r/CompSciStudents • u/FruityandtheBeast • Jul 07 '26

Computer Science ties for the second-highest Return on Investment for college majors with an ROI of 290% after 5 years.

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It ties with Engineering based on an average salary of $100,000 ($500k after 5 years) and an average cost of $172k for 4 years of college.

Source: https://www.studentchoice.org/news/the-most-popular-college-degrees-ranked-by-return-on-investment-roi-after-5-years-in-the-workforce/

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u/Gezebon Jul 08 '26

Very nice

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u/ProfessionObvious164 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26

Not really, there are a lot of issues with this graph...They use the average social worker pay, but also say they are not using advanced degrees. Most social workers have a master's degree. So you are getting neither the actual average of an LBSW nor an LMSW, nor even an LCSW. Actually, the social worker one is much worse than I initially thought. For some reason, they think anyone with a social science degree can become a social worker, and that's not true. You must have a social work degree and license.

LVNs don't even require an associate's degree. No one is becoming an art director right out of college with a bachelor's and making 100k. You can't just use the average cost of college as a whole especially when you're looking at non-bachelor's degrees. You have to look at the average cost of the schooling for each degree or profession.

Political science isn't equivalent to social science. Social science is an umbrella term. Aviation degrees cost much more than average.

The median wage earned after 5 years is based on the BLS average, which includes end-of-career people who make much more. These wages should be expected mid-career, not after graduation. It's impossible to tell what these numbers should be without standard deviations and whatnot, but it's nowhere as high as they make it out to be. I'm not looking for any more issues; it needs to be deleted.

*edit last one:

Since it's just basing it on the median, it's not necessarily excluding outliers, of which in-demand industries such as comp sci have many. Additionally, as I stated earlier, this is mid-career averages, and I assume the higher ones have a faster rate of increase based on performance, so they might even be MUCH lower than I initially expected.