My opinion, and worth everything you paid for it:
Petroleum Engineer will pay the best while demand is high, and fall the quickest of most engineering when the eventual swing comes.
Chemical engineers tend to stay in steady demand, processes for for different products, from different feedstocks can help balances swings, baring global economy drops. At major firms, they tend to be more inline for promotion to upper management, but no hard fast rule there.
I’m electrical, facility based. I’m specialized in power despite my college adviser attempts to guide me away from that “old technology stuff”. I’ve worked upstream, midstream and downstream; which has helped me find work through the business cycles. If oil/gas is expensive, upstream booms. When those feedstocks are cheap, downstream can afford their expansions. When new areas become producing, midstream booms. Mechanical, structural, controls tend to all have the same flexibility I see for the market I serve. And the greater Houston market is nearly equal to the rest of the US for this industry.
Way more industries demand engineers than the oil/gas/petrochemical market. But I rarely find they consistently pay as well. Consulting type engineering like I do tends to pay far better than working direct for the owners. But it also has the most ups and downs. The consulting worlds in the bigger firms also open up opportunities to reach a different industry, like a Nuclear Power Plant design. It is harder to get into.
All that discussion based upon an assumption he wants to be an engineer, and is willing to put forth the effort in college while he watches many of his buddies get to spend more time at parties, etc.
Absolute best advice I can give is to one starting college for engineering, get summer jobs/co-op in a technical area. Grunt work at an engineering office, or a construction job is far more valuable to the college grad recruiter than being the manager at Taco Bell.
He is a good student and not girl crazy. He is not that interested in partying. He is not a jock either. He is kind of a nerd. He is self driven to stay on the high honor roll(straight A’s)at school.
He is mad at his current pre Calculus teacher because she does not teach in class all of the material on the tests. He says he learns more from the homework. He also seems to like chemistry and anything engineering. He is taking an engineering course in high school now. His first project was to build a bridge. He choose a truss design. His current project is to take a printer and use the parts from it to make a car that will be judged based on speed and towing ability. He was talking to him about gear ratios. He seemed to comprehend well.
So, to summarize, I believe he would make an excellent engineer. The only thing that scares me is when he brings home a brochure from Northeastern University and the cost for tuition, room and board is $56K/year. Holy crap, I need to sell more lumber.