These Are The Best US Colleges For High-Paying Finance Jobs

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, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, 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.

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.

To learn more about this topic from a tech perspective, check out this graphic on the top colleges for high-paying tech jobs.