Thanks James!

The highest paid jobs for econ majors are in investment banking, and I would guess that the salaries earned by i-bankers play a huge role in why econ majors earn relatively so much.

The skewing occurs in the median case as well as in the mean case and at the right tail, so even if investment banking jobs are higher paying than the highest paying jobs open to people in other majors, that doesn't immediately suffice to explain the phenomenon – can you flesh out your reasoning?

If you don't go to an elite school you probably don't have a chance at getting an i-banking job.

Here too, there's a large wage gap even for students who don't go to elite schools.

Majoring in economics at a good school signals that you have the math skills to succeed as an i-banker.

Would majoring a quantitative STEM field be just as good or better?

Nowadays, the main path to getting an i-banking job is via an internship during the summer after your 3rd year of college.

Do you know how one goes about these internships?

JonahSinick, to help students who want to earn high salaries you should consider doing a post on how to get an i-banking job.

This is something that we'd like to investigate, though it's not the high priority for us right now (we're more focused on preparing for a career earlier in college than on getting a job out of college, though we're looking at the latter subject some because it bears on the former subject).