For all the concern these days about whether a college degree is still a good investment, bachelor’s-degree recipients fare much better in the job market than do their less-educated peers. But not all college graduates do equally well—and the variation is linked to what they studied. Engineers? Good starting salaries. Arts, life-sciences, psychology, or recreation majors? Not so much.
The idea that a major makes a difference in career outcomes has been a dominant theme in the work of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce in recent years. In a report released on Wednesday, the center updates its analysis of how unemployment and earnings vary.
“It matters what you major in, and it matters if you get a graduate degree,” Anthony P. Carnevale, the center’s director, said in an interview. It’s “the same point we make over and over again, I’m afraid,” he said.
The center seized upon newly available data from the U.S. Census Bureau to capture for the first time in 2011 the variation in earnings and employment rate by major. It followed up with another analysis last year.
The new report, “Hard Times: College Majors, Unemployment and Earnings,” is based on census data from 2010 and 2011. It considers the employment outcomes of college graduates age 22 to 26, making comparisons to experienced graduates (age 30 to 54) and graduate-degree holders—those age 30 to 54 with at least a master’s degree.
Among recent graduates, electrical-engineering and mechanical-engineering majors earned the most, a median of $57,000 each. Drama and theater-arts majors earned the least, a median of $25,000.
Recent graduates’ unemployment rates also varied by major, the report shows. Information-systems majors had the highest unemployment rate, 14.7 percent. Following them were architecture; anthropology; film, video, and photography arts; and political-science majors, all of whom had unemployment rates of more than 11 percent.
Majors with the lowest unemployment rates for recent graduates were nursing, elementary education, physical fitness and parks and recreation, chemistry, and finance, all of which had rates of less than 6 percent. (Some majors were too small to provide solid data and could not be included. In other parts of the analysis, the researchers put similar majors into groups.)
As for why certain majors had lower unemployment rates, the center offers some explanations. The crash of the housing market, even if it’s now recovering, continued to plague some majors, like architecture. And as a general principle, majors that enable graduates to create technology offered better job outcomes than did majors that prepare graduates to use technology. That explains why mathematics and computer-science majors faced lower unemployment rates than did graduates who had studied information systems.
As workers gain experience and education beyond a bachelor’s degree, unemployment rates shrink and incomes rise, according to the report. In each group of majors, workers with experience had lower unemployment rates than did recent graduates, and those with graduate degrees fared best of all.
Differences across majors, though, cropped up. Experienced architecture majors, for instance, had an unemployment rate of 9.3 percent, higher than the rate for recent graduates in most of the major groups.
