University majors that require high admissions scores don’t necessarily lead to the highest-paying positions

By: Trademagazin Date: 2025. 08. 07. 10:56

This year, students were able to get into the most popular university majors with exceptionally high scores, with business administration, law, finance and psychology attracting the most students. Meanwhile, engineers are in the best position among recent graduates in terms of advertised jobs and offered salaries.

At the end of July, nearly 130,000 people found out whether they had been accepted to a bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral program at a higher education institution. The score limits were also extremely high for several universities this year. The experts at Profession.hu took this opportunity to look at which bachelor’s degree programs offer the greatest chance of achieving well-paid jobs.

Based on the number of first correct and total applications, the most popular this year were business administration and management majors, and their score limits were also above average (BCE: 443 points, BGE: 400 points, DE: 407 points, ELTE: 422 points). The versatile, economically focused training that provides a stable foundation opens the way to well-paid areas such as finance/accounting (net HUF 368,000), transportation/purchasing/logistics (HUF 371,000), or HR/labor (HUF 356,000). In addition, students gain a comprehensive understanding of all areas of a company’s operations, making it easier for them to enter a leadership or management career later on. The latter, not surprisingly, is the category in which employers offer applicants the highest average net salary: HUF 640,000.

Lower scores, higher wages?

According to the data of the leading job portal, after management positions, areas on the top salary list that typically require an engineering or IT degree follow. IT programming/development (604 thousand HUF), manufacturing/production (524 thousand HUF), engineering jobs (482 thousand HUF), IT operations/telecommunications (474 thousand HUF), and construction/real estate (471 thousand HUF) categories all have outstanding salaries. This shows that the score limits and application numbers alone are not decisive when it comes to estimating the value of a degree, as engineering and IT majors were not among the three most highly rated areas, and the admission score limits were not exceptionally high either (BME: 355 points, OE: 423 points, PTE: 371 points, SZTE: 356 points).

Engineers are also the winners in terms of the number of advertised graduate jobs

After Business and Management, the most popular majors this year were Psychology, Commerce, Marketing and Law, but this does not mean that these are the easiest to find a job in after graduating from university. Currently, the most advertised graduate jobs are found in the Engineering category, followed by Finance/Accounting, Manufacturing/Production, Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals and Sales/Trade.