[nostrademons]

Do they? I've found that my econ major friends bifurcated into two camps. Roughly the top 25% of the class found jobs on Wall Street, working at hedge funds, I-banks, and proprietary trading desks. They make much than engineers, often in the high six figures or even seven figures.

But the bottom 75% of the econ class - or even people in the top 25% who don't know how to schmooze and interview well - ended up in typical liberal-artsy jobs. They're working for government agencies and taking a public-servant salary. Or they're working as a bank teller instead of a bank trader. Or they're working as a tax preparer. Or they're working as a high school teacher or SAT tutor. Or they went back to grad school and are struggling to find any job at all.

These people make a lot less than a typical engineer. Heck, many of them don't make all that much more than someone who never went to college.

I think your question is really "Why do people in finance make so much more than those in software?" And the reason is that there's so much money floating around there that companies can afford to pay high amounts. I have a friend who works in reporting at one of the big hedge funds. His day job is to create pretty charts with Excel and correct typographical errors. His base salary is about $100K.

But if you're trying to decide between an engineering or hard science degree vs. an economics degree in college, your average expected payoff is way higher with a hard science degree, particularly since many of those people end up as quants on Wall Street anyway.