Although students with college educations are usually paid higher wages than students without, not all college majors start off in careers with high-end paychecks.
Of all the majors, science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, majors receive the highest starting salaries, according to a study called “Is College Worth It?” by the Pew Research Center. Russell Deaton, a professor of engineering at the University of Memphis, said he is not surprised STEM majors were at the top of the list when it came to beginning salaries.
“This disparity in pay for STEM majors has been a longstanding phenomenon,” Deaton said. “It is the intellectually demanding nature of the jobs that makes them lucrative. STEM jobs are highly technical, requiring advanced backgrounds in science, mathematics and engineering.”
Early STEM careers have a varying range of annual median salaries depending on the area of study. Engineering and computer science careers generally make the most money early on, around $65,000–$81,000, according to the College Salary Report created by PayScale, a website that provides information about salaries, benefits and compensation information.
Lan Wang, a professor of computer science at the U of M, said early careers in her discipline are paid more because of the low amount of graduates with that degree.
“High-paying jobs are there because employers have a lot of demand in those types of positions but not enough supply (graduates in those areas),” Wang said. “Computer science graduates are needed not only in high tech industries but also in many traditional industries that want to improve their productivity and future prospects.”
While being on the high-end of the pay scale is good news for STEM majors, it also means there are majors at the low-end. The annual median pay for early careers in the fine arts, liberal arts and education get the short end of the stick, falling around $43,000-$50,000 for the arts and $35,000-$45,000 for education, according to PayScale.
Despite reportedly low initial salaries, Gretchen Peterson, a professor of sociology at the U of M, said initial careers in liberal arts are still of high value because of the growth of opportunities.
“While certain base salaries might be low initially, it might be a career where there is a lot of possibility for promotion, for movement on the salary scale,” Peterson said. “A lot of businesses actually want students with … liberal arts degrees often because it’s really a global economy. They want people who have the skills of working with diverse coworkers, working with diverse clientele, understanding cultural differences.”
Peterson also said statistics about beginning median salaries for majors in the arts could be misleading because of the range of initial salaries and occupations available.
“Sometimes you can have a different outcome depending on the different methodological choices you made,” Peterson said. “There’s a very clear career path that you might take with your STEM major, so they might be in a smaller range of jobs that are all higher-paying jobs as opposed to the sociology majors, who have all kinds of jobs.”
Not all careers in STEM are the most lucrative, however. Initial salaries in biology and chemistry range in the same area as the arts and education, about $42,000-$50,000, and wildlife biology and the animal sciences make even less, $37,200-$42,200, according to PayScale. Biology was listed as the lowest-paying college major with $41,250 in a 2016 report by Glassdoor, a website where employees can anonymously review their employers.
