I don't know if it is necessarily true that outside Utah you can get a better salary. I graduated in Dec. 2003 with a BS CS from BYU, the job market at the time sucked hard. I went home to Missouri and it took 6 months to find a computer related job. I worked at a Ford Assembly plant for 4 months. When I got hired, they low-balled me at 38k/year, I knew it, they knew it and we both knew the market sucked and I didn't have much choice if I wanted to feed my family. 18 months later I got a better job and got roughly a 40% pay raise. This is in Kansas City, Missouri. My understanding is that starting salaries in Utah are better than 38k for a BS CS degree. Though the cost of living is more. Housing in particular is crazy expensive in Utah compared to here. A 1500 sqft home on 1/3 acre lot is about $160. The biggest obstacle for me when first looking for a job is that no one has a clue about BYU. It is pigeon-holed as that Mormon university with a good football program. Where I work now there are 18 people out of about 9,000 that are BYU alums. I am the only software engineer. However, I have interviewed at a few companies whose names anyone here would recognize, and they generally speak very highly of BYU alums with whom they have worked, though these companies are on the west coast.
I took a few CS classes at UVSC. They were fine classes. I didn't feel that they were any better or worse than BYU courses, just different. I am very thankful to the high quality of the coursework at BYU. But then again, most of what I learned in school that distinguishes me from my colleagues I learned by working on Open Source projects. -Michael ----- Original Message ---- From: Jeremy Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Provo Linux Users Group Mailing List <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 1:16:50 PM Subject: Re: UVSC BYU U of U etc was"Software Engineering (was Re: Java) > > > Grant Shipley wrote: > > > According to the 2005 Utah Foundation Report, UVSC bachelor degree > > > graduates earn more money than graduates from any other Utah college > > > or university. > Some interesting facts from the report (granted, the data is a couple of years old): 55% of BYU BS degree grads earn less than 30K in their first year after graduation and only 4% earned over 60K (compare that to almost twice as many from UVSC) Quote: "UVSC graduates, in particular, seem to have found higher paying jobs." Quote: "UVSC graduates overwhelmingly lead the way in terms of employment with 83.9% of its graduates in the workforce and 78.4% employed full-time. The next highest was USU with 74.7% percent in the labor force. USU and UVSC bachelor's graduates were employed at a significantly higher rate than the other schools, while BYU bachelor's graduates were employed full-time at the lowest rate [57%]". Now, you may accuse me of massaging or misrepresenting the numbers. In that event, I will disavow all knowledge of said report as you are clearly throwing flamebait ;) More importantly, there is one quote from the report that should alarm us all (well at least those of us in Utah. Sorry Grant.) "Utah's starting salaries do not compare favorably with the national averages. The lower salaries of Utah-based graduates can probably be attributed directly to the lower salary levels that exist for all workers in Utah. As evidence of this, the Utah Foundation survey found that there is a wide disparity in salaries between graduates who find employment in Utah and those who choose to work elsewhere. According to 2004 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Utah ranked 36th nationally in average annual pay." http://utahfoundation.org/img/pdfs/rr673.pdf Jeremy /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */ /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
