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Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

From the Huffington Post:

"The Bureau Of Labor Statistics has released its annual Occupational Employment and Wages report, and the top-paying industries are dominated by health care professionals. In fact, nine of the 10 highest-paid jobs in America are in the health care industry. The only other group that made the top 10 is corporate executives."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-pai...

Here's a link to the full report:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm

Like a lot of other people here, I'd support a stronger emphasis on skilled immigration to the US, but I don't see compelling evidence of an acute shortage of engineers relative to other fields. In fact, I think the low level of interest in these fields is a rational response to market signals, especially at the elite levels.

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I've encountered this sort of response citing the high pay in healthcare before. So I wanted to throw a thought out there for feedback.

A relevant point is the "carrying capacity" for healthcare professionals. The USA can probably double the number of people employed in healthcare (using a handwavy argument that that 40 million [edit: I earlier wrote 40%] of the population is uninsured).

Note the number of people with the high-paying healthcare job titles: all of them were below 100k people and many were less than 20k people.

Given that so few people work in healthcare relative to STEM, I'm not really sure that pointing out high salaries in healthcare is relevant.

Whereas I can easily see STEM doubling employment in the USA, from the already high (10's of millions?) employment base.

There are all kinds of problems with comparing one field to another, I'll agree. That's why I find this question so difficult to answer. It puts me in a position of "command central", trying to figure out what various professions "should" be paid, rather than letting the market do this.

I'm also comparing a small field tightly controlled by what I believe is a cartel with a large, generally open market. A PhD in CS is great to have, but there isn't an association of CS PhD's that can bar people with lower degrees (or no degree) from writing code.

Still, I think the comparison is more relevant than you do, because it's a reflection of what people who are academically talented can earn in other fields. If we're going to start talking about how there "should" be more supply of engineers at a current salary level, it does make sense to see what people can earn with degrees that have higher completion rates and often take considerably less time, with lighter undergraduate requirements to boot.

Wait are you saying that there are fewer people working in health care in the US compared to STEM? I don't think that's true at all.

Yep, that's what I'm saying.

I'm too lazy to look into this, but intuitively it makes sense to me. Healthcare is basically an "exception handler" (default state of humans is to be health), whereas STEM is the "real code".

I would expect more "real code" than "exception handlers".

Also sq. ft. of physical space devoted to healthcare (e.g., hospitals) seems to be far less than sq. ft. of space devoted to STEM (e.g., office parks).

If dig up info to disprove me, I would be very grateful to get a correction to my worldview.

If by healthcare do you mean all employees who work in hospitals (including many low paying positions), or more prestigious, higher paying positions like RNs, MDs, etc? And what about dentists and other allied health fields?

I would definitely exclude administrators, janitors etc (because these jobs exist in companies that are "in STEM" such as a Microsoft).

I would include medical staff like nurses, doctors, pharmacists, psychiatrists, physiotherapists (not fitness trainers), licensed nutritionists, dentists, dentists' assistants etc.

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