Perhaps if you picked a college and a major, people can offer an opinion on what the ROI of that setup might be. Otherwise they will talk about what they know best. You really need both a college and a major.
You mentioned Glassdoor is similar. Specific Glassdoor numbers are listed below for Google SV. These are much closer to the previously listed Payscale only SV numbers,. The larger difference between Payscale and Glassdoor appeared to be on the low end, rather than the high end,. Payscale had a 25th percentile base near $110k, while Google reported $129k. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-San-Jose-Salaries-EJI_IE9079.0,6_KO7,24_IL.25,33_IM761.htm?experienceLevel=LESS_THAN_ONE
Google Software Engineers with <1 year Experience Working in Silicon Valley
25th Percentile Base = $129k
75th Percentile Base = $149k“Total Pay” Average = $145k
“This estimate is based upon 11942 Google Software Engineer salary report(s) provided by employees”
There are a variety of reasons why this difference may exist, such as Glassdoor was sorted by <1 year experience rather than hired as L3, not controlling for only bachelor’s degree with little work experience, and self-selection bias. I expect both Glassdoor and Levels sources bias in the upward due to self selections in who chooses to participate on and post salary on the site as described in my earlier post.
However, high school seniors are less likely to know that when choosing a college. I.e. they may not know that they may be one of those who can get a $400k per year elite job that would allow them to pay off $250k college debt quickly, and that there is not an economic or industry downturn the year that they graduate that greatly limits the job prospects. Or that they could decide that they really want to do something other than the highest paying jobs that the college debt pressures them to seek.
College Scorecard also includes only graduates who received federal financial aid, so it excludes those who may be better connected or less constrained through high income parents and such. So it may not be too surprising of the College Scorecard numbers may be lower than if it included all graduates.
100% in agreement here. Prospective students should pursue the areas that interest them rather than trying to change to fit a different mold. I would never try to get a student to pursue engineering if they don’t find it fascinating. That said, I do believe that students should be aware of where their path MAY take them especially when it comes to considering any level of debt. IMO any non-zero debt should be avoided.
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This thread is titled “ROI Data by Schools and Majors”. Threads having to with ROI/salary/earnings/new worth/… often move to the discussions relating to the highest numbers. Even among specific highly selective colleges, the discussion often focus on the highest small portions of earnings at that college, rather than typical earnings for students at that college. CS is the major associated with highest median earnings, with only a bachelor’s.
I suspect a lot of this relates to the nature of the forum. The forum relates to college admission, and people who are targeting highly selective colleges are dramatically overrepresented. People who are targeting highly selective colleges often tend to target fields associated with among the highest salaries, as well as certain specific companies perceived as “elite” or highly selective. At HYPSM… type colleges the most common planned fields of study are generally a combination of CS/Tech, Econ, Medicine, and Law. I expect students and persons who plan to work in these types of fields are dramatically overrepresented on the forum. Parents working in these types of fields are also likely dramatically overrepresented for similar reasons.
As the typical earnings for CS majors have increased, the portion of students at highly selective colleges with open major enrollment who major in CS has had a corresponding increase… usually lagging a few years behind market changes,. Some specific numbers for Stanford are below:
CS Major Enrollment at Stanford
2019 – 745 (peak before COVID/remote influence on major declaration)
2015 – 661 (CS becomes the most enrolled major ever, surpassing History during Vietnam war)
2012 – 360 (CS overtakes Hum Bio to become Stanford’s most enrolled major of 2012)
2006 – 129 (minimum following dot com crash)
2001 – 250 (peak before effects from dot com crash in early 2000)
1995 – 106
1986 – 26 (first year CS major is offered)
The other most common majors of 2019 (pre-COVID) were as follows. East coast Ivy-type college generally have greater relative portion choosing econ/finance and smaller portion choosing CS, although CS is still the most common major at many Ivy-type colleges.
Most Common Majors at Stanford
- Computer Science – 745
- Biology + Human Biology – 334
- Economics – 197
- Symbolic Systems – 179
- Engineering – 170
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At CC, almost every thread has the potential to become a “bragging thread” and some parents are quite certain they have a plenty to brag about, even if indirectly.
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I agree with this 100% One can’t just take Student A and suggest to them they major in X. While they might be able to crunch through and graduate with a degree, if they don’t have some natural talent, they aren’t going to be great at what they do. Some folks end up in the lower 25% of what’s earned - and some never get the job to begin with because they don’t do well on the entry tests. They can end up as a barista or waiter wondering why they spent the time/money getting their degree.
Then too, many who start in X major probably figure out their freshman or sophomore year that it isn’t going to work for them (like many pre-meds) and then need to decide what to do. Time is clicking away to graduate within 4 years.
Aim kids the way they are naturally inclined to go. For some, this will be pre-med, engineering, or CS and they’ll thrive, but not necessarily for generic Student A.
Same goes for plumbing and most of the trades.
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Threads like these (ROI) trend towards higher ROI type careers, I guess that’s kind of natural. Personally, I’d like to hear about other fields especially since I have a D starting college this fall. Let’s have some talk on ME outcomes? What can we expect for average types and stellar types?
When numbers get tossed in to the discussion we hear lots of stats and, when available, some pitch in with actual experiences of their kids. That’s what I try to do, just add actual numbers into the conversations, not accomplishments, just numbers. And, in the words of the late Walter Brennan, “No brag, just fact”. (I know, I’m dating myself 
)
I think a lot of defense companies hire ME grads – places like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Miter, United Technologies etc. Those numbers are probably in the 120 type range from one or two examples I heard about. I think the auto guys in detroit etc are in the 80k range. Microsoft (for their devices like surface etc) and Amazon (for all the warehouse robotics) probably start their MEs in the mid to high 100 area. I heard places like Applied Materials wants a combination of skills like ME/EE/some programming, and the whole package could be in the high 100s. Places like Tesla and SpaceX are considered unpleasant. Boston Dynamics is considered cool, but I don’t know what they pay. I am not sufficiently plugged in. You can also go and work for NASA. A lot of the MEs have a choice to do either pure ME or a mixture of ME and Aero.
ME starting salary tends to have less variation than CS. For example, in a thread from a few years ago, I looked up the following median earnings in the CollegeScorecard database. The numbers are not inflation adjusted, so they’d be a little higher today. College selectivity and rate of high achieving students at the college seemed far less correlated with 1st year earnings in ME than CS. ME’s not being especially concentrated in a few small very high cost of living areas like SV also contributes.
Ivies = USNWR top 20 national universities that are Ivies
T20 = USNWR top 20 national universities that are not Ivies
T50 Pri = USNWR top 21-50 national private universities
T50 Pub = USNWR top 20-50 national public universities
All = All reported 4-year private non-profit and public universities in database
------------------ MEDIAN FIRST YEAR EARNINGS BY MAJOR -----------
Major Ivies T20 T50 Pri T50 Pub All
Mechanical Engineering $71k $72k $66k $66k $63k
Salary earnings posted by college reports are below. . Starting around $70k base salary seems like a reasonable rough estimate for this major, with a good amount of variation depending on things like location, experience, skill set, company, etc.
Reported Median ME Major Salaries at Various Colleges
Yale – Median = $75k
Stanford – Median = $74k, Range= $60-98k
Michigan – Median = $74k
GeorgiaTech – Median = $74k, 95th = $99k
Purdue – Median = $70k, 25th-75th = $62-72k
Texas A&M – Median = $70k, 25th-75th = $65-75k
UCSD – Median = $70k
WPI – Median = $69k
Bucknell – Median = $68k
Iowa State – Median = $65k
South Dakota Mines – Median = $64k
I work in engineering, and this seems reasonably close to personal experience at companies I am familiar with as well. However, the companies I am more familiar with often focus more on experienced workers and/or persons with graduate degrees than inexperienced new grads. Persons who can hit the ground running with experience similar to the job requirements rather than requiring a lot of training may be qualified to apply for positions with higher typical salaries than the numbers above.
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Do you have any data on how that would compare to BME? Posts on CC typically characterize BME as tough to use with just a BS.
One difference in BME has a smaller market than the other discussed tech majors. There are far fewer BME grads and far fewer BME specific jobs. For example, the BLS lists the following number of jobs in the United States by field.
Software Developers – 2 million
Mechanical Engineers – 300k
Bio/Biomedical Engineers – 20k
I expect this leads to a more varied type of jobs among BME BS grads than in other engineering fields. For example, Brown’s most recent pre-COVID BME class lists the following job titles and companies in their survey. It’s my understanding that BME BS grads are generally finding work with well above average salaries, but the work may not be as closely related to degree studies as certain other tech fields.
- Analyst, Acsel Health
- Analyst, US Food and Drug Administration
- Application Consultant, Lightning Bolt Solutions
- Associate Biomedical Engineer, Medtronic
- Associate Rotational Program, AMGEN
- Clinical Research Scientist, Medtronic
- Design Researcher, Essential
- Engineer 1, Vaxess
- Field Applications Engineer, HighRes Biosolutions
- Medical Assistant/Scribe, Cure Urgent Care
- Medical Scribe, Brown Emergency Medicine
- Production Engineer (Statistics/Data Analysis), Natera
- Professional Research Assistant - Pediatrics Department, University of Colorado Denver
- Project Manager, Matchstick, LLC
- Research Associate, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
- Research Technician - Hammond Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Scientific Analyst, Aetion
- Teaching Assistant, DownCity Design
College salary surveys are often not meaningful for BME because of the small sample size of what is typically less than 10 students who often work in significantly varied positions like above. One of the largest sample sizes I am aware of is GeorgiTech, which is below. I listed several other tech majors in addition to BME as a comparison. This is from 2019-20 to minimize effects of COVID. 48 BME students are in the sample.
CS: 89% received offers, 87% accepted offers, Median base = $101k
IE: 93% received offers, 88% accepted offers, Median base = $77k
EE: 89% received offers, 75% accepted offers, Median base = $76k
Civil: 87% received offers, 84% accepted offers, Median base = $74k
ME: 74% received offers, 68% accepted offers, Median base = $74k
Aero: 71% received offers, 66% accepted offers, Median base = $74k
BME: 69% received offers, 59% accepted offers, Median base = $72k
Across the Payscale sample, the median was $71k – similar to Georgiatech. Across the full CollegeScorecard sample, median 1st year earnings ranged from $75k at UIUC to $35k at JHU. Perhaps the latter involves something related to pre-med, such as favoring research assistant type work that might offer a better chance of future med school acceptance, even though salary may be low. The overall median across all schools looks like ~$65k.
If anyone is interested, I looked up the highest and lowest reported median 1st year tax reported earnings in the CollegeScorecard database, averaged averaged across all reported colleges and averaged across only the top ~7% most selective colleges among the reporting colleges. The latter group is expected to have a much higher concentration of high achieving students. As has been noted elsewhere in the thread, this database only includes students in the federal database, such as students who took out loans or received Pell grants. The group is also restricted to only students who were employed, were not enrolled in college, and earned at least 150% of poverty threshold (at least $18k for single persons). For the all college grouping, I included majors for which there was a very large sample of colleges reporting.
Across all students, the highest earning majors are almost entirely vocationally focused such as engineering or nursing/dental (not the same as STEM). One of the few exceptions is applied mathematics. The lowest earning majors are a mix performance based, biological sciences related, English-related, and religious related.
Computer Science, Economics, and Business related majors have a substantial difference between the top 7% most selective colleges and all colleges. Non-computer engineering and nursing show much smaller differences. The types of majors that are lowest earnings seem similar between all colleges and most selective colleges, but most selective colleges often have more variation in types of biological majors.
Highest Median 1st Year Earnings: All Colleges
- Computer Eng – $70k
- Electrical Eng – $70k
- Industrial Eng – $67k
- Computer Science – $66k
- Construction Management – $65k
- Chemical Eng – $65k
- Mechanical Eng – $65k
- Aerospace Eng – $65k
- Nursing – $64k
- General Eng – $61k
- Civil Eng – $61
- Electrical Tech – $60k
- Mechanical Tech – $59k
- Clinical/Medical Lab – $57k
- Dental Support – $57k
- Computer Systems Analyst – $56k
- Computer + Information Science – $56k
- Applied Mathematics – $56k
- Environmental Eng – $56k
- Biomedical Eng – $55k
Highest Median 1st Year Earnings: Only Top ~7% Most Selective Colleges
- Computer Science – $95k
- Computer Eng – $88k
- Computer + Information Science – $87k
- Electrical Eng – $78k
- Industrial Eng – $71k
- Mechanical Eng – $69k
- Nursing – $69k
- Aerospace Eng – $69k
- Chemical Eng – $69k
- Applied Mathematics – $68k
- Civil Eng – $67k
- Finance – $67k
- Electrical Tech – $65k
- Economics – $63k
- Accounting – $62k
- Statistics – $61k
- Business – $60k
- Environmental Eng – $59k
- Biomedical Eng – $58k
Lowest Median 1st Year Earnings: All Colleges
- Dance – $22k
- Drama/Theater – $22k
- Film/Video – $24k
- Communication Disorders – $24k
- Fine/Studio Arts – $24k
- Zoology – $24k
- Visual & Performing Arts – $25k
- Audiovisual Communication Tech – $25k
- Anthropology – $25k
- Music – $26k
- Theological Studies – $26k
- Linguistics – $27k
- Ecology – $27k
- Physiology – $27k
- Biology – $27k
- Bible Studies – $28k
- Health/Pre-med – $28k
- English – $28k
- Nutrition – $28k
- Composition Writing – $28k
Lowest Median 1st Year Earnings: Only Top ~7% Most Selective Colleges
- Dance – $19k
- Communication Disorders – $21k
- Music – $24k
- Drama/Theater – $25k
- Visual & Performing Arts – $25k
- Fine/Studio Arts – $27k
- Cellular Biology – $28k
- Anthropology – $28k
- Composition Writing – $28k
- Biology – $30k
- Health/Pre-med – $30k
- Film/Video – $30k
- Ecology – $30k
- Neurobiology – $31k
- Philosophy – $31k
- Natural Resources Conservation – $32k
- Ethnic/Gender Studies – $32k
- Biochemistry / Molecular Biology – $32k
- English – $33k
- Area Studies – $33k
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Thanks. Very interesting.
So, unsurprisingly, the biggest premiums (of selective college median earnings over all college median earnings) are for comp science, math, econ, finance, and engineering.
Comp & Info Science $31k
Comp Sci $29k
Comp Eng $18K
Finance >$12k
Applied Math $12k
Econ >$8k
Elec Eng >$8k
Accounting >$7k
Stats >$6k
Civil Eng $6k
Business >$5k
One also needs to consider cause and correlation. For example, the median for Mechanical Engineer was $65k for all colleges vs $69k for highly selective colleges. I suspect that this relatively small $4k difference primarily relates to having a much high concentration of high achieving students at the highly selective colleges, rather than the school name itself.
However, for economics I suspect that the difference median earnings largely relates to a high concentration of students at highly selective colleges working in “elite” finance/consulting, and school name may make a noteworthy difference in this field.
Computer science is less clear because it is difficult to separate the effects of location. Students at highly selective colleges are far more likely to work in much higher cost of living areas like Silicon Valley after graduation, which also average a much higher 1st year earnings. If you control for both cost of living and rate of high achieving students, then the difference will no doubt be much smaller. However, it may still be significant.
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Yes, of course. There are many factors at play and, as we have discussed in other threads, it is very difficult to isolate causation.
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I’d venture to say this and HCOL areas are the cause of all the differences.
As I said before, Student A can go in to X major and potentially graduate, but without natural talent for it, they aren’t going to excel at it and therefore have less of a chance of being a high earner. Non-selective schools are getting far more average students than highly selective schools.
I think the HCOL areas are also attractive to students from highly selective schools more than non-selective where students mainly want to go to college within 3 hours of home - then work close to home too. The salaries are lower, but since costs are too, these might have a better ROI for actual life.
I know when we looked for a home base we considered a place with a higher salary - until I looked at housing costs. We did far better with a somewhat lower salary and not having to funnel so much of it into housing. I’m eternally grateful I thought to consider that aspect TBH.
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In the real world (i.e. non CC) I have not observed that much of this matters. Family A- lives in an expensive, high cost of living area. I don’t know ANYONE who thinks 'Well jeez, if little Johnny goes to uber-high ROI college with an uber- successful major and then moves to Little Rock he’ll really be swimming in dough".
Real people have a budget, and then lots of other values they are trying to maximize. The right vibe for their kid (don’t want a pressure cooker for a kid prone to anxiety), close enough to come home for Grandma’s birthday lunch on a Sunday and then get back to school in time for an early Monday class, and what seems to be a bunch of potentially interesting majors. In the real world people know that if you have a kid who wants to be an early childhood educator, continuously telling him “You’d make more money in CS” or telling her “You should really become an orthopedic surgeon” is a stupid thing to do.
That’s the real world. You have a budget, you have a kid with his/her interests, you have other constraints, and you try to find a happy middle ground for all those things.
On CC- every kid is the next Nobel prize winner, trying to decide if Cal Tech’s ROI in physics beats Berkeley’s.
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Agreed.
We encouraged D22 to research the salaries for any careers she might be interested in before she even started high school. Discussed our finances in detail and what we were comfortable paying for college last year. And then let her figure out what she wants.