Mmmmm petroleum! Where do I sign?

Where I live plumbers make $40/hr, so about $60,000/yr. When the median salary in the U.S. is about $45,000/yr, those starting salaries are fairly pathetic. If there was an actual engineering shortage, they'd be much higher.

Any field where a significant fraction of the BS graduates cannot find a job when they get out isn't experiencing any real shortage. It does however look as though your area, petro engineering, might have a shot at attracting more people.

Granddaughter, a senior ME at UVA, has several good offers for June. One is a major oil refining Company on the East Coast offering over $60,000.

In addition to this, the professors that I know in Physics all complain about the hassles of raising funding for research. There are little dibs and dabs of money here and there, and if you write enough grant proposals, you eventually get enough to hold together a program. Of course you spend all of your time writing proposals and dealing with performance reviews...

Which brings me to a 2nd point. The supply & demand dynamic for PhDs doesn't work well. Each professor takes as many students as he can get funding for, but there is no guarantee of a job for those that graduate. Essentially the only thing that regulates the number of students is a difficulty in attracting the students in the first place (because kids eventually figure out that the field isn't as lucrative as one might have thought in the first place), and of course the availability (or lack of) research funding.

Colleges and universities are trying to reduce the number of tenured faculty positions - they want to hire people for a teaching stint of a couple of years, and then send them on their way to their next posting. They become in effect highly educated migrant workers, but people reach a stage in their lives where they want to settle down and so forth, and this sort of transient life eventually gets very old. For those that want an academic research career, you end up with multiple post-doc appointments, and then perhaps you get a proper permanent job of some sort.

For those who have an insatiable curiosity, the professor's job sounds a lot more interesting despite all of the drawbacks that you noted, but if you add too much administrative BS, people would be more inclined to just take the money.

Rev Karl and pondlife, my wife has been teaching here in Lithuania since she graduated from the Pedagogical Institute (yeah, I know, that dates me, if anyone knows the local folkways). Add Lithuania to the list of countries with a teaching system under severe stress. Rev Karl's phrase "here's the curriculum, don't deviate" really sums it up. What a succinct way to describe de-professionalization. A flickering ray of hope, however: in discussions of what to do, more and more people refer to the need for professional respect, and that is not just a code phrase for higher pay. There is increasing awareness that the generations that transformed Lithuania from a rural backwater to an industrial backwater (sorry, couldn't resist...) are aging, and replacements are desperately needed. Without good teaching, those replacements won't be coming any time soon.