Bachelor’s degree · earnings 4 years after completing
Highest-Paying Colleges for Statistics (Bachelor's)
Graduates who complete a bachelor's degree in Statistics earn a median of $92,425 four years after finishing, and the middle half earn between $64,564 and $125,467. We rank the 30 U.S. colleges whose Statistics programs have at least 25 graduates in the Scorecard earnings sample, 1,486 graduates in all. That puts Statistics at #11 of 131 bachelor's degree fields we rank, among the best-paid fields.
Carnegie Mellon University, in Pennsylvania, leads at $156,743, 75% above the median ranked school ($89,406). The gap between schools is moderate: the middle half of ranked schools earn between $79,049 and $100,817, and the lowest earns $62,719. 14 of the 30 ranked schools (47%) match or beat the national median.
Public universities dominate the top 20: 18 public, 2 private nonprofit and 0 for-profit. Across all ranked schools, 93% are public. California places 7 schools in the top 20, ahead of Michigan (2).
The top 20 schools cost about the same as the rest of the list: a median net price of $15,464 a year, against $16,213 across all 30 ranked schools. Their graduates who borrowed carry a median of $17,939 in federal loans, about 18% of one year of earnings. Measured against a typical high-school graduate in the same state, the median top-20 school recovers its net cost in about 1.1 years.
Showing the top 30 of 30 ranked schools. Select a column heading to re-sort the table. † = fewer than 40 graduates in the earnings sample.
| 1 | Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA Private nonprofit · 4-year | $156,743 | 86 | $21,000 | $31,944 | 1.1 |
| 2 | University of California-Berkeley Berkeley, CA Public · 4-year | $133,986 | 72 | $15,400 | $13,481 | 0.6 |
| 3 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Ann Arbor, MI Public · 4-year | $109,466 | 36 † | $23,150 | $13,138 | 0.7 |
| 4 | University of California-Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA Public · 4-year | $109,017 | 79 | $15,811 | $12,548 | 0.7 |
| 5 | University of Virginia-Main Campus Charlottesville, VA Public · 4-year | $108,532 | 40 | $16,295 | $21,565 | 1.2 |
| 6 | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL Public · 4-year | $105,978 | 108 | $19,000 | $14,355 | 0.8 |
| 7 | Purdue University-Main Campus West Lafayette, IN Public · 4-year | $104,047 | 56 | $19,250 | $14,600 | 0.9 |
| 8 | California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo, CA Public · 4-year | $101,353 | 34 † | $17,939 | $16,665 | 1.0 |
| 9 | University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI Public · 4-year | $99,210 | 30 † | $24,250 | $17,354 | 1.1 |
| 10 | University of Florida Gainesville, FL Public · 4-year | $98,409 | 32 † | $13,191 | $6,541 | 0.4 |
| 11 | University of California-San Diego La Jolla, CA Public · 4-year | $96,746 | 29 † | $18,583 | $12,470 | 0.8 |
| 12 | Brigham Young University Provo, UT Private nonprofit · 4-year | $96,164 | 71 | $10,312 | $15,564 | 1.1 |
| 13 | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA Public · 4-year | $94,300 | 26 † | $15,500 | $24,953 | 1.7 |
| 14 | Michigan State University East Lansing, MI Public · 4-year | $93,930 | 30 † | $23,625 | $19,680 | 1.3 |
| 15 | University of California-Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA Public · 4-year | $90,778 | 99 | $17,167 | $16,109 | 1.2 |
| 16 | University of California-Davis Davis, CA Public · 4-year | $88,033 | 108 | $14,917 | $14,741 | 1.2 |
| 17 | Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus University Park, PA Public · 4-year | $86,636 | 48 | $21,500 | $32,875 | 2.6 |
| 18 | Utah State University Logan, UT Public · 4-year | $86,262 | 30 † | — | $14,936 | 1.3 |
| 19 | North Carolina State University at Raleigh Raleigh, NC Public · 4-year | $85,090 | 42 | $23,430 | $17,303 | 1.4 |
| 20 | San Diego State University San Diego, CA Public · 4-year | $83,076 | 30 † | $13,125 | $15,364 | 1.3 |
| 21 | University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Minneapolis, MN Public · 4-year | $80,993 | 56 | $20,500 | $16,778 | 1.6 |
| 22 | Rutgers University-New Brunswick New Brunswick, NJ Public · 4-year | $80,721 | 36 † | $22,903 | $24,406 | 2.2 |
| 23 | University of California-Riverside Riverside, CA Public · 4-year | $78,492 | 43 | $21,488 | $14,304 | 1.4 |
| 24 | Florida State University Tallahassee, FL Public · 4-year | $77,605 | 54 | $22,350 | $11,297 | 1.0 |
| 25 | University of Connecticut Storrs, CT Public · 4-year | $76,556 | 51 | $19,500 | $25,097 | 2.6 |
| 26 | University of Missouri-Columbia Columbia, MO Public · 4-year | $76,037 | 25 † | $15,189 | $20,268 | 2.0 |
| 27 | Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI Public · 4-year | $74,229 | 43 | $27,000 | $16,317 | 1.7 |
| 28 | University of South Florida Tampa, FL Public · 4-year | $74,071 | 27 † | $11,792 | $9,812 | 1.0 |
| 29 | University of Minnesota-Duluth Duluth, MN Public · 4-year | $71,279 | 38 † | $21,600 | $18,743 | 2.2 |
| 30 | University of South Alabama Mobile, AL Public · 4-year | $62,719 | 27 † | $22,532 | $17,648 | 2.3 |
How this ranking is built
A school appears here only if it meets every condition below.
- Which programs count
- Main campuses only, one entry per institution. Scorecard reports program outcomes for the whole six-digit federal ID (OPEID6), so branch campuses share their parent’s numbers and are not listed twice.
- Only bachelor's degree programs in Statistics (CIP 2705, the four-digit code Scorecard uses to group related programs).
- At least 25 graduates in the earnings sample. Smaller samples are left out because their medians swing too much and the counts carry a little privacy noise.
- A major gets a page only when at least 20 schools qualify. This one has 30.
- Ranked by median earnings 4 years after completing, highest first. Ties go to the larger sample, then to the school name.
- Schools missing earnings or a sample size are left out rather than estimated.
- What the numbers mean
- Earnings: median annual earnings of graduates four years after completing. The cohort completed in academic years 2017-18 and 2018-19 and was measured in calendar years 2022 and 2023, in 2024 dollars.
- Who is counted: graduates who received federal student aid (Title IV grants or loans), and only those who were working and not enrolled in more school that year. Graduates without federal aid, those who went on to further study and those with no earnings are not in the median.
- Scorecard adds privacy noise to counts and medians and hides values it cannot protect, so a gap of a few percent between two schools is not meaningful.
- Graduates: the number of graduates in that earnings sample. A † marks fewer than 40, where the figure is less precise.
- Debt: median federal loan debt (Stafford and Grad PLUS loans disbursed at that school) of graduates who borrowed, from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 completers. Parent PLUS and private loans are not included.
- Net price: average yearly cost after grants and scholarships for the whole institution, not this major, academic year 2023-24.
- Payback: 4 years of net price divided by how much these earnings exceed a high-school graduate’s in the school’s state. Shown only when that gap is at least $2,000, the same formula as the rest of the site.
- Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard field-of-study data, June 2026 release.
Top states for Statistics earnings
Median of the school medians for states with at least 3 ranked schools. The best school in each state is shown.
| State | Median earnings | Ranked schools | Top school |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michigan | $93,930 | 3 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor |
| California | $93,762 | 8 | University of California-Berkeley |
| Florida | $77,605 | 3 | University of Florida |
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