This is very anecdotal, so carries no weight in the discussion, but:
After graduation with my bachelor's degree, I was offered $12.50/hr to stay (can't remember intern pay rate) with a company that I spent the summer interning with.?ÿ Not too bad of an offer for the time period and location (1994 in western Kentucky).?ÿ I decided to go back for my master's instead.?ÿ I summer interned at another location while considering a PhD.?ÿ When I decided to get licensed first, I was offered $8.10/hr to stay.?ÿ I had worked as a summer intern at the second place for $6.50.?ÿ I was a little insulted at the offer and did not accept.?ÿ Dropped a resume off down the road at a fairly new shop, worked one day (with pay) as a kind of audition (and I think they needed to get some layout done while the main surveyor was out of town).?ÿ Was offered $13.00/hr.?ÿ So that is $5 or 60% more within days in the same exact city.?ÿ Four years later, I was making $15.80/hr.?ÿ So an annual salary of about $33,000 in 1998 in western Kentucky.?ÿ That wasn't too bad of a pay rate for the area and time, and was very decent for surveying party chiefs at that time.?ÿ All of the above companies were surveying/engineering firms and all offered similar benefits packages (which weren't too bad at the time).
Flash forward to 2013 and I've put my practice (solo by this time) on pause while teaching at a regional university for a few years.?ÿ As students start graduating, they want to discuss pay and benefits and generally just know what they should expect.?ÿ Almost 20 years after being offered $12.50/hr, students with the same degree were telling me about offers from surveying companies of $8 to $10 / hr with minimal benefits.?ÿ The high offers from surveying/engineering companies of the area were closer to the $12.50 from 20 years earlier with less benefits.?ÿ Using only 2% average inflation that number should have been closer to $21/hr. WITH the same benefits.
End result - the students would very naturally take positions with large out of state construction firms doing construction based surveying.?ÿ The construction firms appreciated their knowledge and wanted them to start by doing layout to gain a deeper understanding of the construction process and would work with them to transition them to job site superintendents or project managers over time.?ÿ The offers were now closer to $60-70K/yr or about $30/hr.?ÿ We lost many potential licensees, party chiefs,?ÿ and survey department managers to the construction industry.