Being a BME alumni can add hundreds of thousands to your salary in Hungary

The average earnings of BME graduates are impressive, according to data collected by the Educational Authority in Hungary. The Graduate Career Tracking System (DPR) records gross salaries also by course type, so if the number of graduates is sufficiently high, it is easy to compare how good is the negotiating position of the former students on the job market.

For example, the graph below showing Master's degrees points out that in 2018, BME graduates typically earned measurably more than the average graduates of the same programme type (where there was no detectable difference, this was either because the programme did not exist in any other Hungarian institution at the time or the number of graduates from other institutions entering the labour market was so small that income data could not be reported for data protection reasons).

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There is obviously no point interpreting 6 year old salary data in the current context, but the extent of the differences is still striking: the positive wage bill exceeded HUF 100,000 at five programmes, and was close to HUF 150,000 in case of Master of Business Administration. This is remarkable especially because the average includes BME graduates themselves - as it is not possible to retrieve statistics that do not include data on graduates of a particular institution.

Of course, such a difference required a million and a half in earnings, as the graph below shows. But you can also notice that being a BME alumni added about a third or even a half of a typical monthly property installment to the HUF 1 million salary of an electrical engineer.

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The situation is similar if we look at bachelor's degrees from 2021 - there is a large majority of programmes where it pays to be a BME graduate, and this is not limited to engineering: also true to physics as well as communications and media studies.

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The statistics that aggregate Master's degree graduates between 2018 and 2021 and the survey periods of 6, 12, 24, 36 and 48 months after the start of employment, identify those courses that perform exceptionally well, i.e. where a BME degree has a stable income plus compared to the national average. These are: bioengineering, energy engineering, physics, business informatics, industrial product design engineering, marketing, MBA, mechatronics engineering, computer engineering, psychology, computer and cognitive neuroscience, accounting, chemical engineering.