The Economic Guide To Picking A College Major

By BEN CASSELMAN

The millions of American college students heading back to campus this month face a grim reality: A college degree is no guarantee of economic success. But through their choice of major, they can take at least some steps toward boosting their odds.

The link between education and earnings is notoriously fraught, with cause and effect often difficult to disentangle. But a look at detailed data on college graduates by major reveals some clear messages: Don’t be pre-med if you aren’t planning to go to medical school; don’t assume that all “STEM” — science, technology, engineering and math — majors are the same; and if you study drama, be prepared to wait tables.

Those lessons might seem obvious, but there’s evidence that many students aren’t learning them. By far the most popular major in recent years, psychology, is also one of the lowest-paying and leaves more than half its graduates working in jobs that don’t require a college degree. Many of those students no doubt would have chosen to study psychology even if they had known about their uncertain career prospects. But research has consistentlyshown that many colleges and universities do little to push their students to make informed choices about what to study.

For all the recent skepticism about the value of a college education, abachelor’s degree is still “worth it” on average. In fact, according to a recent analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the average value of a college degree is near an all-time high, even factoring in rising tuitions.

But the key word there is “average.” The same Fed researchers also found that the lowest-earning 25 percent of college graduates earn less than about half of high school graduates — and the high school grads also had four years to make money while the college students were taking on debt. And those figures don’t include the shockingly high percentage of college students who don’t graduate, many of whom end up with the worst of both worlds: saddled with debt, but with no degree to help their job prospects.

Today’s college students, then, need to choose a major that maximizes their chances of graduating, and minimizes their chances of ending up in that bottom 25 percent, where they would have been better off skipping college, at least financially.

To understand how big a financial difference choice of major can make, look at the table below. The typical recent college graduate with a full-time job earns about $36,000 a year, according to the American Community Survey. But graduates with a degree in petroleum engineering, the highest-paying major, earned a whopping $110,000. That’s five times the $22,000 median salary at the bottom end of the spectrum, library science. And that’s just for graduates lucky enough to land full-time jobs.¹

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