but is this true? as a SysAdmin (a job often done by people like me, with no education at all) I make rather more than anyone I know working as a chemist, physicist, or mathematician, at least until they got tired of the low pay and became software engineers... but in my limited experience, I could say the same about people who studied poetry, philosophy or literature.

There's a lot of talk about STEM, when as far as I can tell, the money is all in computers; the others might get you slightly above median salaries, but if they are above median, it's not by much.