May 03, 2017 09:02 AM EDT By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

There's a big amount of data being captured, stored, and analyzed which requires a lot of people who can generate insights and make accurate predictions. This makes data science one of the hottest career choices of the moment. More so, a master's degree in data science yields a good ROI.

According to PayScale, the median salary of a data scientist is $91,000 per year while the median rate per hour is $38.35. The maximum salary cap is $142,361 per annum.

PayScale also included the companies that hire the most data scientists. Here are the top 6 employers for data scientists and how much they pay their data scientists.

Microsoft - $92K - $182K

American Express - $115 - $125K

IBM - $90 - $130K

Booz, Allen, and Hamilton - $65 - $85K

Amazon - $62 - $84K

Explorys - $61 - $81K

For those who are wondering what master's program in data science is the best, here are some from the top universities across the nation.

Master of Business Analytics - MIT

MIT Sloan offers a master's degree program in Business Analytics where students will be taught how to utilize Big Data tools and methodologies. It also introduces students to the R statistical programming language.

Master of Information and Data Science - UC Berkeley

This program is a combination of both online and offline coursework but students are only limited to three days which is some sort of an on-campus immersion process for students. Students of this program will learn how to use Python programming as well as data visualization and applied machine learning.

Master of Computational Data Science - UMC

Carnegie Mellon's Master of Computational Data offers students an opportunity to learn technology driven tools in statistics and data science, such as data mining and machine learning. It is one of the most sought after programs in data science and as expected, the acceptance rate is also low compared to other programs.

See Now: Covert Team Inside Newsweek Revealed as Key Players in False Human Trafficking Lawsuit