How much do graduates of various Russian universities earn

We at My Circle have recently been working on the education profile of our users, since we believe that education, both higher and additional, is an essential component of a modern IT career. 

Recently, we have added profiles of universities and institutions add. Education, which collects statistics on their graduates, as well as the ability to indicate in their professional profile the courses taken. Then they conducted a study on the role of education in the employment and career of IT professionals.

Then we became curious how much graduates of various universities earned, who became developers and worked after graduation for 4 years or more. Today we’ll try to answer this question.

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Methodological notes

In this study, we will only look at the backend, frontend, and full stack of developers. For more reliable data, we take only those of them who studied at universities that are indicated by 100 or more users of My Circle and who collected 10 or more graduates with salaries. We will also leave only those who graduated from the university no later than 2015 and had at least 4 years left to build a career. Finally, we limit the selection to only those who have visited the service over the past year, which means that most likely I updated my profile data.

As a result, we get about 9 thousand graduate developers from 150 Russian universities. 

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Geography of Education and Migration of Graduates

A tenth of the developers are preparing universities in St. Petersburg, a fourth are universities in Moscow, almost a third are universities of cities with a population of over one million, and another third are universities of other cities.


It will be correct to compare the salaries of graduates within the respective regions - because the size of the salary is strongly related to the geography of work . At the same time, we know that the city of higher education will not necessarily be in the future the same as the city of work: many graduates return to their hometowns or vice versa move to new places. 

Considering which of our graduates studied their current city is different from the city of a finished university, we got the following amazing picture. It turned out that almost every second graduate, having studied in an ordinary city, leaves him. A third - leave the city with a millionaire, almost every fifth - a capital city.


Are everyone leaving the provinces in the capital, were we horrified? Who, then, remains, then where do all our cities and towns come from, does someone else live in them? Maybe everyone leaves the country altogether? Counting on, we sighed a little. Unlearned, they go not only to the capital, but also to millionaires, and to other cities. 

Two-thirds of those who leave after studying from Moscow, one-third of those who leave St. Petersburg, and a fifth of those who leave millionaires go to their hometowns. The largest proportion who went abroad after studying were from St. Petersburg (13%), followed by Moscow (9%).  



But still, we see a strong bias: Moscow and St. Petersburg are clearly pulling graduates from other regions. We see our “forge of personnel”, but the question of how this forge is being restored remains open for other studies.



Finally, we give the top Russian cities where developers leave after graduating, and we will now move on to salaries.

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Salaries of graduate developers from universities in Moscow

If you do not take into account the migration of developers after graduation, we get the following median salaries, which are now received by graduates of Moscow universities, who have become developers and have worked after graduation for 4 years or more.

If we look separately - at the salaries of developers who remained in Moscow after education, and developers who left the city, we will see that for those who left, their salaries are often slightly lower. This difference is explained by our calculations above, where we observed that most of those leaving Moscow go to ordinary cities, where salaries are lower than Moscow.

In the diagram below we show only those universities for which 10 or more salaries have been accumulated for both the remaining and the leaving graduates.

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Salaries of graduate developers from universities of St. Petersburg

Salaries of graduates from St. Petersburg universities who became developers and worked after graduation for 4 years or more, without taking into account their further migration.

Let's look at the salaries of graduates of St. Petersburg universities - who remained in the city after studying and left it. Unlike Moscow, those who left have slightly higher salaries. Most likely, this is due to the fact that - as we saw above - many leave for Moscow and abroad, where salaries are higher.

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Salaries of graduate developers from universities of millionaire cities

Let's look at the salaries of graduates from universities of million-plus cities who have become developers and who have worked for 4 years or more after graduation, without taking into account their further migration.

When we look at the salaries of those who left the millionaire city after their education and remained in it, we see a rather serious difference between the patches. For those who left, they are sometimes one and a half times higher, and even often more than the salaries of graduates of Moscow universities. This is hardly related to migration abroad: as we have seen, there are no more than 5% of those in millionaires. Most likely, such salaries can be explained by the fact that the most qualified and the most motivated for a career leave, superior to those who sit in the place where they come

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Salaries of graduate developers from universities in other cities of Russia

Salaries of graduates from universities in ordinary cities who became developers and worked after graduation for 4 years or more, without taking into account their further migration.

When examining separately the salaries of developers who left the city to receive an education and remained in the city, we see about the same picture as in the cities with over one million people. 

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We hope you enjoyed our next study. In preparing it, we used the data of the “My Circle” salary calculator , in which we collect salaries that IT specialists share with us. If you didn’t leave us your salary this half year, please come and share information.

By the way, we began to prepare the next semi-annual report on IT salaries. Here is how it was in the past half year .