Online salary database PayScale.com has put together a 2009 College Salary Report that reveals which schools lead to the biggest returns on what is becoming a larger and larger investment for American families – college tuition. The report highlights initial salaries for graduates and average salaries ten years after graduation. Some of the results are obvious, like the fact that Social Work came in as the least well-paid major, but others are a bit unexpected. Like the fact that, while the Ivy League all star schools are on the top ten list, they aren’t taking the top spot. Yale isn’t even close to the top.
Here’s the list:
School Name / Starting Median Salary / Mid-Career Median Salary
1. Dartmouth College: $58,200 / $129,000
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): $71,100 / $126,000
3. Harvard University: $60,000 / $126,000
4. Harvey Mudd College: $71,000 / $125,000
5. Stanford University: $67,500 / $124,000
6. Princeton University: $65,000 / $124,000
7. Colgate University: $51,900 / $122,000
8. University of Notre Dame: $55,300 / $121,000
9. Yale University: $56,000 / $120,000
10. University of Pennsylvania: $60,400 / $118,000
Your kid not at one of the top ten? Not to worry. All Lee, PayScale’s director of quantitative analysis, says that “even more than where you go to school, the degree you get is a bigger influencer of your pay for the vast majority of Americans.” English majors doesn’t often rake in the big bucks. If you want to be a high earner right off the starting line, go for a degree that involves numbers. Seven of the top ten earning careers are in engineering. That’s right, seven out of ten. The others involve economics, physics and computers.
A few other surprising tidbits: Philosophy majors earn more ten years out of school than business administration and nursing majors. Two of the top ten most popular jobs held by Harvard grads are running a nonprofit and teaching high school. The top paid English majors are technical writers and the top paid political science majors are intelligence analysts.
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