The 12 Top-Paying Liberal Arts Schools: PayScale Report

Harvey Mudd College is the top paying liberal arts school in the country, according to the salary website PayScale's report on alumni median career earnings. It's no surprise this Claremont school tops the list -- it focuses heavily on engineering, which dominated the list of best-paying majors. Harvey Mudd is followed closely by Colgate University in New York.

Check out our slideshow of the 12 top paying liberal arts schools and then tell us -- are these schools worth it? Let us know in the comments section.

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Harvey Mudd College

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Starting Median Salary: $64,400 Mid-Career Median Salary: $121,000

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Starting Median Salary: $64,400
Mid-Career Median Salary: $121,000

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Comments

[Alex Ross]

09:50 AM on 08/02/2011

I am a student at Mudd, it really is one of the best schools in the nation and the caliber of it's student body is a head above most other schools; everyone here is smart, I got great grades/test scores in high school and am just a below-average Mudd student. Getting a BS here is defintely worth it, and I've had 3 internships in a row followed by a job offer so I can vouch.

[elphdriver]

12:45 PM on 08/01/2011

Oh yes Harvey Mudd is worth it. My son just graduated from there, is going on to GA Tech with a full fellowship for Ph.D. Many of his classmates have six figure incomes starting out - CS majors, engineering, and math majors going into finance. Plus it is just a great community, a school where you work very, very hard but also have a lot of fun and forge incredible friendships with peers and faculty.

We will be paying the bill for quite a while, but yes, it is worth it.

[hogspook]

03:51 PM on 07/30/2011

I don't have anything against these colleges, but I do have issues with using Median and Mid-career salary figures as indices of anything but themselves... What about the colleges with alumni reporting highest mid-life 'happiness levels'? Now that would be fascinating...

[MiddleNameKyle]

11:52 AM on 07/30/2011

Why is William & Mary not on this list?

[squiems]

04:46 PM on 09/02/2011

Because graduates dont make as much as they do at these schools

[Vicki Sestok]

07:33 PM on 07/29/2011

I think that some of those liberal arts colleges also offer BS degrees in some areas I know for a fact that lafayette at the very least offers a BS in chem. So maybe those schools are keeping up with trends because I know that most jobs in those fields need a BS

[squiems]

04:46 PM on 09/02/2011

Uh, almost all colleges, even small ones, offer several BS degrees. Several of the schools on this list have large engineering programs.

[tswift4evar]

03:41 PM on 07/29/2011

Liberal arts majors may (but probably won't) be the ones waiting your tables or parking your cars, but they'll also be the ones delivering the eulogy at your funeral after the stress of being a MBA drives you to suicide!

[chdevnull]

02:00 PM on 07/29/2011

Some of the comments here seem to be a bit disconnected from reality. How, exactly, does getting a BS leave someone "less educated" then someone with a BA? Sorry folks, a BA is absolutely useless unless you continue on with an advanced degree (an an advanced degree in a relevant field at that). If you only plan to get a bachelor's, you are going to have a much better chance at landing a good paying job with a BS as compared to a BA.

Employers are not looking for jacks-of-all-trades, they are looking for people with specific advanced skill sets that are needed for a particular position. You can try to convince yourself that those philosophy courses you took somehow make you more intelligent then that schmuck who got a masters in Computer Science, but I'm not buying it.

This is the primary reason why we have so many unemployed college graduates. There is actually quite a bit of work out there for educated people. The problem is we pour this bilge down children's throat about how they should "do what they love", and forget to mention that there are these things called bills...

The end result is a 22 year old undergrad with a degree in "island nation fashion trends" holding a worthless piece of paper, and complaining about how *even a college graduate* can't find a job in this economy.

[Megandale]

03:01 PM on 07/30/2011

Keep dreaming.

[squiems]

04:47 PM on 09/02/2011

Exactly right. If you're getting a BA, you've wasted your time in college.

[Drew2248]

01:30 PM on 07/29/2011

These top colleges will pay off not just in high earnings, but also in a first-rate education which lasts a lifetime, something no one can take away from you. You can lose a job, a salary, a house. But you can't lose your education.

These schools are not cheap, but they are worth it. Graduates of Colgate, Bucknell, Williams, and the others have the best earnings potentials in the country, right up there with grads of Harvard, Yale, Princeton which are in a separate list of large universities. These ten small colleges plus the top ten larger colleges are among the best in the nation. Of course, for a lot less tuition you can get a very good education at a public university, too, and still earn a good deal of money. Do you get as good an education there? Maybe.

And these smaller liberal arts colleges have an advantage in offering more personal educations, being more flexible and more friendly and permitting more widespread participation in athletics (half of undergrads at Colgate play Division I sports! That's a lot of very smart jocks!) as well as programs such as off-campus study, and so on. They generally have beautiful classic college campuses, something many large universities do not have. Colgate has been chosen repeatedly as the nation's most beautiful college campus, and Williams, Bucknell, Holy Cross are nearly as beautiful -- nice places to spend four years. That's something to think about along with good education and salary potential!

[Vic22]

12:59 PM on 07/29/2011

I'll tell you what, the best advice I could give anyone about to go to college these days (I'm 25, so I think my experience is recent enough to be very relevent), is to go to the school with the most well know name/reputation. Employers fall over themselves to get kids from certain schools, regardless of what you did when you were in school.

I chose a top 50 Lib arts school over a much better known school (Carnegie Mellon), and I regret just not biting that bullet and spending my four years in dreary pittsburgh. Rankings don't matter when you're trying to find a job if no ones heard of your school

[Drew2248]

01:37 PM on 07/29/2011

I honestly think you're still too young to know this. Getting a first-rate education is a lifetime's benefit. This habit of measuring colleges by jobs you get soon after graduating is short-sighted.

And "better known" by who? I've never met an employer who didn't know and respect Williams College or Colgate University. Carnegie-Mellon is good, too, but it does not offer the same experience as a small liberal arts college.

I'd always get the best education and let jobs and salaries come later. If you don't think that way, you might as well go to a job-training school or study business, computer programming, or engineering and intend to make money--and not pay any attention to your real education. If someone wants to spend their life being very narrowly educated, they can do that. But why--if you have a good mind?

[Vic22]

02:38 PM on 07/29/2011

I agree with you to a certain extent, but once you get to a certain level of school, the education is going to be similiar. Ivy league schools, for instance, are pretty much equal in actual teaching to other schools in the top 50-100, and actually worst than many, but their reputation takes you pretty far. I got a pretty good education, at a decently high ranked school. I always had real professors, not grad students, classes were small, and I know a bunch of Ivy league kids, and I think I compare to, if not exceed them in some ways. But when it comes down to it, the name on the resume pays the most dividends. No matter how high ranked your school, if its name is not commonly known, it often won't get you in the door, which is the most important thing. Pick a high ranked liberal arts school, that isn't one of the ones that people are familier with (Amherst, colgate, etc [Williams is actually not that well known, even though it is consistently ranked as one of the top schools in the nation]) such as a Pomona, and try to find a job in a region that isn't close to the school, and you are SOL. If you went to one of the schools with a big name, even if you were only mediocre when you were there, that name will open doors for you

[hellisonfan]

12:54 PM on 07/29/2011

When my son was beginning to look for a college twenty or so years ago he got a recruitment letter from Harvey Mudd. We had never heard of it, and it might have gotten lost in the flood of mail he was receiving then, but it was printed on the same kind of paper that grocery bags are made of, which got our attention and made us curious about the school. Mission accomplished.

[TakeSake]

12:53 PM on 07/29/2011

"With a degree in philosophy you can earn as much as some poets!"

[baseballmom]

12:16 PM on 07/29/2011

Oh, and Union also has pre-law and pre-med.

[Bri Kates]

01:11 PM on 07/29/2011

Union doesn't have pre-law anymore.

[grod805]

12:50 AM on 07/30/2011

What's pre-law?

Can't you major in anything and go to law school as long as you take the LSAT?

[baseballmom]

12:14 PM on 07/29/2011

Not sure about the other schools, but Union also has an engineering program, and those graduates probably bump the average salary of alumni up a bit.

[dwill123]

12:04 PM on 07/29/2011

Wasn't Harvey Mudd the guy in Star Trek?

[TakeSake]

12:51 PM on 07/29/2011

Somewhere, somehow there will be a Harcourt Fenton Mudd School of Business.

[Rita Khanna]

11:59 AM on 07/29/2011

need to have something to compare with... say Harvard or MIT or Yale...
then it will give a better picture

[Drew2248]

01:41 PM on 07/29/2011

Not sure what this means exactly, but if you mean how do these colleges compare to Harvard, MIT, or Yale, the answer is they compare very well. In fact, these colleges are all ranked among the top 20 liberal arts colleges in the nation (out of a thousand or more!) just as Harvard, MIT, and Yale are ranked in their separate "large universities" list. So, these colleges plus the ones you mention make up the top, let's say, 50 colleges out of a couple of thousand in the entire country. Put another way, this is the very top 1-2% of all colleges. You can't get a lot more "top" than that.

[bpollok]

11:39 PM on 07/29/2011

NY Times wrote an article a while back about the same thing, but included Ivy League schools. Harvey Mudd and Colgate are still pretty high up, though they're surrounded by Ivys.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/do-elite-colleges-produce-the-best-paid-graduates/