Bachelor's · earnings grade

Is a Mathematics degree worth it?

Graduates earn a median $47,260 two years after finishing, more than 60% of bachelor's majors. Measured across 1,228 US programmes by the Department of Education — real graduate pay, not survey answers.

The verdict on the money

Yes — graduates earn more than most majors at this level.

Median earnings $47,260 2 years after finishing · per graduate

Typical range $38,289–$49,436 middle half of US programmes

Over no degree +$7,740 vs $39,520 high-school median

Graduates a year 19,260 1,228 programmes

Where a Mathematics degree pays best US programmes ranked on their own graduates' median earnings two years out.

#	University	1 yr out	2 yrs out	3 yrs out	Graduates/yr
1	Swarthmore College cost & debt at this university →	$59,964	$125,015	not published	49
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology cost & debt at this university →	$82,796	$117,572	$155,540	139
3	Dartmouth College cost & debt at this university →	$76,013	$103,078	$71,100	64
4	Rice University cost & debt at this university →	not published	$97,071	not published	47
5	Cornell University cost & debt at this university →	$77,827	$91,211	$102,995	103
6	Johns Hopkins University cost & debt at this university →	$70,019	$86,867	$101,777	102
7	Duke University cost & debt at this university →	not published	$81,333	$84,729	83
8	Vanderbilt University cost & debt at this university →	$76,609	$80,309	$95,754	157
9	Washington and Lee University cost & debt at this university →	not published	$76,460	$69,951	15
10	Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology cost & debt at this university →	not published	$76,460	$86,525	10
11	Northwestern University	$68,815	$75,518	$76,013	72
12	University of Chicago cost & debt at this university →	$81,753	$72,022	$81,130	181

What this figure does and does not tell you

Two medians are worth separating. $47,260 is what the typical graduate earns — each programme counted in proportion to how many students it graduates. $43,687 is what the typical programme reports, counting a class of twenty the same as a class of two thousand. The weighted figure is higher here, which means the larger programmes in this field are the better-paying ones.

It is the median of what real graduates of this exact major earned, taken from tax records two years after they completed. It is not a starting salary, not an average of job adverts, and not a projection. The median bachelor's major in this dataset reports $36,497, so Mathematics sits above the middle by $10,763.

Two years is early in a career. Fields with long training pipelines — medicine, law, research — look weaker at this point than they will at ten, while trades and applied technical fields peak sooner. Read a low figure in a long-pipeline subject as "slow start", not "bad degree".

There is no debt figure here on purpose. The Department of Education publishes earnings by field of study but not borrowing, so nobody can honestly tell you the debt of a specific major. Debt is published per institution — that is where our university cost pages carry it.

Mathematics at other levels

Master's — $52,959 (C)

Scholarships for Mathematics students

Whatever the subject pays, the money you do not borrow is the money you keep.

Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University Foreign/ Split and Local PhD... Offer at Swansea University for Postgraduate Scholarships in m... 3 PhD Positions in Computational Systems Biology in Berlin, 20... University of California Math Undergraduate Merit Scholarships... Science Undergraduate Scholarships at University of Strathclyd... MSc or PhD Position at Ozyegin University Graduate Program in...

See all Mathematics scholarships →

Study Mathematics Programmes listed on ScholarshipsAds.

Mathematics — KTH Royal Institute of Tec... Engineering Mathematics and Computational Scie... — Chalmers University of Tec... Sciences (Mathematics Specialisation) — Lund University Mathematics — University of Oxford Mathematics and Philosophy — University of Oxford Mathematics and Statistics — University of Oxford

Majors that pay more at this level Closest first — useful if you are still choosing.

International Business — $44,316 Architectural Engineering Technology — $44,356 Air Transportation — $44,463 Human Resources Management and Services — $45,061 Economics — $46,087 Architecture — $46,087

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Mathematics: the questions people ask

How much do Mathematics graduates earn?

The median bachelor's graduate earns $47,260 two years after finishing (weighting each programme by how many students it graduates), across 364 US programmes that publish the figure. One year out it is $43,164.