Not all college degrees are created equal. According to a report by the Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) at Georgetown University, your choice of college major substantially affects your employment prospects and earnings.
“What you make depends a lot on what you take,” says Anthony P. Carnevale, Ph.D., director of Georgetown’s CEW. “Most young people in college take whatever interests them, without thinking what it can really do for them.”
So which college majors are the least valuable in terms of career prospects and expected salary? Using data provided by the CEW from the 2009 and 2010 American Community Survey, Forbes discovered the 10 worst college majors based on high initial unemployment rates and low initial median earnings of full-time, full-year workers. The findings? While the arts may be good for the soul, artistic majors are terrible for the bank account.
Topping the list at No. 1, anthropology and archeology represent the worst choice of college major in economic terms. Recent college graduates of the major, those ages 22 to 26, can expect an unemployment rate of 10.5%, well above the national average. When they do land a job, the median salary is just $28,000, compared to a mechanical engineer’s initial earnings of $58,000.
With low demand and low earnings, the arts and humanities are well-represented on this list. Film, video and photographic arts (No. 2) features a 12.9% unemployment rate for recent grads; fine arts (No. 3) has a rate of 12.6%; and philosophy and religious studies is a high 10.8%. All earn a median of just $30,000.
Full List: The 10 Worst College Majors
“What society rewards in economic terms has moved away from the softer majors,” says Carnevale. “It’s become about how much math you do.”
Non-technical majors–the arts (11.1%), humanities and liberal arts (9.4%), social sciences (8.9%) and law and public policy (8.1%)–generally have higher unemployment rates. Conversely, health care, business, and the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) have been more stable and higher paying for recent college graduates. A nursing grad, for instance, faces a below-average unemployment rate of 4% and a median starting salary of $48,000.
Arts and social sciences are also harder hit in recessions. “When the economy is robust, the demand for the arts goes up,” says Carnevale, “but in a recession, they are the first victims.” The collapse of the housing market means architecture majors now face an unemployment rate of 13.9%, the highest of all the majors tracked. However, once employed, experienced workers earn an above-average median salary of $64,000.
The value of specific degree types has transformed dramatically since the early 1980s, says Carnevale. While a bachelor’s degree was once a general qualification that could land recipients in a number of different jobs, the last three decades have shown increasing specialization and differentiation of earnings across majors. He believes the change has largely been driven by technology, which increased the demand for knowledge-based workers and technical training.
Is a four-year college degree still worth it? Carnevale offers an emphatic “yes,” saying the earnings advantage of a bachelor’s degree over a 45-year career is $1.2 million on average. The advantage of an engineering bachelor’s is a whopping $3 million. However, he warns that if you want to pursue the arts and social sciences, you should either combine the study with a more practical major or go for a graduate degree.
“There’s an escalation in requirements,” says Carnevale. “For degrees like teaching, psychology and the arts, if you don’t get a graduate degree, you don’t make much money.”
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See Also:
Full List: The 10 Worst College Majors
The 15 Most Valuable College Majors
Comments
It’s unfortunate that certain majors have less job prospects. I am so interested in history that I would have loved to get an arts degree, but instead settled on something I do like, maybe not as much, but something that gives me some skills that are more marketable in the working world.
“Major in what you like,” is the standard advice given by academic counselors and university career counselors alike. As real-world experience and occupational training / education studies such as CEW show, that advice is a display of callous disregard for the college student’s future economic reality as a graduate. Whether the student chooses to follow that poor counsel or to peruse sector labor market data, such as BLS occupational projections, and make his/her own decision is perhaps the most telling indicator of that college student’s will and capacity to think critically and to make independent judgments.
Proponents of the outdated quadrivium-trivium model of liberal arts education speak of going to college “to better yourself” while downplaying the increasing need for vocational / technical / practical training to better our bottom lines. The knowledge economy has plenty of thinkers but insufficient doers, as evinced by the 3.4 million unfilled jobs which the 8.2 million unemployed would love to fill but lack the requisite prior experience demanded by those positions. Until the economy improves, employers generally will not provide on-the-job training to develop rudimentary but able-minded, able-bodied job applicants into better-qualified workers.
I am glad that I ignored the annual “University Open House” pleas from the philosophy & classics department to enroll in one of their majors and successfully argued to my senior academic adviser why I would definitely not apply to law school or continue full-time enrollment anywhere as a career option; too much schooling time creates an opportunity cost of lost work. Those who do major in less-in-demand majors but nonetheless gain full-time employment upon graduation do so primarily on their social connections in order to be selected over comparably accomplished graduates (in terms of GPA, extracurriculars, etc.) in fields more directly relevant to the job.
Although some might say the 8.1% unemployment rate of public policy graduates is due to cuts in government funding, most eliminated managerial and internship government positions were removed via attrition. Protection of one’s bureaucratic fiefdom is a predominant reason why municipal and state governments are hesitant to offer so much as an unpaid internship. The “gated community” approach to spreading on-the-job training and the low turnover of government bureaucrats make it unlikely that a newly minted college graduate will just waltz into a position monitoring programs, preparing budgets, or writing grant applications.
I also notice the current trend in public administration and policy jobs is for the successful job candidate to have accrued several or more years of progressive experience in the private sector such as project management or consulting. Even the “entry level” positions such as “assistant program manager” require at least three years of experience for an applicant to be a serious contender. Completing a few internships in college doesn’t cut it anymore, and woe to those whose programs do not offer any internship opportunities!
After many years as an engineer I can tell you 75% of the engineers I know cannot write a few coherent sentences displaying clear organized thinking.
This is an area where the liberal arts might be able to help.
And yes, I remember pooh-poohing the basic humanities and liberal arts general education requirements when I was an engineering student too.
Oops.
I majored in psychology and minored in computer science from a top 15 school and as a postgraduate I spent an entire year trying to find a job with my major to no success, getting few interviews even with extensive networking. The first time I thought to apply to a tech job just based on my programming background they interviewed me and I was hired the same week.
The difference between majors is night and day in the job market, and I would agree that most liberal arts majors essentially require you to go to graduate school to get anything beyond entry level positions for the next decade; assuming you can even get one of those.
These lifetime earning stats are not helpful to the typical kid who is *debating* going to college. If they are debating it, they are likely not like the *average* bachelor’s graduate. They need to know whether the particular school and major they can enroll in are worth it. Even further, they may have to make an estimation of whether they can achieve above/below average grades in a given program. I feel like people like Carnevale are doing some kids a disservice by leading them to believe they will make $1.2M more over their lifetime, which never materializes after they graduate with a useless degree from a poor school with poor grades. Yet they will have loans and opportunity cost just to enrich college professors and administrators.
My ultimate point is that, given the premise of the remainder of the article, when asked “is a four-year college degree still worth it,” the answer should more appropriately be “it depends.”
It does suck that mantra “Do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” is now invalid if you actually want to make serious money. Personally, I love film and english and I intended on getting a degree in one, but I realized that I’m going to need a business degree if i want to make real money in this country. So here I am in business when I really have a passion for film and english. It’ll just be my hobby forever I suppose.
You definitely do not need college to learn how to write nor how to make movies. You are better off taking Computer Science because that will apply to almost anything including writing and movies. A high school education is enough to write a good novel if you really put your mind to it. This is why the degree is practically worthless. Writing is very easy as I just demonstrated. English is my second language and I have no formal training outside of general ed.
Choosing a major based on results after one year out is a pretty short-sighted choice in a globalizing and rapidly changing world. However, I would urge everyone who thinks that way to please major in those things. For those with longer term thinking and an interest in learning about how the world works–plus getting writing, analyzing, thinking, collaborating, and inter-disciplinary skills–anthropology is #1.
http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2012/08/21/anthropology-is-the-worst/
Any hard science would work. Learning how to write is a product of the students effort not of the major. I didnt have to write much outside of projects yet my english is better than many native speakers. Right now the best skill you can have leaving college is computer science followed by any common engineering such as civil, mechanical, computer or electrical (dont get cute with bioeng or chemical eng, this was my mistake because employers didnt know what they mean and they didnt bother asking).
You can take any comp sci grad (with a few bio courses) and put them in an anthropology job and they will figure it out after reading a few example reports but you cannot take an anthropologist and put them in front of a computer and ask them to write a high traffic distributed db business app nor ask them to design a sewer system for a low income housing project. My point is, learn a skill that is not easily displaced and is in demand. Anthropology is ok at best but only because of the lower division science.
It seems to me that the most important thing is to do work that is meaningful for you and that utilizes your natural talents. Yes, Oprah Winfrey could have studied engineering or nursing because it paid more, but thousands of us are grateful that she did not. Of course, Oprah is a top one percenter now, but she followed the path that was right for her, not something based on an economic analysis of the most lucrative college majors.
Meaningful work that leverages many natural talents, plus earning creativity is what drives long term success. If you love to help animals and want to keep them healthy, why get a degree in chemical engineering? You won’t like what you do anyway and will end up either quitting or worse, settling. This is bad news because a job affects such a big part of your life.
As for pay averages, they don’t necessarily mean that much to us individually. I heard Robert Reich (the sub 5 foot tall former Labor Secretary) say “averages don’t mean much, if you average my height with Shaq, I’m 6 feet tall.”
Parents and all those who pay to put themselves or someone else through college need to consider the financial feasibility of pursuing a specific degree. Unfortunately, economic conditions preclude using “study what you want” as a universal rule. This raises critical questions about the relationship of finances and education in today’s economy and society.
The same economic conditions are also forcing educational institutions to adopt corporate for-profit models. Although the financial results may satisfy taxpayers (at least with regard to public institutions), students are now paying higher tuition for a smaller selection of courses and larger class sizes than ever before. Economic constraints must be considered, but we should not allow them to hobble our higher education by denying access to the poor, by discarding unprofitable subjects as bastions of worthless knowledge, nor by diminishing the pedagogical strengths of our educational facilities.
We should not direct the guiding principles of our higher education toward motives of self-aggrandizement or cupidity. Nor should we use the profitability of a degree as the sole measure of its value. These fields may be the least profitable fields for initial entrants, but I remain unconvinced that they have been proven the “worst.”
In 1959 I received a BA with majors in History, English Lit. and minors in Psych and Ed. I started off with an investment firm in NY, and made good money, but quit in disgust when I perceived that ethical requirements were really nil and fiduciary responsibility for the clients was skewed toward greed for the corporation. I then taught in a public school system in NJ for 30 years and went on for a Master’s degree. Never regretting the decision I however, took 1/2 of every raise and invested it in IRAs and conventional stock a/cs. At present, i am not in Willard’s or Mophead’s fortune category, however I am my wife and my children and grandchildren will never have to worry about money. I do not regret going the Liberal Arts way. I enjoy music, art, history, archaeology, astronomy, and watching the advances in the sciences. My wife and I still go to school (all-life-learning) and enjoy it. Those who propose that students aim for a specific degree in a specific narrow field do not understand the world to which they are restricting those young humans. Aside from making money, there is a whole world of reading, and a whole line of understanding all kinds of art and music. There are other cultures which beg to be studied and understood in context. Look at the genius of Einstein. He was also a musician and was comfortable talking psychology and world affairs as well as a=mc squared. Turning out engineers without anything else, or doctors without anything else, or even lawyers without anything else is really producing people who are 21st century improved models of workers displayed in Chaplain’s film “Modern Times”.
b.t.w. that was e=mc squared in my original post.
My point was that, for the most part, those who have a very narrow educational base in their higher ed studies, also end up with an unfortunate lack of knowledge of the universe in which they live. They may make much money, but their narrow view of politics, international relations, personal relations, social constructs, how others live, and thus usually vote for politicians based on very narrow and short term criteria. I have friends who are PhDs in some very narrow technical and scientific areas, and am amazed that many of them have no knowledge outside of their small, academic or corporate fields. Those same folks are also the ones who, at the undergraduate level, restricted their choices to anything allies to their future speciality. A big mistake. When they had an opportunity to take an art history course, or a history course, or archaeology, or anything outside their field, they shunned that as a waste of time. Now their only conversation is outside their speciality is based on what they read in the papers, on line, and what they hear around the water cooler. Oh well.