Why Women (Like Me) Choose Lower-Paying Jobs : Planet Money : NPR: Midway through the conversation, I realized that the economist — Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University — was basically talking about me. I described my situation to Carnevale: I majored in applied math. I have an MBA. And I'm working as a reporter at NPR.
"Oh, you left a lot of money on the table," he told me. "You left probably as much as $3 [million] to $4 million on the table."
A typical journalist's lifetime earnings will be somewhere in the $2 million range. Not bad! But someone with math skills and an MBA could get a management job and make $5 million or $6 million over the course of a career.