Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Top 10 College Majors that Pay

Lord knows I don't believe money is the most important thing in life given that I teach at a NYS community college, but if that's your thing, here's what you should major in according to PayScale.com.


This is for graduates with a bachelor's degree and either starting median pay (darker blue bars) or mid-career median pay (lighter blue bars).  See website for methodology.

Note that 7 of the 10 fields have "Engineering" in the job title and all are heavily math dependent.

What's ironic about this is that our community college offers an engineering major that's always on the verge of being discontinued due to low enrollment.  Our students do very well, often transferring to schools like Clarkson and RPI, but the real problem is that virtually all of our incoming students (local high school graduates) are so deficient in math skills it would take them 1-2 years before getting up to calculus I level math such that they could even start taking engineering classes!

We have plenty of humanities and social science majors, however.  I wish them luck finding employment in today's marketplace.

1 comment:

  1. Speaking as a jobless physics major: Just because they pay a lot doesn't mean there are jobs out there. Economy is still pretty bad.

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