College Graduates $alary

The good news for the class of 2009: Starting salaries are barely down from last year. The bad news: Only 20% of graduating seniors have actually found a job.

The average salaries are down by less than 1 percent for the class of 2009 graduates (Graduating between September 2008 to August 2009). One should not be misled by the less than 1 percent decrease in salary to think that job market is still good because the people (or graduates) who would have brought the average down may not have been offered any job at all as indicated by the fact that only 20% of graduates were offered a job.

This is the major conclusion from the Recent salary survey done by National Association of Colleges and Employers. A quarterly report of starting salary offers to new college graduates in 70 disciplines at the bachelor's degree level. The survey compiles data from college and university career services offices nationwide. Salary Survey is issued in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, with the Fall issue serving as the year-end report. (Salaries reported in this press release reflect offers to bachelor’s degree candidates.)

Well, the news seems to be good only for Engineering graduates out of graduates of most other disciplines of 2009.

As a group, engineering graduates enjoyed the highest salary increase. Overall, the average offer to engineering graduates rose 3.7 percent from 2008 to $59,254. Chemical engineering graduates posted a 2.7 percent increase to their average salary offer, which now stands at $64,902. Computer engineering graduates saw their average offer rise 3.6 percent to $61,738. Software design and development jobs were the most common offering, and the average salary for these jobs rose 5.6 percent over last year, from $62,155 to $65,619. Electrical engineering graduates earned one of the larger increases; their average offer rose 5.6 percent to $60,125. Civil engineering graduates, however, saw their average offer just nudge up slightly—0.8 percent—to $52,048.

Compare this with other fields; like Business graduates where the rise in salary was less than 1 percent to US$47,239. Accounting majors did a little better than the business majors, and posted a 1.9 percent increase for an average offer of $48,993.

Economics graduates on the other hand saw a decrease to their average salary offer, which fell by 1.3 percent to $49,829. Computer science grads saw their average salary offer rise 1.6 percent to $61,407.

Information sciences and systems grads, however, saw their average offer slip slightly to $52,089, down less than 1 percent from last year at this time. You can see the details of whole survey here.

Now that you know about the starting salaries of graduates of different disciplines lets look at some of the schools around the country whose graduates have reported highest salaries. I will straight away jump to the results of the survey which were quite surprising because the highest starting salary was reported by Loma Linda University which was US$71,400. Below is the part of list:

School Name: Loma Linda University

School Type: Private

Starting Salary: US$ 71,400

Mid-Career

Median Salary: US$88,500

School Name: MIT

School Type: Engineering

Starting Salary: US$ 71,100

Mid-Career

Median Salary: US$126,000

Surprisingly Loma Linda University beat MIT in starting salary whereas Dartmouth College beat MIT in mid-career level salary where it was US$129,000 as compared to MIT where it was US$126,000 (third column of above list). Find the complete list here.