The Career With the Biggest Financial Payoff

Akane Otani:

To figure out how return on investment for a bachelor’s degree varies with career choices, PayScale tracked the median salary for people in the U.S. who completed its salary survey online who had graduated between 1995 and 2014. For each career, it looked at the difference in 20-year earnings between someone who had a bachelor’s degree and someone with only a high school diploma. From that differential, it then subtracted the cost of college to arrive at the ROI number.

The analysis excluded careers that require advanced degrees, like law and medicine—which explains in part why health care, otherwise a field that can pull in sky-high salaries, was middling on PayScale’s list.