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The average salary projections for Class of 2019 master’s degree graduates are characterized by large increases, according to results of NACE’s Winter 2019 Salary Survey.

Engineering majors are expected to earn the highest average salary among Class of 2019 master’s degree graduates. Their overall average salary projection has rocketed 9.4 percent to $82,589 this year. (See Figure 1.)

Computer science graduates are also seeing significant gains in their average salary projection as it has climbed 8.5 percent to $81,466. Driving the overall increase for these graduates may be the average salary projection for information sciences and systems majors, whose anticipated salary of $81,895 is up 12.4 percent this year.

While Class of 2019 master’s degree business graduates are third on the list of top-paid majors, they boast the highest expected salary increase—10.9 percent. This boost brings their projection to $77,347 this year. Of the 12 reported individual business majors, one-third have salary projections that exceed $80,000, including M.B.A. graduates, whose average projection is up 8 percent to $84,580.

The overall average salary projection for Class of 2019 master’s degree graduates in math and sciences is down 1.3 percent to $75,737. However, extremely limited data for these particular degrees may be partly to blame.

The Winter 2019 Salary Survey contains annual salary projections for Class of 2019 college graduates. Data from the survey were obtained by surveying NACE employer members from August 1, 2018, through December 3, 2018. A total of 186 surveys were returned for a 20 percent response rate. The Winter 2019 Salary Survey report is available to members in MyNACE. An executive summary report is available at http://www.naceweb.org/research/reports/.  

Figure 1: Average Salary by Discipline, Master’s Degrees