Lehigh Engineers' earning potential near top in U.S.
Ninth in U.S. for mid-career salary; other rankings demonstrate Lehigh strength as well

Graduates of Lehigh Engineering have a salary earning potential that is among the most competitive in the United States, according to the results of several recent surveys.

Lehigh tied with Colgate and Stanford for ninth overall in the 2011-2012 PayScale College Salary Report, which measures the mid-career salaries of workers with undergraduate degrees from more than 1,000 schools. Graduates who earned an advanced degree beyond a bachelor’s degree were not included in the survey. Lehigh tied with Stanford for eighth in the private research university category. [Note: for the full report, visit the 2011-2012 PayScale College Salary Report site online.]

In the same report, Payscale also listed the most lucrative college degrees: 8 of the top 10 were directly engineering. The other two on the list, applied physics and mathematics, have strong ties to the discipline of engineering, as well.

But salary figures aren’t the only validation of the power of a Lehigh engineering degree:

• In the U.S. News & World Report 2011 "Guide to America’s Best Colleges," Lehigh Engineering ranked 36^th in the country among engineering programs whose highest degree is a Ph.D. Lehigh University was ranked 37^th overall, and 29th in the nation for "great schools, great prices."
• In August 2010, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that the "return on investment" of a Lehigh degree was 12^th in the nation, ahead of Georgetown, Columbia, and UCLA, among others.
• Over the summer of 2010, noted news reporting and opinion website The Daily Beast ranked Lehigh as the eighth most powerful college for producing leaders and innovators in the high-tech arena. According to the Web site, its writers "scoured the biographies of hundreds of key technology executives from the nation's biggest companies and some of its hottest startups...to identify which colleges, compared student-for-student, have turned out the most undergraduates destined for high-tech greatness." Wendell Weeks '81, CEO of Corning, and John Gardner '64, COO of Learnvest and founding partner of Cabezon Capital, were mentioned as notable alumni.
• In the U.S. News & World Report "America’s Best Graduate Schools for 2011," Lehigh Engineering was ranked 42 out of 198 colleges of engineering that grant doctoral degrees.

"Engineers are trained to solve big, complex challenges," says David Wu, Dean and Iacocca Professor of Lehigh Engineering. "It comes as no surprise that such skills command a higher earning potential -- or that Lehigh Engineering and its graduates are considered to be among the best of the best."

 

     

P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science
Lehigh University • Packard Laboratory, 19 Memorial Drive West, Bethlehem, PA 18015 • (610) 758-4025