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The Best U.S. Colleges for High-Paying Finance Jobs
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Key Takeaways
- Finance grads from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earn on average $175,439 in salary, a $73,608 premium over the median finance grad from a private institution.
- Harvard finance grads have the second-highest wage premium of $64,135, with an average annual salary of $165,966.
- After the first 10 years of graduating, the median finance grad earns an average salary of about $100,000, based on data from the Burning Glass Institute.
AI is disrupting the job market, especially for new college grads.
Yet if you’re a finance grad from a prestigious college, you could have a greater edge. Not only that, certain schools have shown to produce significantly higher wage premiums in the long run thanks to the quality of their program, exposure to industry professionals, among other factors—if you’re lucky enough to attend them.
This graphic shows the private colleges with the highest rate of return in the finance industry, based on data from the Burning Glass Institute.
Which Colleges Produce the Most Lucrative Finance Jobs?
Below, we show the average wage premiums of finance grads across the top 20 highest-returning private colleges.
These figures show how much more the average 2013 college grad made across the first decade of their career compared to the median finance grad. At the end of the period, the median finance grad had an average annual salary of $101,831.
| School | Average Annual Wage Premium Over the First 10 Years of Career |
|---|---|
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | $74K |
| Harvard University | $64K |
| Princeton University | $62K |
| University of Pennsylvania | $61K |
| Dartmouth College | $60K |
| Claremont McKenna College | $60K |
| Yale University | $55K |
| Columbia University in the City of New York | $53K |
| Stanford University | $52K |
| Duke University | $52K |
| Williams College | $50K |
| Georgetown University | $50K |
| University of Chicago | $49K |
| Cornell University | $48K |
| Bowdoin College | $47K |
| Brown University | $46K |
| New York University | $46K |
| Amherst College | $43K |
| University of Notre Dame | $42K |
| Wesleyan University | $42K |
While MIT is most commonly known for its tech and engineering programs, its business program is also world class.
MIT finance grads earn about $10,000 per year more than Harvard grads, where the cost of attending college is more than double that of MIT. For those who enroll in the MIT MBA program, the most common employers for grads include McKinsey, the Boston Consulting Group, and Amazon.
As we can see, Princeton follows closely behind Harvard, with a $62,000 wage premium. Meanwhile, Dartmouth College stands in fifth, with the priciest tuition fees across the top 20 private colleges.
When it comes to the best public institutions for producing high-paying finance grads, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor ranks first overall, with an average annual salary of $140,022.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
To learn more about this topic from a tech perspective, check out this graphic on the top colleges for high-paying tech jobs.