I am about a month from completing an MPH (Epidemiology and Biostatistics concentration) and my thoughts are on the job market as I comb through opportunities and talk with peers and mentors. To better understand the labor market, it was helpful to look at recent labor survey data. To compare apples to apples, I adjusted wages by 2023 cost of living estimates by state.

I started off by looking at the count of epidemiologists by group in a bar chart. This hits home what a huge employer federal, state, and local governments are for those working in this field (Figure 1).

Then I grouped epidemiologists by NAICS group title and reported the average mean adjusted annual wage and total employed by group (Table 1).

Table 1: Mean adjusted income by group for epidemiologists (adjusted by cost of living)
Group title Mean adjusted annual wage ($US) Total sampled
Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences 115270.35 370
Scientific Research and Development Services 112754.95 410
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services 105385.32 980
Health Care and Social Assistance 88985.64 1160
Management of Companies and Enterprises 87353.57 90
General Medical and Surgical Hospitals 85400.37 640
Hospitals 85251.56 690
Local Government, excluding schools and hospitals (OES Designation) 69549.86 1720
Federal, State, and Local Government, excluding state and local schools and hospitals and the U.S. Postal Service (OES Designation) 69315.88 10000
State Government, excluding schools and hospitals (OES Designation) 67711.76 3160
Ambulatory Health Care Services 54783.72 40
Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools 43565.88 70
Educational Services 43565.88 140

Now I knew in which industry groups epidemiologists were employed and what the wage range looked like, but where in the United States would an epidemiologist most likely to be employed and and also get a higher salary? I grouped the data by state and used percent_rank() to determine which states fell in the top 25% for number employed and which landed in the top 25% for highest average adjusted annual wage. States who scored highly in both of these rankings are highlighted in green in the interactive table below (Table 2). Note that I did not take into consideration a state’s population size, which should be considered when looking at these rankings. For example, it makes sense that a state like California employs a large number of epidemiologists, and a less populated state like Alaska employs fewer (70).

Finally, I created a scatter plot to see where each state lands in terms of correlation between the number employed as epidemiologists and the average adjusted annual wage. I see a couple of outliers (e.g., average wage in New Jersey is high, but the number employed (440) is fairly low) but for the most part, states tended to have fewer than 500 epidemiologists and paid in the $60K-$90K range. There is a weak positive association (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.38) between number employed in the survey data and average wage.

Data

I used the most recent data tables provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Research estimates by state and industry/all sectors). This data is derived from sample surveys, which are subject to sampling and non-sampling error. To take into consideration variations in cost of living from state to state, I adjusted salary values using the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center (MERIC) cost of living estimates for 2023. According to their website, MERIC arrives an the cost of living index by averaging the indices of cities and metropolitan areas in a state.

To conduct this analysis, I cleaned and joined these two data sets and filtered to only include observations where the occupational title is “Epidemiologists”. I used the following variables:

I then calculated the mean adjusted annual wage by creating a new variable using this formula:

\(adjusted salary = (mean Annual Salary(1 + 1-cost Of Living Index/100))\)

Conclusions

Limitations

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023, April 27). Tables created by BLS. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved March 21, 2024 from https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.

Karol Łukaszczyk. (June 2023). Cost of living in State in USA - MERIC (adapted from Missouri Economic Research and Information Center’s Cost of Living Data Series), Version 1. Retrieved March 21, 2024 from https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/lukkardata/cost-of-living-missouri-economic-research.

Link to the code for this analysis: https://github.com/LyndsayM/salaries