Petroleum engineering is the college major that will produce the best salary after graduation, and it isn’t even close.
According to compensation information service PayScale, petroleum engineering provides by far the best median salary, both at the beginning and mid-point of one’s career.
It is the only major for which graduates tend to crack six figures right off the bat. At career mid-point, the median petroleum engineer graduate makes $160,000, according to the survey.
Among students determined to go into the soft sciences, political science students tend to fare best: Government is the 14th highest-earning (mid-career) major, beating out economics, industrial engineering, and applied mathematics.
