patrick.net

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-10-most-useless-graduate-degrees-172315282.html

I'm so happy that chemical engineering is listed because for the most part, its core knowledge base is around distillation, which had ended in America during the oil patch bust of the 80s. In addition, chemical process engineering had also been rightsized out of America. Those companies UOP, Dow, DuPont, etc have been merging and sacking ppl for years.

Afterwards, for careers in energy/fracking [ or whatever ], any generic mechanical engineering or more specialized, "petroleum" engineering would suffice in terms of academic training. For an area as specialized as energy, however, it's probably best to study in the Texas triangle and attempt to gain an internship in the Houston area, prior to graduation. They don't take too kindly to newbies w/o experience.

Biotech also hires chemical engineers but almost none of the school education is needed for bioreactor batch processing or even separation technologies. At best, a chemical engineer in biotech is a BS level cell biologist/biochemist with a couple of years at the pilot plant facility. That's hardly worth getting a STEM degree for.

The only reason for a masters degree in chemical engineering is if one, your undergrad was in let's say Math/Economics but then, you wanted to sit for the Patent Agent exam. Well, most likely, you'll need a STEM masters to be eligible. Plus, various brand name schools, like Carnegie Mellon or Johns Hopkins, don't have difficult admissions to an MS chem engin program because 90% of the applicants are international students. Thus, it can also suffice for a lateral move into let's say management consulting or finance, if you get tired of working on patents as the aforementioned areas like to recruit elite school alumni over let's say a Petroleum guy from Texas A&M.