Lehigh University · every degree · entering Fall 2027
Every bachelor’s degree Lehigh offers — 79 majors across four colleges, the honors tracks, and the 40 fields you can only minor in — ranked on what Lehigh graduates actually earn, separating what is measured from what is merely benchmarked.
Most “salary by major” content silently blends three incompatible datasets. This page keeps them apart, because they disagree by up to 55% and the disagreement is systematic, not random.
Lehigh’s own First Destination Report. Real starting salaries of real Lehigh graduates. Note: Lehigh publishes averages, never medians — averages get pulled upward by a few large offers.
Class of 2025 · 92% outcome rateFederal College Scorecard: actual tax records of Lehigh completers, four years after graduation. The strongest evidence that exists. Available for only 24 of the programs.
Award years 2017–19 · earnings CY2022–23 · 2024 dollarsNational median for the same major. Used only to compute Lehigh’s premium. Never presented as a Lehigh outcome.
College Scorecard, same cohort & measureRuns 40–55% above IRS data for identical majors. Self-selected respondents skewed mid-career. Payscale English shows $76,592; the IRS shows $48,590. Useful for curve shape only — not used for any figure on this page.
Verified across 44 majorsThe top Google result for Lehigh salaries — news.lehigh.edu, “Lehigh grads rank among top earners,” mid-career $112,000 — is dated July 2011 and cites the 2011–12 Payscale report. Fifteen years stale. It is still widely quoted.
Tiered by measured Lehigh starting salary, Class of 2025. Programs without a Lehigh-specific figure sit in their college’s divisional rollup and are marked DIV — that is a division average, not a per-major number.
Starting salary tells you about year one. This tells you about year twenty. Federal projections for the decade 2025–2035, mapped to the occupation each major actually feeds. Bars right of the line are growing; bars left of it are shrinking.
College of Health has Lehigh’s lowest measured starting salary ($65,500). But it feeds the two fastest-growing occupations on this entire chart: Medical and Health Services Managers at +24% and $123,860, and Epidemiologists at +19%. Population Health starts low and climbs into a field that is expanding faster than software.
Paired with the full-tuition College of Health Scholars award, that is a materially different calculation than the starting-salary tier alone suggests.
Computer Programmers −7% · Journalists −6% · Network & Systems Administrators −4% · Political Scientists −2% · Graphic Designers −2%. Writers and Authors, Musicians, and Actors are flat at 0%.
Note the split inside computing: Computer Programmers −7% while Software Developers +10%, Information Security Analysts +21%, and Data Scientists +35%. “Computers” is not one trend — the routine coding occupation is contracting while the design and security occupations expand.
Occupation mapping is approximate by nature — a major does not map cleanly to one BLS occupation. International Relations has no distinct BLS occupation and inherits Political Scientists. Musicians and Actors have no published annual median at all (BLS gives hourly only: $47.80/hr and $29.05/hr).
“Difficulty” is mostly opinion. Credits to graduate is not — it is printed in the catalog, and it is the honest version of the same question. Every program below fits in four years, so extra credits mean a heavier term, every term.
CSB, IBE, IDEAS. That is 16 credits more than a standard Arts & Sciences degree — a full extra semester of coursework compressed into the same four years. All three also require a 3.25 GPA to remain enrolled. Drop below it and you are out of the program, not just off the dean’s list.
Electrical 134 · Bioengineering 132 · Chemical, Environmental and Engineering Physics 131 · AI/ML/DS 130–131 · Civil and Computer Engineering 130 · Applied Science 128 minimum.
Bioengineering additionally forces a choice among three required tracks and substitutes biology for a humanities elective in the first year — the least flexible first year in the college.
Business 124 · IBH 122–124 · College of Health 120 minimum · Arts & Sciences typically 120. Business requires only a 2.0 in-major GPA to graduate — the lowest academic floor of any program here.
College of Health adds a real constraint that credits do not capture: 25% of major coursework must be experiential, meaning placements and fieldwork, not lectures.
Arts-Engineering and the Electrical Engineering + Engineering Physics dual (162 credits) run five years and award two bachelor’s degrees. A second degree requires 30 credits beyond the first, all taken at Lehigh, plus dean and committee approval.
Because merit awards renew for ten semesters on a bona-fide five-year program, the fifth year can be tuition-covered.
Ten programs. You declare interest sophomore or junior year — nothing to do at application time — and file an abbreviated graduate application senior year.
The 4+1 MPH is automatic at a 3.5 cumulative GPA with junior standing. Graduate courses taken while still an undergraduate are billed at undergraduate tuition, and the fifth year carries a 30% discount. Business offers reserved graduate credits and roughly 20% off. Caveat: those graduate credits do not count toward the undergraduate degree, and the engineering 4+1 GPA floor is published as both 3.0 and 3.5 on two different official Lehigh pages.
Every degree program plus the honors and non-degree routes. Click any column header to sort. 83 rows, not 79 — Computer Science, Economics and Health, Medicine & Society each appear twice because the college you apply through genuinely differs, and Explore Lehigh and Eckardt Scholars are routes rather than degrees. “Locked” is the column most people miss: it is when the choice becomes irreversible.
| Program | College | Degree | Start · Lehigh | 4-yr · IRS | vs national | Outlook ’35 | Locked |
|---|
This is the structural insight that matters more than any salary number. Most of these choices are not made on the application.
You apply to a college, not a major.
Lehigh, verbatim: “If not accepted into the program, you may elect to be considered for another college if desired.” IBE, CSB, IDEAS and IBH all carry a fallback college. There is no downside to naming one.
Lehigh, verbatim: “students applying to any accel program cannot simultaneously be an Early Decision applicant.” The 7-Year BA/DMD forfeits Early Decision — trading a 47.35% admit lane for a 26.79% one.
Unresolved: whether an ED I applicant may select IBE or IDEAS. CSB and IBH list all three rounds; IBE and IDEAS publish only “deadline January 1st,” which is the ED II/RD date. No Lehigh page settles it. Call Admissions at 610-758-3100 before Nov 1.
Applications fell about 5% and the admit rate rose nearly 3 points, from 25.93% to 28.96%. The Class of 2030 set an application record (20,441) but its admit rate is not yet published.
CDS 2025–26 · Fall 2025 entry47.35% ED vs 26.79% regular. ED fills 57.4% of the class — 881 of 1,535 students. There is no Early Action. Lehigh reports ED I and ED II combined only, so anyone claiming one beats the other is guessing.
Level of applicant’s interest is rated “Important” in the CDSThe Common Data Set GPA section is left blank in both 2025–26 and 2024–25. Any “average GPA 3.8” figure you have seen is third-party, not Lehigh. Only two factors are rated Very Important: rigor of secondary school record and academic GPA.
Only 33% of enrolled students submitted an SAT (10% ACT). Over half submitted nothing at all. The widely quoted 1380–1480 range describes the third who chose to submit — not the class. Test-optional indefinitely, opt-in, and Lehigh superscores both tests.
CDS confirms these policies apply to Fall 2027 applicantsLehigh publishes no admit rate by college. Not in the Common Data Set, not in the Data Center, not in the class profile. The claim that Business and Engineering are harder admits appears only in consulting blogs with nothing cited. The only official college-level figure is enrollment share of the Class of 2029: Arts & Sciences 37%, Engineering 25%, Business 22%, Intercollegiate 11%, Health 4%, Arts-Engineering 1%.
Merit aid is a separate door from need-based aid, and it carries no asset test.
| Award | Value | Separate app | Fall 2027 deadline |
|---|---|---|---|
| College of Health ScholarsRequires naming College of Health | Full tuition, 4 yrs + $5,000 experiential fund | Yes | Lehigh app by Jan 1 2027 · COHS app by Feb 1 2027 |
| Founder’s / Trustees’“Top tier of our applicant pool” | Full or half tuition | No — automatic | — |
| Dean’s Scholarship | $15,000–$25,000 | No — automatic | — |
| Soaring Together | Full tuition | Yes | Not published — unverified |
| National Merit | $1,000–$2,000 (Finalists) | No | — |
Merit awards renew for 8 semesters — or 10 for a “bona-fide five-year program.” Stated three times on Lehigh’s page. Full tuition follows you into year five of Arts-Engineering or a five-year dual degree. That is an entire extra year of covered tuition plus a second bachelor’s degree.
It requires naming College of Health as your intended college. It is not available through Business or Engineering. That is a genuine trade: College of Health has Lehigh’s lowest measured starting salary ($65,500) and its lowest placement rate (88%).
It may collide with Early Decision. The scholarship notifies in late March; ED I binds you in mid-December. You could be committed months before knowing whether tuition is covered. No Lehigh page states how the two interact. Recipient counts circulating online (4–5 per year) are not on the official page. Verify by phone.
Every item below is commonly listed online as a Lehigh program. None of them are.