Higher Earnings From Your Higher Ed: What To Study in College for Long-Term Financial Gains
Key Insights
- Graduates with biological/biomedical science degrees experience the highest salary increases between their first and fourth years in the workforce.
- Engineering degrees lead to the highest initial salaries, but those earnings grow less dramatically compared to graduates from other fields.
- On average, computer science majors achieve the highest salaries after one year of graduation, while operations research majors earn the highest salaries after four years.
U.S. student debt has ballooned by nearly $600 billion over the last 10 years. The rising costs of college education have caused many people to of a degree that could put them in lasting debt.
But different fields of study can have drastically different results on a graduate鈥檚 financial future. Getting a bachelor's degree usually costs about the same no matter what you study. But some subjects help graduates enter higher-paying jobs faster and can lead to more pay increases early on in their careers. It鈥檚 helpful to consider the potential return on investment (ROI) for different fields of study before committing to a major.
With that in mind, which fields offer the highest earnings one year after graduation? And which fields have the best potential for earning the most money four years after starting a career? We break down these questions below using data from the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 (DOE) College Scorecard.
Terms: The DOE sorts college programs into broad categories with more specific specialties or majors underneath. For example, the Architecture and Related Services category contains degree programs classified as architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design, among others. Throughout this article, we refer to fields of study and majors using the exact DOE names.
Fields of Study with Highest One-Year ROI
According to DOE data, $37,414 is the median yearly wage for all college graduates one year after finishing their bachelor鈥檚 degrees. But the top 10 fields of study produce graduates who earn more than this median salary. In fact, six fields of study (see below) lead to median yearly earnings higher than $50,000 for workers just one year after graduating.
Top 10 Fields for Fast Financial Gains
* Engineering and engineering technology are related but distinct fields: Roughly speaking, engineers design and improve technology and processes and engineering technologists apply these designs and improvements to practical contexts.
Specific Majors with the Highest One-Year ROI
We鈥檝e seen the most lucrative fields of study for young professionals. The table below reveals the individual majors that lead to the highest-paying jobs for graduates after one year.
Top 10 Majors for Fast Financial Gains
Eight out of the ten majors are in engineering 鈥� the highest-paying field 鈥� but there are two big exceptions. The first is construction engineering technologies, which the DOE classifies in the "engineering technologies/technicians" field. And the most notable exception is computer science, the top-paying major for early-career professionals.
Fields of Study with the Fastest Growing Salaries Across Four Years
We鈥檝e seen which fields of study earn graduates the highest initial wages. But what about wage growth in the period between one and four years after graduating? See our calculations of the data below.
Top 10 Fields for Long-Term Financial Gains
These high-growth fields are quite different from the fields that lead to the highest initial payoffs. In fact, most of them aren鈥檛 even in the top 10 highest-paying fields for workers after one year.
In the field of biological and biomedical sciences, there's a big difference between how much money is earned in the first year after graduating and how much the salary grows in the next three years. Even though it's ranked 31st out of 34 fields for how much money you make in the first year after graduation, it's the field where your salary grows the most over the next three years.
It鈥檚 hard to pin down specific causes for these findings, but one reason may be that some career paths have organized growth structures that lead to relatively flat wages until workers are several years into their careers. It鈥檚 also possible that graduates with bachelor's degrees in certain fields are more likely to earn advanced degrees right away, which often leads to better salary potential in the long run. For example, many legal professions and studies graduates may earn Juris Doctor degrees and become lawyers.
Majors with the Fastest Growing Salaries Across Four Years
As with earnings after one year, it's useful to understand which individual majors lead to the highest wage growth for graduates between the first and fourth years after graduating. We鈥檝e calculated the top 10 of these majors here.
Top 10 Majors for Long-Term Financial Gains
The data yields a few majors that haven鈥檛 appeared in our other tables, such as pharmacy, pharmaceutical sciences, and administration. The high earnings growth rate for this category might be a result of many graduates pursuing a Doctor of Pharmacy immediately after college. This degree typically takes four years to finish and is required in order to become a pharmacist, which is often a well-paid career path.
Allied health and medical assisting services is another high-growth area that hasn鈥檛 appeared in our other tables. This category includes programs in areas such as speech-language pathology, veterinary technology, physical therapy, and respiratory therapy. As with pharmacy, many allied health fields require advanced degrees to reach the higher levels, such as a master鈥檚 degree to become a speech-language pathologist or a professional doctorate to become a physical therapist. These graduates may experience early-career salary bumps once they earn their advanced degrees and move on from assistant roles in these career fields.
What the Data Tells Us
Most of the highest-paying fields of study require advanced skills in math and science, including engineering, computer/information sciences and support services, and mathematics/statistics. Humanities and social sciences programs typically don鈥檛 produce graduates who are big earners one year out of college.
Most of the highest-paying fields of study require advanced skills in math and science, including engineering, computer/information sciences and support services, and mathematics/statistics.
It鈥檚 also worth noting that our salary growth numbers are in median dollar amounts, not percentages. Biological and biomedical sciences graduates increase their salaries a median amount of $21,133 over the course of three years, but their median starting point is only $29,441 after one year. This adds up to a median salary of $50,574 four years after earning their bachelor鈥檚 degree.
On the other hand, adding the median first-year salary and growth rate for engineering graduates yields a median salary of $85,901 at the four-year mark. Thus, studying engineering might be more lucrative than studying biological and biomedical sciences, even several years into a career.
Ultimately, this study only takes monetary earnings into account. Not every college student can succeed in a STEM program, and many students would rather study other subjects because they enjoy these subjects and excel at them. There are plenty of potentially fulfilling career paths for students of subjects that don鈥檛 always lead to the largest salaries.
Methodology
For this article, OnlineU pulled data from College Scorecard to determine salaries one year and four years after college for graduates in 189 fields of study. College Scorecard classifies these fields of study using two-digit Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes. To discuss individual majors, we also analyzed salary data for the narrower four-digit CIP codes contained within these fields of study.