March 7, 2019

Graduates’ Pay Ranked for 1,650 Colleges

Decisions about which college to attend or degree to pursue are increasingly driven at least in part by this consideration: will I be able to pay back my student loans?

Countless things determine how much someone earns – smarts, rich or poor parents, high school or graduate degree, being in the right place at the right time. But LendEdu’s new ranking of starting salaries for graduates with bachelor’s degrees from some 1,650 U.S. colleges is essential information, especially when debt is the only option to finance college.

A degree is almost always worth the investment. Georgetown University estimates workers with a bachelor’s degree earn $1 million more over their lifetime than high school graduates. Post-secondary degrees have even bigger payoffs.

The salary rankings turned up some useful and quirky findings. LendEdu, a personal finance website for consumers that sells advertising to financial firms, compiled the salary data for the first five years of employment from payscale.com surveys.

• Ever hear of Harvey Mudd College? The typical recent graduate of this engineering school 40 miles west of Los Angeles earns a bit more ($85,600) than an MIT graduate ($83,600). Harvey Mudd is Silicon Valley’s No. 2 feeder school.
• Graduates overestimate what a degree is worth. The typical college student expects to earn $60,000 but earns only $48,400 in the work world. …

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