The Most Lucrative College Majors

July 4, 2008— -- The field of psychoanalysis has gotten the Hollywood treatment over the past decade, being featured on a hit TV show, The Sopranos, and two movies starring Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro, Analyze This and Analyze That.

In the same period, the number of college students earning psychology degrees has jumped 22%; the Princeton Review pegs it as the second most popular major today. No doubt students have visions of striking it rich, listening to patients' problems while collecting $100-an-hour fees.

Click here to learn more about the most lucrative college majors at our partner site, Forbes.com.

The reality is that few psychology majors move on to graduate school--and the career path for the rest of the group: not so rich. Psychology majors during their first few years out of school typically make around $35,000; those with 10 to 20 years' experience are pulling in $54,000. Those are the second-lowest incomes in both cases in our study of the most lucrative college majors. Only criminal justice majors fare worse.

The most lucrative college major today: computer engineering. Those with less than five years' experience are making $60,500, while those with 10 to 20 years' experience are banking $104,000 per year. "Everything today has a computer in it," says Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at PayScale.com, an online compensation comparison tool.

Today's computer engineering majors are designing the integrated circuits that move information around, and employers like AT&T, Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard can't hire enough of them.

To gauge the most lucrative majors, we turned to PayScale.com, which collects real-time salary information from 10 million users. They looked at 20 popular majors where most of the graduates go into the private sector; thus, some popular majors, like education and social work, were excluded.

We looked at median salaries to wipe out outliers at the top and bottom ends of the scale. Salaries included bonuses and commissions, but excluded any stock compensation. All jobs were included in the data, not just those specific to the major. Anyone who acquired an advanced degree was excluded from the study.