Show me the money: economics majors rank high in starting salaries

Ironman, at the valuable Political Calculations, lists "2008 Starting Salaries for Recent College Graduates" (National Association of Colleges and Employers data). Economics majors rank near the top of the majors he's able to list, at $52,926/year.

This is not a surprise; economics majors have been near the top, usually below engineering, computer science, and not much else, for at least the eight years or so I've been following the NACE surveys.

But there are two surprises. One, economics used to be combined with "finance" and I'd always assumed the high value for economics was due in significant part to the finance folks. But for this survey, finance is broken out separately and the survey shows an average starting salary for finance majors below economics.

Second, and related, there are ample indicators that accounting majors are much in demand. But accounting--which used be ranked slightly above economics/finance--is now shown as about $5500/year less than economics.

Note: I don't trust any of these figures much. But as my wife once proclaimed, tongue-in-cheek, when talking about teaching history to high-schoolers: "It doesn't matter whether it's true or not, so long as it's interesting."

UPDATE: Thanks to economist, blogger, and Door reader, John B. Chilton, for a pointer to these comments by noted labor economist Daniel Hamermesh. Aside from any inaccuracy in the the NACE data, Hamermesh finds (using other data) that over half the differences in earnings across majors can be explained by differences in personal characteristics--such as SAT scores--and hours worked. This doesn't surprise me. I have long told my economics students that their prospective higher salaries are, of course, not entirely because of their economics training. But I do implore them to learn enough economics to be worth those salaries.