High-demand · bachelor's
Computer and Information Sciences
CS's practical cousin — less math, same salaries.
Top 25% earn
$169,000
Entry median is $103,050. The ramp is the point.
You can work anywhere, remotely, in any industry. The pay is the highest of any bachelor's-only path. Internships often convert to $80–120k offers. The degree travels — American CIS grads are hireable globally in a way few other majors are.
The 2023–25 entry-level market was brutal. Big tech cut hiring, bootcamps flooded the bottom, and AI tools made one senior dev replace two juniors. Expect more effort to land the first offer than the 2021 cohort needed. CS rank of your school matters more than ever.
Ship something visible — a real app, a working project, OSS contributions. Recruiters read GitHub before resumes. FAANG and top AI labs pay $200–400k for new grads, but require hundreds of hours of interview prep (LeetCode, system design). Outside the top tier, $100–130k is a normal first job.
AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude) are real, used daily, and reshape how juniors learn. The pattern: junior devs who skip fundamentals and trust AI get stuck. Juniors who use AI to learn faster catch up to mids quickly. The "AI will replace programmers" claim is overblown — but the bar for getting hired is higher.
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