Most Lucrative College Majors
July 15, 2008 | 10:04 pm | by t-blender |Rate It:
forbes.com: The most lucrative college major today: computer engineering. Those with less than five years’ experience are making $60,500, while those with 10 to 20 years’ experience are banking $104,000 per year. “Everything today has a computer in it,” says Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at PayScale.com, an online compensation comparison tool.
Today’s computer engineering majors are designing the integrated circuits that move information around, and employers like AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ), Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) and Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ) can’t hire enough of them.
To gauge the most lucrative majors, we turned to PayScale.com, which collects real-time salary information from 10 million users. They looked at 20 popular majors where most of the graduates go into the private sector; thus, some popular majors, like education and social work, were excluded.
We looked at median salaries to wipe out outliers at the top and bottom ends of the scale. Salaries included bonuses and commissions, but excluded any stock compensation. All jobs were included in the data, not just those specific to the major. Anyone who acquired an advanced degree was excluded from the study.
If you’re looking for a big paycheck straight out of school, think about an engineering degree. The four highest paid majors for people with less than five years’ experience were all engineering-based, with computer engineering leading the way…
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