Scorecard Data
Author: Sven Soderborg (QAMO ’24)
Publication Date: January, 2024.
For many young adults, the choices of which university to attend and which major to study are defining moments. But more than milestones, these decisions substantially influence future earning opportunities. Drawing on data from the U.S. Department of Education, this analysis delves into how these crucial choices affect the 4-year earning outcomes for students at Utah’s universities.
Choosing a college is the first step towards acquiring a degree. As illustrated in Figure 1, Utah’s universities offer diverse price points and results. This chart presents the Net Price of Attendance—the average price paid by full-time undergraduates, after subtracting any federal, state/local, and institutional grants and scholarships—and the median earnings of students four years after graduation.
Figure 1 Median 4-Year earnings of graduates working and not enrolled compared to the 1-year net price of attendance. Source: 2023 College Scorecard with pooled 2018-19, 2019-20 award years.
There is considerable variation in the average salary of graduates across Utah universities. Weber State boasts the highest average earnings four years post-graduation, coupled with a comparatively low tuition fee. Conversely, Westminster graduates enjoy impressive average earnings but at a cost noticeably steeper than other Utah institutions.
However, the salaries in Figure 1 are an average across all majors and hide considerable variation in salaries across majors. It’s reasonable to hypothesize, for instance, that a computer science graduate from Southern Utah University might out-earn an anthropology graduate from Weber State. A student’s choice of major may have a larger impact on future earnings than the choice of university. Figure 2 compares median earnings for select universities for the top-earning majors of Mechanical Engineering, Finance, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science. Figure 3 does the same for the lowest-earning majors.
Figure 2 Bar chart of 4-year median earnings for selected high-earning fields within-universities vs. across all universities. Source: 2023 College Scorecard with pooled 2018-19, 2019-20 award years.
Figure 3 Bar chart of 4-year median earnings for selected lower-earning fields within-universities vs. across all universities. Source: 2023 College Scorecard with pooled 2018-19, 2019-20 award years.
The differences are stark. Looking across the majors in Figures 2 and 3, post-college salaries range from $26,982 to $100,923. While there are differences across colleges in outcomes, those differences are smaller than those associated with choice of major. In other words, Computer Science majors generally earn more than their peers regardless of where they go to college and differences across schools within a field may reflect local job markets and selectivity of the applicant pool. Importantly, the differences in salaries across majors within a university are larger than the differences in salaries across universities. For example, Computer Science majors earn $114,046 and $99,562 at BYU and the University of Utah, respectively. At those same schools, Family Studies majors earn $24,823 and $41,041. In short, above and beyond which school a student goes to, what seems to matter most for future salary is major choice.
These data are drawn from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. While these data are strongly related to other measures of post-college outcomes, it’s important to note that they are constructed only from students who received federal aid. For confidentiality reasons, earnings data for majors with a limited number of graduates isn’t publicly disclosed. We focus on the earnings of students who graduated four years earlier, and who are currently working and not enrolled in college or graduate school. In general, these early-career earnings are strongly related to later-career earnings, but there are important exceptions, especially for students whose majors lead to postgraduate studies, where peak earnings might materialize much later in their careers.
Figure 4 Median earnings of selected majors across the United States for age groups 25-34 and 45-54. Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2022 American Community Survey.
The data in Figure 4 illustrates some of these exceptions. Majors like History and Biology show significant increases in median annual earnings later in life relative to nearly every other major. Individuals in these majors have a high propensity to pursue advanced degrees, specifically medical and law degrees in this case, and thus go on to have much higher earnings than they did with just a Bachelor’s degree. On the other hand, many of the lowest earning majors in the short-term are still relatively low earning later in life. This highlights the reality that not all fields experience significant salary growth over time. Together, these data show that the choice of major for a Bachelor’s degree is not the ultimate criterion deciding the earnings potential, but it’s still an important factor to consider when planning for the future.