By Rory Scott
September 30, 2014, Arch daily
Using information collected from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution has created a set of interactive infographics comparing the lifetime earning potential of graduates of 80 majors. With so much debate over the earning potential of architects, the tool provides us with an invaluable insight into the long-range outlook for members of our profession, charting the both the total lifetime earnings of architects and their average earnings per year over a 42-year career.
The good news is that, despite all the noise about low wages, the median lifetime earnings of architecture graduates is above average for undergraduate majors, although not by much. The space above the architecture degree is occupied largely by every single engineering major, as well as many of the business, finance and accounting majors.
The bad news: compared to other construction industry degrees such as Construction Services or Civil Engineering, Architecture graduates lag significantly behind in earning potential. Here we see that across the entire spectrum of lifetime earnings, from the 5th to the 95th percentile, architecture graduates earn roughly the median income for college graduates. Read more…