STEM majors

The differences in starting salaries for STEM majors versus those who study the humanities have been widely publicized. Now a new study looks at how those differences add up over a lifetime of earnings – and the results are staggering.

The lowest-paid graduates, early-childhood education majors, earn just $39,000 annually midcareer, while the highest-paid, petroleum engineering majors, make an average of $136,000 per year. Over a career, that difference amounts to more than $3 million, according to the report The Economic Value of College Majorsby economists at Georgetown University.

Among the major fields of study, architecture and engineering students earn highest average salary -- $83,000 per year -- and education majors earn the lowest -- $45,000 per year.

The study finds that generally it’s still worth it to go to college. The average bachelor’s degree holder makes $1 million more over a lifetime than a person with just a high school diploma.

A separate report released last fall by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the value of a bachelor’s degree has reached an all-time high of around $300,000. Researchers found that it takes about 10 years to recoup the cost of a degree, a historically low level, down from close to 25 years in the late 1970s and 1980s.