<p>Oh you busted me. I threw 75% out there as a rule of thumb.</p>
<p>However, that’s how the market works. We can’t magically tell how good someone is until late in their career, when they’ve already proven themselves, so employers tend to go by things like majors and internships. Supply/demand will naturally place an approximate value on someone based on those factors. You can find an engineer who will work for $30,000 per year, but it’s like shopping for a computer assuming you’ll find one for $40 because the website has a bug. Risky planning.</p>
<p>So, we can’t predict what someone will be making 30 years from now or how many times they’ve changed fields (and most incoming college kids probably don’t really care anyway), but we can look at surveys of recent graduates from within the past few years and see a pattern (more relevant anyway). In popular majors, the vast majority of employees make almost the same amount. There are only a handful of outliers making way less or way more.</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.careers.calpoly.edu/search.php?yr=2010%20-%202011[/url]”>https://www.careers.calpoly.edu/search.php?yr=2010%20-%202011</a></p>
<p>Select “undergraduates” and check out some of the most popular “high-paying” majors.</p>
<p>Accounting:</p>
<p>$16,000
$17,000
$25,000
$27,840
$31,000
$35,000
$36,000
$38,000
$40,000
$40,000
$40,000
$47,000
$48,000
$48,000
$50,000
$50,000
$50,000
$50,000
$50,500
$51,000
$51,000
$51,000
$51,000
$51,500
$51,500
$51,500
$51,500
$51,500
$51,500
$51,500
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$52,000
$53,000
$53,000
$53,000
$54,000
$54,000
$54,000
$55,000
$56,000
$56,000
$56,000
$56,000
$56,200
$57,000
$60,000
$65,000
$65,000
$68,000
$70,000
$70,000</p>
<p>From my speedy count, 34 out of 45 grads are making $50,000 to $55,000. </p>
<p>34*100/45 is…</p>
<p>Oh my goodness. 75.5% of grads with an accounting degree are making nearly the exact same amount of money. The median happens to be $52,000. But accounting is just a boring linear climb up the corporate ladder, right? No risk involved.</p>
<p>How about a “high risk/talent-driven” field with a less predictable career track, like computer Science: </p>
<p>24 out of 32 Cal Poly CS grads are making $70k-80k. </p>
<p>Exactly 75%.</p>
<p>Almost every major you’ll find follows the Salary website/BLS/etc. cliches where they place outliers into the remaining top and bottom 12.5%. You CAN roughly estimate what you will be making based on your major.</p>
<p>Now lets look at journalism. Most employees reported unreported(0?). 10 out of 47 were only employed part time. The reported salary range jumps from $21,450 to $380,000 (which could possibly be a joke response, but who knows) in 17 spots. There’s absolutely no market pattern going on and anyone planning a career based on that degree is really gambling compared to engineering or accounting.</p>