A median salary is a single number standing in for thousands of different outcomes, and in some fields it hides an enormous amount. Take the gap between what the top quarter of a program's graduates earn and what the bottom quarter earn, rank all 308 college programs on it, and a handful of fields turn out to be near coin flips. Law sits at the extreme: its bottom quarter earn 74,367 dollars four years out, its top quarter earn 296,764, a spread of 222,397 dollars inside one degree. The typical program spreads about 39,500. The widest fields are not slightly less predictable than the rest, they are several times less predictable.
Which Major Has the Widest Pay Range
Law, and it is not close. The bottom quarter of law graduates earn 74,367 dollars while the top quarter earn 296,764, so the same credential produces a four-fold pay difference depending on where a graduate lands. The second-widest field, operations research, spreads 100,846 dollars, less than half of law's gap.
The Widest-Range Programs
Each program below is ranked by the dollar gap between its 75th and 25th earnings percentiles four years after graduation. The wider the gap, the less the median tells you about a given graduate's likely pay.
| Rank | Program | Bottom quarter (p25) | Top quarter (p75) | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Law | $74,367 | $296,764 | $222,397 |
| 2 | Operations Research | $80,170 | $181,016 | $100,846 |
| 3 | Mathematics and Computer Science | $77,135 | $174,935 | $97,800 |
| 4 | Mining and Petroleum Tech | $44,837 | $126,643 | $81,806 |
| 5 | Systems Science and Theory | $56,212 | $134,909 | $78,697 |
| 6 | Computer Science | $74,830 | $152,038 | $77,208 |
| 7 | Cognitive Science | $53,334 | $130,402 | $77,068 |
| 8 | Biomathematics | $56,786 | $132,795 | $76,009 |
| 9 | Health Professions Education | $57,252 | $130,237 | $72,985 |
| 10 | Petroleum Engineering | $80,747 | $146,680 | $65,933 |
Law's pay range dwarfs every other field
Dollar gap between 75th and 25th earnings percentiles, four years after graduation, top six programs
Two patterns sit inside this list. One is a cluster of quantitative fields, operations research, computer science, the math hybrids, where the floor is already high but the ceiling runs far higher. The other is law, which behaves differently: its bottom quarter is solid, but its top quarter is in a category no other field reaches.
Why the Same Degree Splits So Far Apart
A wide range almost always means a field has two job markets wearing one name. Law is the clearest case. A small share of graduates enter elite firms paying first-year salaries near 200,000 dollars, while a much larger share work in government, public-interest, nonprofit, and small-practice roles paying a fraction of that. The median lands in the empty middle between two clusters, describing almost no one. The quantitative fields split a different way: most of their range comes from how high the top runs, as the strongest graduates move into finance, specialized engineering, and senior software roles while the rest earn ordinary professional pay.
Most programs are not coin flips. Two-thirds of them spread between 30,000 and 50,000 dollars, a normal range for any profession with junior and senior pay. Only 4 programs out of 308 spread more than 80,000 dollars, and law is one of them. The coin-flip fields are rare, which is exactly why they are worth flagging: the median misleads most in the few places people least expect it to.
How We Measured This
The figures are 25th- and 75th-percentile earnings four years after graduation, reported at the program level by the federal government. For each program the spread is the 75th-percentile figure minus the 25th-percentile figure, and programs missing either value were dropped, leaving 308 fields. Programs are defined at the four-digit CIP level, so each row is a specific field of study rather than a broad category. The full method and source vintages are on the methodology and data sources pages.
What the Numbers Do Not Say
A wide range is not a verdict on a field, and law shows why. Law's earnings reflect graduate degrees, not bachelor's degrees: the program's completions are entirely at the doctoral and professional level, so its numbers describe people who finished a JD, not undergraduates. That raises the whole distribution and stretches the top. More broadly, percentile spreads mix together graduates who chose different paths, different cities, and different sectors, so a wide range partly reflects choice, not just luck. The data also cannot say where an individual will land inside the range, only that the range is wide. A field can be both high-spread and a strong bet if a student knows which end of it they are aiming for.
What This Means for Students
Read the range, not just the median, before you commit to a high-spread field. A program like computer science has a high floor, its bottom quarter still clears 74,830 dollars, so the wide range is mostly upside. Law is different: the range straddles two separate careers, and the median describes neither. When a field's spread is several times the typical 39,500 dollars, treat the median as the least useful number on the page and ask which cluster you are realistically heading toward. The narrowest fields make the opposite point: teaching programs spread under 20,000 dollars, so the median there is a reliable forecast. If predictability matters more to you than a shot at the top, the career-path explorer lets you compare typical pay across fields before you pick one, and the ranking of all 38 majors by earnings shows where each field's median actually sits.
What This Means for Career-Changers
If you are switching into a field on the strength of its median pay, the range tells you how much faith that median deserves. A career-changer drawn to law by its six-figure headline number is reading the top quarter and budgeting for the median, two figures that describe different people. The fields with tight ranges, teaching and the structured professions, are the ones where a quoted salary is close to a promise. The fields with wide ranges are the ones where the same salary is closer to a maximum, reachable but not given. Before you retrain, run the realistic, not the aspirational, end of the range through the ROI Calculator, because the cost of the switch is fixed while the payoff is the part that scatters.
