Just in case you were wondering, it turns out that while in many cases one’s undergraduate major doesn’t really matter so much, a few majors pay a lot better than others.
According to an article by Lynn O’Shaughnessy at CBS Money Watch:
If you hope to earn a college degree that will qualify you for the nation’s best paying jobs, ask yourself this question: Do you feel comfortable around these sorts of brain twisters: differential equations, vectors, harmonic functions and complex exponentials?
A more direct question, however, might simply be: how do you like engineering? The top highest-paying college degrees, by median career salary, are
1. Petroleum engineering ($155,000)
2. Chemical engineering ($109,000)
3. Electrical engineering ($103,000)
4. Material science & engineering ($103,000)
5. Aerospace engineering ($102,000)
6. Physics ($101,000)
7. Computer engineering ($101,000)
8. Nuclear engineering ($97,800)
9. Biomedical engineering ($97,800)
10. Mechanical engineering ($94,500)
These are the people who end up making the most money. No surprise here. Math, it’s all about math.
