Berkeley Starting Salaries and the Silicon Valley — The Last 7 Years

I graduated from Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program in 2005 and the Valley was in the midst of an economic recovery. It took me about a month to find a full time position paying $60,000 a year. Recently I did a little digging into the starting salaries of my major for the past 7 years just for fun. I am not surprised by my findings but it is pretty interesting.

This is the raw data from Berkeley’s career center which I copied from several different pages and pieced together. 2007 data isn’t yet available but the median salary is probably about 4 to 5% higher:

Since this data is self reported the reported salaries may be skewed a bit towards the higher end. Nevertheless it’s interesting to see that the class of 2005 is extremely small. I started college in 2001 and that was actually the year Berkeley EECS had the most applicants and it was the most difficult year to get accepted. I think the acceptance rate was somewhere around 11%. The reason was that everyone wanted to get into the high paying major and we all applied during the height of the technology bubble. However, I witnessed a lot of people drop out of the major after the economic downturn. Berkeley would then accept quite a few transfer students from community colleges to fill up the upperclassmen spots. I remember that my sophomore class was wittled down to less than 200 people, but junior year was filled up by an influx of new people so the final graduation count is above 200.

2003 was the worst year of all seven years, and the cheap ex-boyfriend was this class. Companies cut down the starting pay drastically and people had no choice but to take it because having a job is better than nothing. Now four years later, it may still be too optimistic to say that salaries have recovered to the peak levels because the cost of living in the Valley has risen significantly. Gas prices in 2000 were less than $2.00 a gallon, and now it has doubled. The same goes for housing prices. In 2000 a salary of $62,000 is more than enough to purchase a starter home in the Bay Area. I remember back then that my parents were contemplating buying a condo near Berkeley and it cost less than 180,000. Our family friend also purchased a home around then in Albany for 170 to 180k. Now these homes are all valued at around half a million and a salary of even $70,000 a year is nowhere near enough to cover the mortgage. If we take the cost of living into account, I would argue that our real wages have dropped significantly in the Bay Area.

The lesson here is that negotiating for a higher salary when you just start out is really important. Also, it is true that not every Berkeley grad stayed here in the Bay Area so perhaps life isn’t so bad for those that moved on to cheaper areas. Also, if you graduated in a bad year you would need to ask for bigger raises to avoid being paid less than new grads. If you can’t secure a reasonable market rate raise then it’s probably best to change jobs.

I am not sure what will happen in the next seven years. Some say that there is another technology bubble already here, but I don’t think that is true. I am working at another startup but it has a great product that brings in a good chunk of revenue and from what I have heard many other startups are also quite solid. It should be an interesting ride.

Source of data:

Data for class of 2000 via Internet Archives
Data for class of 2001 to 2004 via Internet Archives
Data for class of 2003 to 2006 via Berkeley Career Center

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