Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon's engineering program lands right at Pennsylvania's median for first-year earnings—$64,871 based on comparable programs in the state—which puts it roughly $3,000 below the national benchmark for engineering bachelor's degrees. That's a head-scratcher given CMU's elite status (11% admission rate, 1545 average SAT). At an estimated $26,500 in debt, the debt-to-earnings ratio of 0.41 is manageable, but several less selective Pennsylvania schools report higher starting salaries for their engineering graduates: Lafayette ($76,507), Wilkes ($74,654), and Elizabethtown ($73,003) all exceed what similar programs in Pennsylvania typically produce.

The caveat here is significant: these figures come from peer programs across Pennsylvania, not CMU's actual outcomes, which the Department of Education suppressed due to small sample sizes. Given CMU's reputation as a top-tier engineering school—particularly in computer science and robotics—their actual graduates likely command higher starting salaries than the state median suggests. But without hard data, you're betting on reputation rather than documented results. If your child has admission offers from schools with reported outcomes in the mid-$70,000s, those represent verifiable data points worth weighing heavily in your decision.