn when you get this degree and how much those are going to help you in life in general now when you look at earnings over a lifetime you see that engineering degrees make the most out of all types of degrees for normal degrees you earn around 2.4 million over a lifetime and for engineering it's going to be 3.5 million on average that is the best out of any type of degree out there so on average people who get engineering degrees tend to do extremely well financially but we already knew that we already knew that engineering degrees go into careers where you make really good money the interesting thing here is that when you look down at the types of careers they go into it really doesn't matter they make money no matter what career path they go down so for instance if you work with computers and math you're going to make around 3.7 million if you go into management you'll make around 4.1 even if you go into arts and media if you go into an art related career which of course they're kind of notorious for not making very much money you're still going to make well above average around 3 million over a lifetime so there's something about getting an engineering degree that just translates really well to careers across the board it could be that people who go into engineering tend to be really smart and so it doesn't matter what career path they go down they would have done well anyways or it could be that the difficulty of getting the degree itself and the skills you learn while you're getting it are so good that it really translates well across the board nobody really knows it could be correlation or causation i think it's a little bit of both now when it comes to how valuable the skill of aerospace engineering is you're going to see that it ranks around 66 out of 100 and again you can compare that to a really good one as well as a bad one and you'll see here that it's on the higher side the skill of aerospace engineering is something that is valuable on the open market meaning a lot of companies like to hire people who have these skills now that being said the skill set of aerospace engineering is a little bit niche meaning you are learning a very specific skill set when you go into aerospace engineering that might not necessarily translate to all different types of engineering careers so when you compare aerospace engineering to mechanical engineering for instance mechanical engineering is going to teach you more of a wide variety of skills that can apply to all different types of industries and businesses and even careers whereas aerospace engineering is a little more specific you're going to be learning specifically about things that fly through the air so although engineering degrees in general are pretty well respected and you're more likely to get hired with a degree even if you're applying for a job that has nothing to do with there are engineering degrees out there that are going to be more flexible meaning if you don't end up becoming an aerospace engineer you're going to have a lot more options but with that being said the likelihood of automation is only around 1.7 meaning this is probably not going to be automated i would imagine that engineering as a career if it does get automated would be one of the very last ones you know when i think of careers that will probably never be automated the ones that really come to mind are engineers doctors and you know people who work in the medical field there's too many skills that it requires that i just don't think you could teach to a robot there's communication creativity a lot of the times you're going to be working with your hands using your fingers in order to diagnose problems and then fix them now when it comes to these skills being outsourced i also think they are highly unlikely usually if you're working on a project you're going to be working in a team and you'll be meeting up in person a lot of the times these things are so complicated that it would be very difficult to do them over a zoom meeting you need to be there in real life so that you can see what you're working on being able to touch it being able to move things around you know mess with the wires things like that you just wouldn't be able to do that over zoom now another thing i like to mention here is engineering degrees are the most likely degree to create a millionaire meaning out of all the different types of degrees if you go into engineering you are the most likely to become a millionaire now of course you can become a millionaire very easily with a normal job by investing i talk about that a lot on the channel that is the easiest way to become a millionaire but it's also the one that takes the most patience and time a much faster way to get there is to start your own business and i think this is the reason that so many engineers end up becoming millionaires engineering basically teaches you a skill set where it's practical problem solving and entrepreneurship is all about solving people's problems and i think it would be easier to teach an engineer business skills than to teach a business person engineering skills and so many engineers end up working for a few years and then they'll recognize an opportunity somewhere down the line where they can actually create a product or a service that helps people out so for instance let's say you were an aerospace engineer about five or ten years ago when drones were first starting to come out and you recognized the popularity of the drones and how clunky and not easy to use they were and then you started up a company that makes them even better that's one obvious example of using your aerospace engineering skills to start a business and a lot of the time it won't be that glamorous you might create a battery for instance it's like 10 or 20 more efficient and then a bigger company buys you out but overall i'm going to give this one a score of 8 out of 10 when it comes to x factors so some of the pros here are the salary is extremely good i mean you can easily get to six figures some people might even start off right after school with a six figure job and there's pretty high satisfaction overall for people who go into aerospace and they want to become an aerospace engineer and there's going to be some good entry-level occupations that are available for people so you're not going to have to wait 10 or 20 years before you start making pretty good money some of the cons here are that you're probably going to have to relocate for work especially if you want to become an aerospace engineer you may have to move somewhere where there's aerospace engineering jobs available and that might not be the nicest place luckily once you get a few years under your belt you get some experience you'll likely have a lot more options another thing here there's a high level of workload stress especially when you're in school one of my roommates in college was an aerospace engineer and it is not easy trust me when i say that additionally if you want to be like a rocket scientist for instance you're probably going to need to do further study so you'll likely need to get a master's or a doctorate level degree but overall i'm going to give this one a score of 8.75 out of 10 excellent for the right person it's definitely worth the money don't go into this one just because i say it's good or just because the pay is high if you hate math you probably don't want to become an engineer make sure you do your own research make sure it's something that you would actually enjoy doing best thing for you to do if you're looking into one of these careers is first of all do lots of research online and then second of all contact people who are currently in the career ask them questions on what they would recommend that you do you know should i do an internship should i get work experience does joining a bunch of clubs matter all those sorts of questions that are relevant to your specific career that you're trying to go for now if there's other degrees that you're interested in and i haven't gotten to them yet and you want to leave a bunch of comments down below you might speed that process up by checking out my college degree ranker down in the description below right now it's version 1.1 i basically compiled all the best information from the best sources across the internet into one very convenient spreadsheet just for you i also rank them based on what i think are the best possible standards i am going to be updating it after all this madness in the world is over with because right now the demand is just really weird like for some careers it's super low way lower than it usually would be and for some careers it's a lot higher so it's really wonky right now so once all this stuff is over i am going to be updating it to version two but yeah check that down in the description below and my patreon if you don't want to wait for the video to come out and if you haven't done it already go ahead gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you might have on the video sharing the video helps a ton that actually does help with the algorithm the whole like button thing is just kind of goofy it doesn't really help that much but sharing the video really does help so if you want to do that that's awesome and don't leave check out my other videos right here i made them just for you