An IT qualification remains among the most lucrative college degrees to get these days according to a recent survey by the US National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The salary levels give you a rough guide of what you can expect elsewhere. Engineering grads account for 12 of the 15 the top-paying major degree classes in the US. Those currently graduating with a petroleum engineering degree can expect an average starting offer of $83,121. The top spot was followed by those with engineering degrees in the chemical ($64,902) or mining ($64,404) sectors.

Fourth and fifth places in the salary stakes were taken up by degree holders in computer engineering ($61,738) and in computer science ($61,407). That's considerably higher than the $49,307 average starting salary offer for new college graduates in all disciplines.

"Many of the engineering disciplines benefit from an imbalance in the supply/demand ratio," says Marilyn Mackes, NACE's executive director. "Even in a tight job market, there are simply more opportunities requiring an engineering degree than graduates available to fill those positions. That drives salaries up." And do not despair if you are out of a job or starting the search for your first real IT job. The OECD recently released a positive report on the information and communications technology (ICT) market. The report indicates that the industry is on the road to recovery, pointing to a sudden upturn in global sales of ICT goods in May and June.

This good news comes after manufacturing production fell by as much as 40 percent on an annual basis in Japan, Korea, China and other Asian economies in early 2009.

"The production decline at US and European manufacturers appears to have bottomed out, but a significant rebound is not yet underway. In the US, for example, production in June was down 15 percent year on year but stable from the previous month," the report states.

Here are two other studies that should make you think. A Nielsen survey shows that young children are getting online at a faster rate than their older siblings. About 16 million children ages two to 11 were online in the US during May, making up about 9.5 percent of Internet users. In the past five years, the number of children online has grown by 18 percent, compared with just a 10 percent growth among all Internet users.

The second study, by Forrester Research, shows that parents are taking multiple steps to protect their surfing children. About 44 percent say their means of control is by only allowing computer use in a central living area. About 43 percent say they hold discussions with their children about what they can or cannot do online.

Of the 1,165 online parents, 40 percent said they have set parental controls on the computer to prevent problems from occurring, while 13 percent have installed monitoring software. The sad part is the 10 percent of parents who avoid problems by not allowing their children to have Internet access at all, even though they themselves use it. Cutting off your child's access is like banning them from going to the library, in a way, though some may disagree.

The question on parenting controls was part of a larger study showing the growing awareness people have of the need to have security software as protection against hacking and viruses. It shows that in the economic downturn more and more people are turning to freeware to protect their computers.

About 20 percent of consumers in the survey obtained their antivirus software via a free Internet download, more than any other method, including packages being bundled with their computer.

"Consumers are undoubtedly driven by the price tag, finding the value of security software arbitrary and the pricing models confusing," says Forrester, which attributes the trend to the growing options available for free security software.

A growing source of information and reviews free products on such sites as CNet has also driven the trend. The truth is you can now put together a pretty good package of freeware security products that does a good enough job when stacked with commercial alternatives.

I am a fan. I have not used commercial security packages for about three years. I depend on the free version of AVG (http://free.avg.com) and SpyBot (www.safer-networking.org) to keep the bad guys at bay.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.