17 Best-Paying College Majors: 2023

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Recent college graduates looking to start their careers benefited from favorable labor market conditions through the end of 2022, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The unemployment rate for those ages 22 to 27 with a bachelor’s degree or higher was little changed at 4.1%, and the rate of underemployment for this group dropped to 38.1%, its lowest level since the early 2000s, the bank reported.

The research includes a list of college majors whose median early-career wage is $50,000 and median midcareer wage is $75,000. Even some majors that recent graduates may have regretted declaring when they were sophomores showed creditable salaries in the current job market.

In the gallery, we list the 17 top majors sorted by median wages for midcareer employees, ages 35 to 45. It may not come as a surprise that graduates with engineering degrees earn the most money at the start of their work lives and at midcareer. In order to showcase a greater variety of fields, we grouped nine different engineering careers together as one “major” on our list, presenting their early-career and midcareer salaries as a range.

Below is a breakdown of each engineering field’s median wages.

The New York Fed collected 2022 data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click through the gallery for the best paying college majors at mid-career, according to the bank’s research.

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