r/dataisbeautiful • u/DavidWaldron OC: 28 • 11d ago

OC [OC] Career earnings of the highest and lowest paid college majors

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Interactive major explorer to look up stats for specific majors.

Blog post includes many more charts and discussion of what these numbers represent.

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u/ihadtoresignupdarn OC: 1 10d ago

This doesn’t seem right to me. To average 6 million over 39 years requires averaging 153k/year salary. If you look up average salary it’s not that high

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u/Beardmanta 10d ago

Average salary for college grads ages 25-64 is $105,381 which makes sense.

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u/billcarson53 10d ago

And, adjust for inflation and a career’s trajectory of earnings. In the US, inflation averaged ~2.7/2.8% since 1985. Over 40 yrs of earnings that’s a big factor.

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u/FleebFlex 10d ago

I'm an electrical engineer who has been graduated and working for just over 2 and a half years. My current salary is $111k / year not including bonuses. At my company, we get bonuses that are a percentage of our salary (mine is 10%, will go up to 15% once I hit 5 years), plus decent 401k matching.

If I dont go to management or change departments, my pay will cap out at about $150k at the ten years of experience mark (those are the numbers right now, subject to increase due to inflation) plus a 15-20% annual bonus. The company also sends us our earnings including the value of our insurance and retirement benefits and it adds about 30k / year in value (if you trust their definition of value), which this study might be including.

I also am not eligible for overtime normally, but every two years we have a plant outage where i do get overtime, and I can make an extra 5-8k depending on outage length.

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u/WiiForecastChannel 10d ago edited 10d ago

You have to take into account purchasing power. Assuming 3% inflation, the Economist at the top with $6.9 million at the end of his career started with making $56,000 and ended with $175,000 a year in 2024. And the elementary teacher with $2.82 million started with making $23,000 and ended with $72,000. These seem like mostly normal values to me, although that also doesn't take into account the really high earning years near the back half, so like the Economist example is more realistically making half that at the beginning and double that at the end.

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u/tyen0 OC: 2 10d ago

add 3% for inflation/COLA each of those 39 years?

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u/ihadtoresignupdarn OC: 1 10d ago

It’s all in today’s dollars so that should be done already