Author: Jonathan Guarine
Obtaining a bachelor’s degree is often associated with positive labor market outcomes, such as higher wages and lower unemployment rates. Yet even among graduates, there can be significant variation in both short- and long-term outcomes. College major choice is an important factor contributing to this variability.
For college graduates, how do starting wages compare to earnings ten years later? And how does this wage progression differ across majors?
Based on data from NC TOWER—North Carolina’s “Tool for Online Workforce and Education Reporting”—the interactive figure below compares median annual wages during the first and tenth year after graduation across different majors. The figure focuses on bachelor’s graduates from the University of North Carolina (UNC) system from 2003 to 2011, who have at least ten years of wage history.
Graduates who pursued majors in Health Professions & Related Programs—which include nursing, dentistry, and public health—earned some of the highest starting wages. Within one year of completing college, these graduates had median annual wages ranging from $47,600 to $55,800.1 Despite having high initial earnings, graduates in these programs saw earnings grow by an average of only 37% over ten years.
In contrast, graduates from Engineering and Computer & Information Sciences programs experienced faster wage growth. Graduates in these two categories had earnings increase by an average of 163% over ten years. By the tenth year, median annual wages for these graduates typically surpassed $95,000.
It is worth noting that graduates across all major groups faced a significant decline in initial wages in 2009, coinciding with the Great Recession. The drop in initial wages was severe for Engineering and Engineering Technology graduates. However, there was minimal impact on their wage progression over the subsequent decade. This finding aligns with previous LEAD research on the dissipating “scarring effects” of graduating into an economic recession.
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1 Wages are expressed in constant 2022 dollars to allow for cross-year comparisons.