How Much Can You Make After College Graduation?
Authors: Helena Xu (Project Lead), Larry Lu, Kai Del Regno, Nivetha Balu
Introduction
The college application process is both a stressful and exciting experience, where we are contemplating on which schools to apply to and what major to choose, and eventually we get to select which school to commit to. Committing to a school for the next four years of your education is not always an easy decision to make. In addition, while in college, it is not uncommon for students to change their major. Why do so many students decide to change their major, or at least consider it? There are many reasons, such as out of interest or more career opportunities. Students may be interested in how much they can make after graduation in the field of their choice as well.
Various factors could influence your salary after graduation, such as where you went to college or what major and field you pursued. Therefore, we explore average and median salaries and their relationships to UCLA specifically, categories of majors, university rankings, and loan amounts.
Average Salary in the UCLA College of Letters & Science
While filling out the college application, applicants to the most-applied-to university in the nation, UCLA, are faced with the question of what major they want to pursue. UCLA has a general college called the College of Letters & Science, which contains four divisions of study: Humanities, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences.
An initial glance at the bar graph above shows that all four areas are in the same ballpark amount for average salary post-graduation. If we examine the four divisions more closely, we find that physical sciences has the highest average salary in the College of Letters & Science, life sciences has a slightly higher average salary compared to humanities, which has the lowest of all four divisions. Majors within the physical sciences division include Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics. Majors within the humanities division include English, Art History, and Comparative Literature. This suggests that STEM majors tend to have a higher average salary compared to the humanities majors. For students interested in the UCLA College of Letters and Science, this provides insight to prospective students and applicants on which departments have graduates make the most after earning a degree from UCLA.
Average Salary by UCLA Professional Schools
There are seven professional schools at UCLA outside the College of Letters and Science: Arts & Architecture, Engineering, Music, Film and TV, Nursing, Public Affairs, and Education.
Based on the visualization above, it is clear that the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences boasts the highest average salary, while the Herb Albert School of Music has the lowest average salary. A closer look at the graph shows that STEM fields tend to have higher salaries post-grad compared to the performing arts. This is apparent through engineering and nursing having the highest salaries, while music has the lowest. Other fields in the humanities, such as arts and architecture, film, public affairs, and education, tend to fall somewhere in the middle around an average salary of $50,000. While music may be fun to pursue, if you want to ensure that your salary after graduating from UCLA will be on the higher end, it may be of interest to you to join UCLA’s School of Engineering or School of Nursing.
Median Salaries by Category of Major
Again, the decision of choosing a certain major to pursue during college is sometimes challenging to make. When looking more broadly at the median salaries for different categories of college majors in general through the boxplots, we find similar trends to that of the average salaries for UCLA. For example, just like how the UCLA School of Engineering has the highest average salaries, majors in the engineering category are shown to have the highest range of median salaries, with its middle median salary being around $75,000. It is also the category that has the highest median salary of $125,000 within the dataset. Likewise, the category of computers and mathematics also has relatively higher median salaries. On the other hand, major categories such as psychology and social work, education, arts, and humanities are on the lower spectrum of median salaries. Two interesting cases to note are the interdisciplinary and communications and journalism categories; the boxplots for those categories do not show much of a range in median salaries, which suggests that the median salaries for majors that fall under those categories have very similar median salaries. Clearly, the type of major you choose in college can have a great influence on how much you earn in the future. Does this change your mind about your choice of major?
Starting and Mid-Career Median Salary vs. School Rank
College rankings provide a solid, albeit subjective, method to quantify the prestige, success, and overall quality of universities across the country. Schools are ranked based on a multitude of factors, including graduation rate, selectivity, faculty quality, financial resources, and student performance, to name a few. Interestingly, one variable that is omitted from these ranking considerations is salaries following graduation, despite it being a telling representation of the reputation, resources, and quality of education provided by any given school. On average, one would intuitively expect a T20 alum to earn more than a school hovering around the 200s. However, does this trend actually exist? If it does, how much do these median salaries actually differ across the ranks? To answer these questions, data from the US News 2022–2023 Best National Universities rankings were graphed along with the starting and mid-career median salaries for each school in order to create a fitted line to predict salaries for each rank and discover how schools actually compared to their projections.
At first glance, it is clear that there is a negative relationship present, with the starting median salary decreasing as the school rank decreases. Noticeably, the curve’s slope starts off incredibly steep but gradually flattens as you go along. This means a higher school rank is correlated with not only a greater median starting salary, but a greater increase in median starting salary. A graduate from the #200 school would not make much less than a graduate from a school ranked 150; however, someone from a school ranked 10 would make much more on average than a #60 alum. Notably, UCLA graduates underperform in terms of starting median salary, earning almost 4.5% less than projected for a #20 school.
In addition to this, mid-career median salaries must also be considered, as many jobs differ in terms of salary growth.
Immediately, a similar trend from before can be identified here — an initially steep slope that slowly flattens out. With mid-career median salaries, however, the relationship is much stronger, with an R2 score of 0.748 compared to the 0.656 for starting median salaries. This model does a much better job predicting mid-career median salaries rather than starting median salaries for T20 alumni, as many underperforming schools have “caught up” to the others and are much closer to the line of best fit. UCLA graduates, while still below their projected median salary, perform much better than before.
Here are some stats relative to rank:
Overperforming schools (median starting salary):
- Caltech, Rice, CMU, GT, RPI, WPI
Underperforming schools (median starting salary):
- Northwestern, UNC, UChicago
Overperforming schools (median mid-career salary):
- Dartmouth, RPI, WPI
Underperforming schools (median mid-career salary):
- Northwestern, UNC, FSU, Emory
Most improved:
- Dartmouth
Since the ever-present law of correlation not implying causation applies here, one cannot assume that a better rank causes graduates to earn more money. This metric has more to do with how accurately a college’s rank can predict the professional success of its graduates. In consideration of the relatively strong relationship between rank and median salary, students who go to highly-ranked schools tend to succeed more in the professional world. From this data, it can also be seen that tech school rankings matter less, as they all tend to highly overperform relative to rank, and that mid-career median salaries are overall more true to their rank, as the data points are much less spread out than before, especially among higher-ranked schools.
Median Salaries and Loans
The value of a degree is affected not only by the median salary of degree holders after graduation, but also by the median amount of student debt accrued while completing the degree. We can get a sense of the values of different types of degrees by examining the loan amounts and median salaries for different Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) codes. The following visualization shows the relationship between the median of the median salaries 3 years after graduation for undergraduate programs in the dataset with the same CIP code, and the median of the sum of medians of the Stafford and Parent Plus loan debt after graduation for those same programs. Note that the sum of median Stafford and median Parent PLUS loan debt may not be the same as the total median debt accrued by students enrolled in degrees with a specific classification.
We observe a large group with low median salary and low student loan debt, as well as a group with high median salary and low student loan debt. The large group contains programs with classifications like Psychology, Social Studies, and Biological and Physical Sciences. We can conclude about these degrees that though they do not provide very high value to their holders, most students do not take on large debt burdens to get the degrees. The group with high salary is largely, and unsurprisingly, composed of STEM classifications like Computer Science, various Engineering fields, and Applied Mathematics, as well as some business-related classifications like Real Estate and Business/Managerial Economics. We also observe some notable outlier groups where students take on large debt burdens with little compensation. These are degrees like Dance, Literature, and Graphic Communications.
Conclusion
Overall, the trends that we’ve found throughout our analysis of average and median salaries with the type of college, majors, and loan amounts is not very surprising. Generally, majors in STEM fields have higher average and median salaries and majors in humanities have lower salaries. Schools of higher rank typically have graduates who earn higher median salaries as well. The amount of loans that needs to be taken out in order to pursue certain degrees is also taken into consideration. These various components can all contribute to a students’ decision on choosing a certain college and major in the course of their education. For those of you currently applying or about to apply to college, hopefully this article helps you in your decision on which school and major to choose, if you are interested in your salary after graduation. For those of you who have already graduated from college, does this analysis align with your earnings, and where do you lie on this spectrum of salary expectations?
Sources:
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/wsj/college-salaries?select=degrees-that-pay-back.csv
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/wsj/college-salaries?select=salaries-by-college-type.csv
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/tunguz/college-majors?select=all-ages.csv
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
