And that is already a lot of money. More money than I can think of spending and enough money to let me save 50% of my paycheque.
So excuse us for making 'barely anything above minimum wage'
Not trying to knock anyone or be condescending. The point is that like 90%+ of biology or chem phds make less than $60k. That is not true of engineers, not by a long shot. There was a recent nytimes article comparing grad student degreees awarded in various fields to jobs in that field. There were more jobs than degrees in comp sci. For life sciences, there were like 115,000 advanced degrees and like 10k jobs