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Which one of these majors has the highest earning potential in today’s job market?

he College Scorecard, a Department of Education initiative that publishes data on student debt and earnings after graduation for thousands of schools, just got a major update. Previously, the Scorecard’s major shortcoming was that it only reported data at the institution level—so we could see how much a typical graduate from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill earns, but not how much an engineering major earns relative to an education major. Since the payoff of a college education varies wildly by field of study, the usefulness of this dataset to students was limited. No longer. Last Wednesday, the Department unveiled...

Salary potential shouldn't be the sole thing that attracts you to a major in college — things like passion, interest, and aptitude should also be considered. But it's still nice to know which degrees pay off the fastest. (And we can't blame you for being drawn to those.) PayScale, the creator of the world's largest compensation database, recently looked at the starting pay for millions of professionals and sorted the results by college major. Here are the 22 majors with the highest starting salaries: 22. Business and Information Technology Median starting pay: $56,900 Median mid-career pay: $99,100 % change from...

When deciding what to study in college, it's important to consider the earning and growth potential for jobs associated with each major. To help you figure that out, Payscale, the creator of the world's largest compensation database with more than 40 million salary profiles, looked at the difference between starting salary (less than five years of experience) and mid-career pay (10 or more years of experience) by college major to determine the 13 majors with the largest salary growth. 13. Business & Information Technology (IT) Common jobs: Information Technology (IT) Manager, Systems Analyst, Systems Administrator Starting median pay: $56,900 Mid-career...

It’s never pretty watching college graduates facing the cold, cruel world of the job market after being trained by people who have steadfastly avoided such a bracing encounter for most of their careers. We can see this exercise played out on one of our local campuses—George Washington University. “While GW has poured millions of dollars into improving career services, the percentage of students employed within six months of graduation has hovered at about 63 percent over the past three years, according to a survey released last month,” Allison Kowalski reported in The GW Hatchet on May 12, 2014. The efforts...

College students who major in physical sciences tend to be smarter than those who major in psychology, judging from the 2013 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness from the College Board. The report includes data on SAT scores by intended major for the college-bound class of 2013. We've taken the liberty of ranking majors based on these scores, which are the best commonly available proxy for intelligence.

Using 1994-1995 and 2002-2003 data, Nieswiadomy (1998, 2006) found that economics majors scored well on the LSAT. These results are frequently posted on university web sites by Economics and other departments. This note, which updates the prior studies using current 2007-2008 data for the 2008-2009 class of students entering law school, finds that Economics majors still perform at or near the top of all majors taking the test. Economics majors (LSAT score of 157.4) are tied for first (with Philosophy) of the 12 largest disciplines (those with more than 1,900 students entering law school). Economics is tied for second (with...

If you're currently pondering what to settle on as your major--or even if you're just curious what tomorrow's job applicants are majoring in today--here's a top 10 list for you. Not that this should sway you. In fact, the popularity of majors has little to do with actual demand for related fields in the workplace. Nonetheless, here we've included the ten most popular majors. 1) Psychology.....snip.... 2) English. ......snip.... 3) Mathematics. ..... If courses in Abstract Algebra, Complex Variables, History of Math, Number Theory, and Vector Analysis appeal to you, you and your amazing brain will feel right at home....