Highest paying college majors

Pratt students' hard work will pay off, according to recent data from PayScale's Best Undergrad Degrees by Salary.

The top 10 majors that lead to the highest mid career salaries on the list are petroleum engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, aerospace engineering, computer engineering, physics, applied mathematics, computer science and nuclear engineering.

From the majors that we have at Duke, the top 10 highest paying are electrical engineering, computer engineering, physics, computer science, biomedical engineering, economics, mechanical engineering, statistics, civil engineering and mathematics.

Long after this large cluster of engineering and quantitative majors, the next major that Duke provides on this list is chemistry (35). Other Duke majors on the list include philosophy (48), literature (53), biology (56), environmental science (57), linguistics (58) and history (62).  Many other humanities and language-related majors do not come until much later on the list.

Duke only provides 12 of the 50 highest-paying majors on the list. Engineers are clearly making the most money, yet we only provide four engineering majors.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons that Duke did not score as highly as several more engineering-focused schools, such as California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvey Mudd College, in Payscale's rankings for highest mid career salaries by university.

Duke students, however, don't seem to pick their majors based on how much they will pay off in the long run. As reported by The Chronicle in December, the top eight majors at Duke are economics, psychology, political science, biology, public policy, biomedical engineering, history and english. Of these eight, only economics and bioengineering are among the top 50 highest paying college majors.

Lucky for us, though, Duke's mid-career median pay of $113,000 is higher than every major on this list, except for petroleum engineering at $155,000. So, even if you find your humanities major low on this list, odds are you'll still be making more money than engineers from most other colleges across the country.