Starting Salary Offers to CS Majors

There are many sources for salaries in the information technology sector. Most focus on specific occupations or types of industry. The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports starting salary offers to new college graduates at the bachelor’s degree level. The survey collects data from college and university career services offices.

The graph presents the starting salaries offered to computer science majors, adjusted for inflation to 2006 dollars. The effect of the “dot-com” boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s is evident. Three other items are worth mentioning. The first is that starting salary offers since the end of the IT bubble have been about 15 percent higher than those before it. Second, graduating computer science majors consistently receive some of the highest starting salary offers among all majors, exceeded only by a few of the engineering fields (see the table). The third point is that the drop in offers seen in 2006 was reversed in 2007. In current dollars, computer science majors saw a 4.5 percent increase in salary offers between 2006 and 2007.

Sources: National Association of Colleges and Employers, http://www.naceweb.org/; NACE Research, Starting Salary Offers: Historical Perspective Update 1990 to 2005 (Bethlehem, PA, 2007).

The following is a brief summary of some of the information that you can find on the website. It focuses on the relative popularity of CS and trends in degree production by gender, ethnicity and citizenship. Basic employment information about doctorate recipients also is touched on.

Jay Vegso can be contacted at jvegso [at] cra.org.