From: Bizjournals
Don’t worry, parents. Maybe your kids’ degrees in Philosophy and Gender Studies will pay off. Average salaries for graduates with bachelor’s degrees are up 3.8 percent for the Class of 2016, with surprising gains for liberal arts and humanities majors.
According to a new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the overall average salary for the Class of 2016 is $52,569, up from the average salary of $50,651 reported by the Class of 2015 at the same time last year.
Graduates with STEM degrees still made out with the best starting salaries. Computer Science majors are the highest-paid, with an overall average starting salary of $71,534, up almost 9 percent over last year’s reported average. Engineering graduates are the second highest-paid, with an average starting salary of $66,121, up 7 percent over last year. Mathematics and Statistics majors place third with an average starting salary of $62,985, up almost 16 percent over last year.
But don’t knock the humanities majors. Grads with majors like Latin American Studies and Gender Studies are seeing big gains in full-time employment and pay, per the NACE’s First-Destination Survey: Class of 2015. Average starting salaries for these two majors are up 26 percent to $43,524 for the Class of 2015, compared with the previous year’s graduates. Language Studies nabbed the second-largest salary gains.
Liberal arts degree holders’ starting pay is edging closer to grads holding a bachelor’s in business, according to Edwin Koc, NACE’s director of research, public policy and legislative affairs. Bachelor’s degree graduates in business ranked among the mostly highly paid majors in 2016, with overall average starting salary at $53,836, up almost 9 percent over last year’s reported average salary of $49,536.
“I’ll be interested to see if it’s a one-year quirk or whether it continues to boom in that direction,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Koc noted that employers are looking to hire staffers with strong communication skills after noticing new hires’ soft skills are not up to snuff.
“Employers may be reconsidering how they’re approaching recruiting college graduates, and may not be so focused on hiring a particular major,” he told the WSJ.
But not all liberal arts degrees are created equal. Visual and performing arts majors from 2015 were the only group of humanities students who saw employment decline; 2.3 percent fewer graduates were employed six months after graduation. And history majors’ starting pay only increased 3.7 percent year-over-year from 2014 to 2015.
NACE collected employment and salary information from almost 300 U.S. colleges and universities and 244,000 bachelor’s degree graduates. More than 80 percent of 2015 bachelor’s degree earners were employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation, per the report.
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