Did some math.
Graduated in ChemE in 1998
Adjusted for inflation, those numbers are lower in purchasing power (and in some cases dollars) than the published numbers when I graduated.
2008 to 2013 derailed a lot of careers.
“Adjusted for inflation, those numbers are lower in purchasing power (and in some cases dollars) than the published numbers when I graduated”
A common starting salary in the early ‘80s was $26-27K / yr for mech/ee/aero; bit higher for chemE/PetE.
Taking a simplistic scale factor of ~ 5X inflation since then (mostly home price), starting salaries now should be around $100-125K. Obviously they are not. There are some notable exceptions for companies that offer stock options, but that’s a small group. In general the result is that engineering salaries are lower across the board.
Be assured that certain other fields yielded the same kind of results in certain cases. I was a skilled technician who managed to worked my way up slowly, mostly a very little at a time, & then shortly after the year 2000 the pay really dropped. That might not have been the norm, but it sure happened to me. Prior to that, pay was a little better than average in a mostly low-wage part of the country.