At Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, the undergraduate class of 2014 did very well on the job market. Nearly three quarters of its 563 graduates are employed while 15% are in graduate school. The majority who’ve found jobs landed impressive starting salaries. Computer science majors, on average, were hired at $71,500, while the high salary for that major was $102,000. Chemical engineers also did well, with average starting salaries of $72,100 and a high of $100,000. One reason Stevens students get such well-paying jobs: almost the entire class majors in some subset of engineering or computer science.
Those two majors come out on top in a new large-scale survey, called “2015 State of College Hiring,” by Looksharp, a company that runs an entry-level and internship jobs site called Internmatch. It got 46,000 of its users to fill out a 52-question survey about everything from whether they got jobs following their internships (students with paid internships were three times more likely to have lined up full-time jobs than those who did unpaid internships) to how they look for jobs (Google, not surprisingly, is the No. 1 tool). I asked Nathan Parcells, a Looksharp vice president and co-founder of the six-year-old San Francisco startup, to delve into the report and tell me the college majors that led to the highest starting salaries.
I’ve reported on this subject numerous times before, including three stories using data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Surveys consistently show that computer science and engineering are the surest path to the highest pay straight out of college. While NACE’s 2013 survey broke down engineering degrees into its various parts, like petroleum and chemical engineering, and also computer engineering (which focuses more on hardware than computer science), the Looksharp survey lumps engineering into one category, with a $65,000 starting salary, just behind computer science, the No. 1 major at $66,800.
Looksharp covers 22 majors in all. They include one it calls “psychology and counseling,” another called “architecture and planning,” and a third called “health care.” These are rough categories and they don’t reflect all majors at all colleges. For instance, “communications,” a well-subscribed major my son is considering at UCLA, is nowhere on the list. And UCLA doesn’t have an undergraduate health care major. You can major in architecture there but not architecture and planning. Management is another popular major that lands students well-paying jobs
Parcells says Looksharp has a database of 1,000 majors and “to make the survey results simpler and more actionable,” its questionnaire asked students about 35 majors and then clumped them into 22 “broad buckets.” In other words, like the NACE table, the survey doesn’t cover every major at every college but it does give a sense of the courses of study that are most likely to result in job offers with substantial salaries.
After engineering comes “mathematics and statistics” with a $60,300 starting salary. Then comes economics at $58,600, and finance at $58,000.
Parcells emphasizes that the list reflects average starting salaries across the country. Employers hiring computer science grads in the San Francisco Bay Area offer an average of $85,000, approaching $20,000 more than the national average and computer science majors who graduate at the top of their class can expect offers “well over $100,000,” he says. Of course the cost of living there is among the highest in the country.
There are no surprises on this list, except perhaps the fact that “arts” ranks at No. 18 out of 22, with a salary of $41,500, above history and English, which are at No. 20 and 21, with salaries of $40,300 and $39,600 respectively. Usually arts majors are at rock bottom of such lists. This time “social services” is in last place, with a salary of just $34,700.
For all 22 majors and starting salaries, see our slideshow above or our table below.
