Brown Engineering ranks fifth on inaugural WSJ list of highest earning recent graduates

Data collected and ranked by the Wall Street Journal placed Brown’s School of Engineering as the fifth highest private college for engineering salaries in the article, Best College for Your Dream Career in Engineering, published in May 2023. Harvard, Stanford, CalTech and Princeton were the only schools ahead of Brown on the list.

The rankings were determined by a Burning Glass Institute analysis of experience and pay data from Lightcast, a labor-market data firm, and Glassdoor, a company-ratings website. For each college, an annual salary premium was calculated using the difference between the earnings of the school’s graduates in their first 10 years after graduation and the median graduate in the field. To filter for graduates working in engineering, the Burning Glass Institute analyzed only the roles relevant to the profession as classified by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Standard Occupational Classification codes and the U.S. Census Bureau’s North American Industry Classification System.

Engineers who attended Harvard, Stanford, CalTech, Princeton and Brown as undergraduates earn significantly more per year than graduates of other schools, according to a new ranking of colleges by Burning Glass, a nonprofit that researches employment trends.

The average annual engineering salary of Brown graduates over their first 10 years in the field is $114,727. That’s a premium of nearly $25,000 a year over the median graduate’s average annual salary of $90,174. 

The University of California, Berkeley is No. 1 on the list of public schools, with graduates in the engineering field earning a premium of $20,339, or $110,513 in total annual salary, averaged over those first 10 years. It is followed by the University of California, Santa Cruz and the U.S. Naval Academy in second and third place.

These graduates earn higher pay than the median graduate in engineering