[ashark]

$35k isn't an unusually low starting salary for lots of tech jobs outside major hubs. IT positions, starting network techs/sysadmins, hacking on PHP/Wordpress, that kind of thing.

Under the broad umbrella of jobs-you-can-land-with-a-degree-containing-the-word-"computer", there are a great many that aren't making Facebook creepier, or making Gmail's interface worse, or other, similar, very high-paying jobs.

There are even, believe it or not, many that don't pay as well as not really understanding how to write code, but nonetheless somehow landing a position writing enterprise Java or DotNet at some boring bigcorp, then never leaving because you never actually get any better at programming than when you started, but these people don't seem to care and there are a few competent people here picking up your slack, so why risk going somewhere else? AKA the broad middle-tier of people working as software developers.