Highest-Earning College Majors

10/05/2014 Mises Wire Peter G. Klein

A new report on career earnings by college major is making the rounds. Engineering majors make the most, with economics the highest of the social sciences, and even ahead of business. However, as a Slate report points out, if you look at the upper tail of the distribution, economics majors do even better than engineering majors -- the highest-earning economics majors do much better than the highest-earning engineering majors. The result holds even when you consider the fact that many economics majors go on to law or business school or enter other graduate programs. Slate thinks the answer is that “the finance and consulting industries like recruiting [economics majors], not necessarily for their specific skills, but because they consider the major a basic intelligence test.” Of course, the data don’t distinguish between students of Austrian, Keynesian, Marxian, and neoclassical economics, but I know what I’d choose as an intelligence test! An economics major.

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