College Salary Report: Why No Advanced Degrees?

In my last post, University Graduate Salaries: Which Schools Payoff?, I discussed the methodology behind PayScale's College Salary Report: Best Colleges & Degrees.

Advanced degrees medicine, and, to a lesser extent, in law, business, and other fields, can increase a bachelor's degree graduate's future earnings by opening up high paying jobs that are not otherwise accessible.

We left graduates who earn advanced degrees out when calculating the average salaries used to compare schools and degrees. Why? I'll look at the answer in this post.

Are you being paid like an employee with a doctorate in Medicine, or in English? Use the PayScale Salary Calculator to discover whether that advanced degree means more pay in your current career, or whether you should look for a new one.

University Graduate Salaries: Which Schools Payoff?

PayScale just released a College Salary Report: Best Colleges & Degrees. With my able associate Erica Sanders, I had a great time digging through our extensive data to understand whether graduates of different schools have different long-term salaries.

What makes our data so unique is that we have the jobs people are doing now - 5, 10, 20 or more years after they attended their undergraduate institution - and what these graduates are being paid now.

There are other surveys that track recent graduate salaries, and we can do that too. (See my post on Starting Salaries for College Grads.) We also have previously mined our college data for March Madness (Alumni Salaries vs. NCAA Championships), to mixed success in predicting the outcome of the Men's basketball tournament. :-)

In this post, I'll look at our College Salary Report - Best Colleges and Degrees methodology, what the different salaries mean, and apologize to Temple University, Weber State University, and Claremont McKenna College for not including them in our report :-)

College degree or not, are you earning as much as you could? Use the PayScale Salary Calculator to discover what employees like you are earning.