A physician's assistant helps a doctor with a variety of different tasks, but does not cost health care providers as much as doctors do. A master's degree in physician assistant studies qualifies you to work as one of these people, who earn just under $100,000 a year in the middle of their careers (as of March 2011). These programs are also not as hard to get into as some other programs, such as specialized science and business courses, but they are hard to complete.
Computer science master's graduates earn about $110,000 a year, but there are not as many jobs available as there are for physician's assistants. So, while those with jobs do earn more, competition is more stiff, the odds of not getting a job at all are higher than for physician's assistants.
All engineering master's programs are lucrative. Civil engineering, for example, pays an average of about $100,000 annually, while other graduates of engineering master's programs, such as architecture and chemical engineering earn between $90,000 and $100,000 a year.
Many of the hard sciences have lucrative earnings capacity as well, all landing in the $100,000 average range. Mathematics graduates, for example, find $100,000 per year careers working as actuaries and analysts for accounting and finance firms. Physics grads can work in a number of jobs, such as systems engineers and senior physicists, all of which pay about $100,000 a year.
A master's in business administration (MBA) is also a lucrative master's degree. Graduates' average salary is around the $100,000/year mark, but the potential for growth is substantially larger than with the other degrees mentioned above. Chief financial officers and marketing directors, for example, are generally MBA-qualified and earn between $140,000 and $160,000 a year, substantially more than the $100,000 per year earned other master's degree holders. There is a lot of competition for these jobs, so the odds of getting one are more slim than they may be for other master's graduates.