Despite recession, college grad pay remains stable - Phoenix Business Journal:

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This year’s graduating class held its ground with averagee startingsalary offers, demonstrating that employerse are reluctant to significantly tinker with startiny pay despite the recession, a report by the Nationapl Association of Colleges and Employere found. The average starting salary offert for new college graduatesis $49,307, which is less than 1 percenty lower than the averagew of $49,693 that 2008 graduates posted last year at this according to a news release Wednesday. In its the association compiled data from college and university career servicesoffices nationwide.
Graduatesw with bachelor’s degrees in the business disciplines saw theidr average rise by less than 1 percent to thestudy found. “Accounting majors did betterd thanthe average,” the news release said, “and postedr a 1.9 percent increase for an average offefr of $48,993.” But the average offef to business administration majors droppec 2.1 percent to $44,944. That’a party because many of those offersw came from retailers andwholesalers that, on average, offerec starting pay of $40,220, which was 6 percen lower than what they offered a year ago.
Finance graduates and marketing graduates fared better than those in othefrbusiness disciplines, with the average offetr to finance graduates rising 2.9 percent to $49,940 and the averagde offer to marketing graduates increasing 3 percentg to $43,325. Starting salaries weren’ft looking as good in the spring for graduatews fromcomputer science-related fields, when the groupp saw a 5 percentr decline in average offers compared to the sprinfg a year earlier. But in a comparison this summer to summerdlast year, the averagwe offer to the group has increasedx 1.9 percent to $59,418. Among the specifi c disciplines in this computer science grads saw their average salary offereincrease 1.
6 percent to $61,407. Taking a slight dip were salart offers to information sciences and systems grads, whose offers fell by less than 1 percengt to $52,089. Enjoying the highest salary increasr wereengineering graduates, with the average offedr rising 3.7 percent to $59,254. Chemical engineering graduates, meanwhile, posted a 2.7 percentt increase to $64,902. Computef engineering graduates enjoyed an averagse offer riseof 3.6 percent to $61,738. Electrical engineerinf graduates earned one of thelarger increases, the news release The group’s average offer increased 5.6 percent to Civil engineering graduates saw only a tiny bump of 0.8 percengt to $52,048.
Liberal arts grads experienced a decline of less than 1 percentffrom $36,419 last year to $36,175, the study Among the liberal arts disciplines, English majors posted a 1.1 percentt increase in their average salary offer to $34,704. The salart offers for history majorsrose 1.7 percentg to $37,861. Psychology majors’ averager salary offers grew 2.1 percent to Sociology majors, on the other hand, saw theirf average offers fall 4.4 percent to $33,280.