The most common advice given to students on what to study at university tends to focus on salary and job prospects. One’s choice of major makes a huge difference to future earnings and job security, according to an analysis of census data by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Yes, engineers and finance students out-earn English majors. But it’s not as simple as that. Business may be one of the highest-paying majors, for example, but subject to a really wide range—graduates on the low end of the salary distribution can make less than an average teacher.
Here’s a breakdown of the many ways that what you study determines your future earnings power, drawing from data on US graduates:
A petroleum engineering major, on average, makes $136,000 a year:
An early-childhood education major, on the other hand, makes just $39,000, on average:
Median salary levels show a pretty stark difference between majors, but it’s important to understand the degree to which earnings vary within a field. The range of salaries in some of the most lucrative fields—engineering or business, for example—is much wider than in lower-paying industries, making above-average social workers better off than a fair few coders or financiers:
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors start out making the most money—an average of $60,000 for 25-34 year olds. And their salary grows more quickly over time than every other group as well. Teaching and service-oriented majors in particular see very little wage growth over the course of a graduate’s career:
A finance major tends to substantially out-earn somebody who focuses on human resources:
Social science has a very clear hierarchy as well, with economists vastly out-earning anthropologists:
Your major determines how likely you are to go to graduate school, and how much you’re likely to get out of it. More than half of biology and life-science majors go on to get a graduate degree, and they make 63% more than those who don’t. But only around a fifth of journalism and communications majors do, and they get a much more modest bump in salary when they do:
