Where to go to college to make the most money

Where to go to college to make the most
money — for each major
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By Matt O'Brien  
Forget the dorms, the dining halls, the parties, the
picturesque quads, and, yes, even the libraries. Where
should you go to college if all you care about is making
the most money?
Well, that depends. None of the Ivies are actually among
the top 25 schools for best-paid young grads. Instead, it's
engineering schools, like Harvey Mudd, and the service
academies whose students have the highest-starting
salaries.
But that, of course, doesn't mean you shouldn't apply to
Harvard. (Even if you could get the same education for
$1.50 of late charges at the public library ). First off, peak
earnings matter more than immediate ones. And second,
there are big different things going on with these
numbers. Engineers, you see, tend to make more money,
so a school full of them will too. But that doesn't mean
it's the best school for engineers. Just that it has a lot of
them, and nothing else.
So what we really want to see is which schools have the
highest earnings for which majors later on in life. And
we can figure that out by looking at Payscale's numbers .
They have self-reported earnings for grads from over
1,000 schools, which admittedly has its limitations—I
doubt MIT grads are outside the top ten highest paid for
computer science—but it's the best we've got. And if we
break it down this way, it turns out that Harvey Mudd
isn't really the best school for engineers. Rice is. You can
see that in the chart below, which looks at the top ten
engineering programs in the country based on their
grads' mid-career earnings.
I added one last wrinkle. The dark blue bars show the
schools that have top 10 programs, based on future
earnings, for more than one of the most lucrative majors.
After all, it's hard enough for a 22-year old to have an
inkling of what they want to do with their lives, let alone
an 18-year old. That why, unless you're precociously self-
assured, you want to go to a school that keeps your
options open — which is where the Harvard, Stanfords,
and Berkeleys of the world distinguish themselves.
Here, for example, are the best-paid computer science
programs. And there's Berkeley again. (These, remember,
show median salaries, so the Mark Zuckerbergs and
Kevin Systroms don't pull their schools' numbers up).
Or we could look at social science majors — i.e.,
economics — and see that, once again, Stanford
alums end up making more than any others.
As for everybody who tells you that majoring in the
humanities is career suicide? Well, that's certainly not
true for Harvard grads, who end up earning as much as
any other kind of major anywhere else. (That's what
happens when History majors all end up working on Wall
Street or as corporate lawyers). But, as you can see,
Berkeley, Northwestern, California-Irvine, and even Cal
Poly alums all do well themselves — just like in their
other majors.
The lesson, then, is to beware college rankers bearing
school-wide earnings numbers. If you know, really know,
what you want to study, then you should apply to the
schools that have the best (and best-remunerated)
programs in that area. But if you don't, you're probably
better off applying to, yes, a liberal arts college that offers
you a lot of great classes in a lot of different subjects. And
those aren't just the Ivy-plus schools. The whole
University of California system is exemplary, as are other
public schools like the University of Virginia, just to
name a few.
So sorry Harvey Mudd, but your grads aren't really the
best-off. The boring truth is it depends on what you want
to study, and how much it costs to study that at a
particular school. Although a nice quad never hurts.