It seems to me like engineering is becoming more and more concentrated at the massive engineering factories like Texas A&M, Georgia Tech, and the Big 10 schools. I think a lot of the smaller schools don't have the finances to compete.

If you switch your kids major from chemistry to chemical engineering you will double his pay immediately. The starting salaries in oil/gas and power generation are on the rise big time.

Chemistry is indeed a evolving and important career path, in any scenario involving BAU at some level. I have two daughters in college. One in California looking at natural health systems and nutrition, and one at MIT taking Physics and Material science courses. Both a better bet than political science or a wall street job today. I have a friend whose daughter is at harvard and is amazed at the number of feckless seniors at Harvard are concerned that they have prepared for a cushy job on Wall Street and they suddenly don't exist.

I have a degree in Chemistry and program computers for a living. Deciding to go into pure chemistry as and undergraduate was the best decision I ever made. Gaining and understanding of one of the basic sciences is worth its weight in gold. Save the engineering for graduate school four years is barely enough time to pick up a basic grasp of physics, chemistry and mathematics.

With my background I can program computer, work in any number of chemical related industries, work in the medical field as a lab technician. Actually understand agriculture etc etc. People that don't understand chemistry miss a lot about our world and how it works.

As far as Chemistry being in demand thats a tough one generally in the US you really have to go to graduate school to get a job doing chemistry simply because most of the synthetic work is either drug related or about industrial catalysts. Both areas require advanced degrees. Most chemical production has been outsourced to areas such as China with weak pollution laws.

I made the mistake of taking advanced basket weaving in graduate school theoretical chemistry which is practically worthless but was a lot of fun. If I was entering the field today I'd focus on nano-technology which has a huge untapped potential. We are just now getting to the point that we can do non-homogeneous chemical reactions or real three dimensional chemistry. For example the concept of creating something quite similar to a spiders spinnerets is now conceptually feasible.

Or another example something like a spinneret that creates endless carbon nanotubes. In many cases this is a fusion of concepts from making computer chips and activating the surfaces with catalytic agents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanochemistry

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=EWejwvtfMwwC&dq=nano+chemistry&pr...

Beyond this I'm using my degree now to investigate using liquid nitrogen as a energy store
for renewable energy. You can't do that with a Computer Science degree.

Chemistry and particularly chemical engineering should be just fine. I would look at the history of basic chemical processes as society powers down. We will have to learn how to produce basic chemicals with less energy. We will also have to look to other more sustainable sources for plastics, fertilizers, as well as energy.