Which Major Pays? An Analysis of the Salaries of Undergraduate Majors in USA
Back when I was looking at which undergraduate major to go into, I wish I had this information available. Now, I’m not saying you should choose your major based solely on how much money you’ll be making once you graduate but knowing that definitely helps one refine their choices. An informed choice is always better.
What we major in has consequences far into our lives. In fact, one can argue that everything else from the point of graduation onwards depends in one way or another on what we majored in, and on where we completed said major.
DATA
The data comes from Payscale’s year-long survey of ~1.2 million users who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. The full dataset can be accessed here
Two different categories of salaries for 50 different majors are covered by the data:
- Median starting salary: The median of what the students were earning right after graduation
- Mid-Career Percentiles: The median10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of their salaries 10 years into their career
What Degrees Have the Best Starting Salary?
Right out of college, the top-earning specialization is for Physician Assistants, with a median of $74,300. Following that, the next 7 majors are all engineering majors. In fact, 8 out of the top 10 majors are Engineering degrees.
The major with the lowest starting salary is Spanish, with a median of $34,000. There isn’t too much variance in the next 9 majors, all of them with a median salary slightly higher than $34,000.
This is only the starting salary, let's have a look at how the salaries are 10 years into the career.
Mid-Career Salaries by Major
Have a look at the top ten, Engineering majors still hold 7 spots and the other 3 are now held by Economics, Physics and Math. The Physician Assistant is now at the 11th position with a mid-career median of $91,700.
The bottom ten haven’t changed much but Nutrition has dropped considerably from the previous graph.
Now, let's have a look at the growth in the median salary from the beginning of the career to ten years later.
The lowest growths have been 23.4% and 23.6% for Physician’s Assistant and Nursing respectively. Physician’s Assistant started off with the top salary and dropped to the 11th spot by mid-career. Nursing also started with a decent starting salary but did not grow much.
The top spot for growth in salary is held by Math and Philosophy, both with a growth of 103.5%. All the engineering fields have growths ranging from 60% to 75%, while this isn’t too much, it is enough to have kept them in the top ten.
Now, let's have a look at how the median salaries themselves are distributed. This should give us a good idea of the risks and opportunities involved with each major.
Distribution of Mid-Career Salaries
This above chart can be interpreted in many ways, I believe that a larger range between the 10th percentile and 90th percentile shows a higher risk and higher reward associated with the major.
Economics, Finance and Math have the largest range between the lowest and highest percentiles in this data. All three majors also have a robust median mid-career salary, this shows that these choices are relatively safe and also hold a lot of potential. A similar thing can be said about Engineering, physics and computer science majors.
The lowest 10th percentiles are for Music, Art History and Philosophy. Strange, Philosophy has a high mid-career median but a very low mid-career 10th percentile. This to me speaks of very high risk or variability in the job market for Philosophy graduates. You can derive similar conclusions about all the other majors present using the four charts above.
Whatever major you end up choosing, make sure its an informed choice. All the best.
As a final note, it's important to realise that everything above is my interpretation of the data. Data that is about 10 years old. While I’m sure much hasn’t changed since the data was collected, do take all this with caution.
What Next?
The logical next step seems to be to look at the career prospects of North American colleges. I have the data, I’ll do just that in my next post.
You can find the code for all this and my other projects on my GitHub.
