We have all heard that attaining a college degree opens the door to higher-paying jobs. But how much more do female college graduates in the U.S. earn compared to their non-graduate counterparts? It depends on where you live.
Of course, plenty of young professionals straight out of high school have jobs that rake in the big bucks — but by and large, the typical college graduate in the U.S. will make $1.2 million more over their lifetime than someone who hasn’t been to college, and is 3.5 times less likely to experience poverty. Male graduates, in particular, will have the highest salaries.
With widespread knowledge of the gender pay gap, the data showing that women hold the largest amount of college debt in the United States, and the systemic barriers that often force women out of the workforce or hinder their ability to build wealth at the same rate as men, how can a college degree work to ensure women overcome these issues?
A new study from Career.io dug into U.S. Census data and revealed the U.S. cities and states with the highest salary premiums for college graduates. Part of the study breaks down the findings by gender, revealing that female college grads earn the most in New Jersey, Texas, and California. The wider study also looks at U.S. cities and found the top 10 cities where female graduates earn the most.
Women with degrees in New Jersey make 105.27% more than their counterparts without degrees
Women make up more than half of the college-educated workforce in the U.S., but where are college-educated female workers out-earning women who haven’t got a degree the most? New Jersey comes top in that respect, a state in which the average female employee with a bachelor’s degree earns $33,170 more than a female high school graduate (a 105.27% salary premium).
According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research: “A growing share of employed women in New Jersey are in managerial or professional occupations. About 45 percent of women hold these positions, which tend to require a four-year degree and often have higher wages and employment benefits.”
When it comes to gender different in earnings in cities across America, Edina in Minnesota ranks as the city with the highest salary premium (390.29% or $54,059) over women without degrees. Here, women earn the biggest bucks in agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining, an industry in which the median salary for women is a quarter of a million dollars.
College degrees don’t guarantee big earnings… and you don’t need a degree to earn big
Our research reveals that in some places, someone with a degree has the potential to earn the salary of their counterpart without a degree several times over. It doesn’t tell us that getting a degree is a surefire way to make lots of money; even at the most elite universities in the U.S., certain majors are associated with annual salaries of less than $30,000.
It also doesn’t tell us that not going to college will forever haunt your earning potential. Some of the biggest and most well-paying companies in the world, for instance, are beginning to loosen their requirements for a college degree. Take Google, where employees can rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in compensation; the number of Google job posts that required a bachelor’s degree decreased from 93% to 77% between 2017 and 2021. At Apple, they went down by 18%.
In a country where 51% of people have to drop out of college because they can’t afford it and where 34% of young adults can’t go at all because of the high costs, that can only be good news. You can see more of the data about the earning potential for female college graduates over at Career.io.
