The Salary Equation : Will your pay increase after grad school?

They say that if you are going to grad school for the money, it is better to leave after a Master's rather than a Doctorate. A PhD usually lasts 3-5 years longer. At the end of those 3-5 years a Master's graduate is already making amounts similar to a freshly minted PhD. And he probably saved a bunch of money in those 3-5 years.

But back to salaries. I rely heavily on the data from the Engineering Career Services at UW-Madison. This is a good estimate of the pay you can expect at a decent school.

MS Level Salaries


PhD Level Salaries


Location, location, location
One big fudge factor... salaries are heavily dependent on the location of the job. For instance places with high-living expenses like California, Massachusetts or New York states have higher absolute pay. Many other states have lower pay. A tool to compare salaries by location is located here. Based on the above data an average MS in ECE makes around $70,000 and an average PhD makes around $95,000 in 2008.

Other Salary Related Sites
Also if you ever need to compare your pay to your peers in the area, I highly recommend www.payscale.com. It pin-points other people like you with similar experience in a similar company and charts a graph of their pay. I also like the feature where you can run experiments based on certain scenarios... For instance will an MBA improve your package, or will any sort of certification. I also liked this site called www.mydanwei.com which surveys the salaries of the most frequent job profiles in a company.

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