With a median salary of $201,000, alums of Harvard Law School earn more than any other graduate school after ten years in the workforce, according to a new survey from PayScale.
The survey, which also studied 600 business schools and master's and doctorate programs, found that the most valuable U.S. graduate degree is in petroleum engineering. In fact, an education in petroleum engineering is so valuable that even a bachelor's degree in the subject is more valuable on average than any graduate degree, including law school and business school, according to PayScale editorial director Lydia Frank.
Ranking graduate schools by income can be a sordid business, since it's seductive to conflate the income of alumni with the quality of their education. For example, Stanford and UC Berkeley, two universities separated by a 50-minute drive, have the honor of graduating the first and fourth richest business-school alums, according to PayScale. Both universities are exceptional, but their top-four finishes could equally be a function of their geography—their proximity to the Valley, the quality of its business connections, and the wage premium required to buy even a cardboard-box-sized apartment in San Francisco.