Looking for a great place to find your next job? Move to Texas. A new WalletHub study finds Houston and Austin to be the two top metro areas in the United States for those with science, technology, engineering and math careers. The Raleigh, NC, Denver, CO and Omaha, NE metro areas round out the top five on the list.
For the study, WalletHub analyzed the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country. It looked at 11 key metrics including job openings per capita for STEM graduates, percentage of all workers in STEM occupations, STEM employment growth, and annual median wage for STEM workers.
All the places that typically come to mind when you think of STEM jobs—namely New York, Silicon Valley in California, Boston, and Washington, DC—didn’t even make it in the top 20. The DC area came in at 25, Boston was ranked number 35, San Francisco was 38, and New York City was a low 76. Meanwhile, the top ten list included Seattle, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City, and Columbus and Cincinnati in Ohio.
San Jose, Washington DC, and Seattle do boast the largest percentage of workers in STEM jobs. But San Francisco and New York City also suffer from the lowest annual median wages for STEM workers when adjusted for cost of living, while San Jose and Washington, DC have some of the lowest housing affordability.
Prachi Patel is a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh. She writes about energy, biotechnology, materials science, nanotechnology, and computing.
