Most Lucrative College Degrees In The Us, Revealed

Teenagers who want to be dancers or playwrights: Your parents have new data to wield against you. The median incomes of top STEM majors from elite universities run laps around the salaries of average college graduates, according to government data that the New York Times reported on this week.

The highest-earning degree in the US…is Mathematics at Duke. Its undergraduates earn a median income of $297,029 four years after graduation, according to the HEA Group, which crunched the tax returns of students who graduated during the 2017–18 and 2018–19 school years and received federal financial aid.

HEA also found that:

• Duke, Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA, MIT, Pomona College, and several Ivy League schools accounted for the country’s 10 highest-earning programs, six of which were computer science. Median incomes started at $217,000.
• Nursing majors from some California schools made ~$150,000, landing in the top 100 out of nearly 25,000 bachelor’s programs analyzed.
• Among the liberal arts, English majors medianed out at $48,920, but history majors can outearn them by $50,000+.

Zoom out: Though some critics object to an earnings-only assessment of a degree’s success, a new rule could cut federal student loans for undergraduate programs that don’t beat the median high school graduate income of $34,808. Juilliard—whose music program came in under this baseline in HEA’s assessment—said its projected graduate earnings for 2026 would pass this test.—ML

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