lowest earning college majors 2011 study
Watching my kids struggle with student loan debts and jobs that don’t pay a ton of dough, I’ve had my own doubts. Maybe all that money that they, my husband and I poured into higher education would have been better spent setting them up in businesses that couldn’t be outsourced to Bangladesh, like say, plumbing or time-share sales.
You can’t go by opinion polls alone to answer such an important question, however. After all. if surveyed, a significant portion of the population would no doubt insist that the earth is flat and that Lady Gaga is an artiste rather than warmed-over Madonna. Now, thanks to Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, who crunched the numbers for a new report called What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors, we have some real answers. I say “answers” — plural — because Carnevale argues that the financial return on a bachelor’s degree depends to a large extent on the particular degree the student receives.
Carnevale and his two co-authors Jeff Strohl and Michelle Melton, found that all bachelors degrees “pay off” — earning their recipients 74 percent more over their working lives than those with a high school diploma, even after subtracting the cost of the degree and earnings lost during time in school. But, there’s wide variation among different majors from lifetime earnings of $1.09 million for engineering grads to $241,000 for education majors.
So, to help you nag your children to their fullest earnings potential (the better to support you in your senescence), here are the study’s findings of the ten degrees that produce the top median annual earnings. As for the ten that provide the scantiest returns, well, your kids can remind you that not everything is about money.
The Tops
* Petroleum Engineering……………………………………$120,000
* Pharmacy/pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration $105,000
* Mathematics and Computer Sciences………………….$98,000
* Aerospace Engineering…………………………………….$87,000
* Chemical Engineering………………………………………$86,000
* Electrical Engineering……………………………………….$85,000
* Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering…………..$82,000
* Mechanical, Metallurgical, Mining and Mineral Engineering…$80,000
The Not-on-Tops
• Counseling/Psychology………………………………………..$29,000
• Early Childhood Education…………………………………….$36,000
• Theology and Religious Vocations………………………….$38,000
• Human Services and Community Organizations………..$38,000
• Social Work…………………………………………………………$39,000
• Drama and Theater Arts ……………………………….……..$40,000
• Studio Arts………………………………………………………….$40,000
• Communication Disorders Services………..……………….$40,000
• Visual and Performing Arts……………………….…………..$40,000
Sadly, race and gender still play a role in determining earnings. According to the study’s authors,
even in their highest paid major, electrical engineering, African-Americans still earn $22,000 less than Whites and $12,000 less than Asians with the same major. Women tend to hold the majority of degrees in many of the lower-paying fields such as education, but even women with degrees in the higher-paying field of chemical engineering earn, on average, $20,000 less than equally educated male counterparts.
Source: moneywatch
