According to a study by Scholarships as reported by CollegeTimes, engineering degrees are the most valuable. Of this top group, chemical engineering degrees earn graduates an average starting salary of $55,900. Computer engineering graduates come in second with $54,877, and electrical/electronics engineers start at an average salary of $52,899. Engineering degrees win out because of their flexibility: students interested in engineering have a variety of fields to go into from working with hardware to working with software as a computer engineer or sticking to an analytic or statistics role as a mathematics or statistics engineer.
Economics degrees are often thought to be valuable, but this is not necessarily the case. In a Scholarship study, accounting graduates started at an average of $45,723, with economics majors earning an average of $45,191. Business management majors earn an average of $39,850 while marketing graduates start at an average salary of $36,260. CollegeTimes points out that for most of these degrees, a bachelor's degree is sufficient for the starting salary, though some fields may require a master's or even Ph.D. to earn the high end of the salary bracket.
In a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, liberal arts degrees, such as English, history, art, biology and chemistry, ranked tenth on the list of most valuable degrees with an average starting salary of $30,800. Of note about liberal arts degrees is that, though they are not as high earners as engineering or finance degrees, they have experienced an increase in average starting salary of 6.1 percent since 2010.
Of course, where you go to school can also impact how much you will make. In the Businessweek and PayScale study, a degree from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was deemed the most valuable, costing an average of $189,000 but offering a 30-year net return for graduates of just under $1.8 million. The California Institute of Technology ranked second with an average cost of $181,100 and 30-year net return of $1.8 million. Harvard placed third, costing students $189,600 with graduates earning approximately $1.6 million.