Office accessories in a cardboard box at office.
Students get lots of advice on what majors are the smart ones to enter if you’d like high-paying work after college. The answers typically revolve around STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The chances of moving into the top economic quarter — or even higher — are good.
However, sometimes things don’t work out as promised. Companies often over-hire in active years, assuming they can make more money. When things turn in the other direction, they cut jobs to preserve profits and, more often, keep markets happy, which results in buttressing share prices.
The Good And Bad Degrees
The important point to take here is that sometimes what society or quasi-experts promise isn’t true. To that point, earlier this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a table called “Labor Market Outcomes of College Graduates by Major.” It shows majors, unemployment rates, underemployment rates, median wages for both early career and mid-career, and share of college graduates who went on for a graduate degree.
One caveat is that the data is from 2023, so things may have changed, but probably not that much. Then again, the unemployment rate that year was 3.8% or lower in each quarter. It’s 4.2% now.
When ordered by the unemployment rate, here are the ten majors in which people had the lowest unemployment rates:
- Nutrition sciences, 0.4%
- Construction services, 0.7%
- Animal and plant sciences, 1.0%
- Civil engineering, 1.0%
- Special education, 1.0%
- Agriculture, 1.2%
- Early childhood education, 1.3%
- Aerospace engineering, 1.4%
- Nursing, 1.4%
- Earth sciences, 1.5%
And here are the ten majors with the highest unemployment:
- Anthropology, 9.4%
- Physics, 7.8%
- Computer engineering, 7.5%
- Commercial art & graphic design, 7.2%
- Fine arts, 7.0%
- Sociology, 6.7%
- Computer science, 6.1%
- Chemistry, 6.1%
- Information systems & management, 5.6%
- Public policy and law, 5.5%
There is no way to know how many of the people worked in the fields in which they earned a degree. An old 2013 survey from CareerBuilder said that 47% of college-educated workers said their first job after college wasn’t related to their major; 32% said they never found a job related to their major. Coming after the Global Financial Crisis, those figures could be unrepresentative for “normal” times.
Something To Look Forward To?
For this 2023 survey, and so far as anyone knows, it could be that the people out of work with a given degree are unemployed for some reason that has nothing to do with
Those hoping for a sure bet major should still be wary and realize that there are fewer safe havens than before with artificial intelligence and advanced robotics. Could a machine take over for a plumber, for example? Rather unlikely at the moment. There are too many unknowns, too much crawling around strange spaces.
There are other unknowns in life, especially in some parts of STEM. In May, Reuters reported that Microsoft was laying off thousands, and the cuts were not performance-related. The results of Q1 were $25.8 billion in net income, up 18% year-over-year, and strong demand for AI services. CEO Satya Nadella said that AI systems are writing 20% to 30% of Microsoft code, according to TechCrunch. In April, Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott reportedly said in an earnings call that 95% of its code will be AI-generated by 2030, or five years from now.
Amazon told thousands of employees to relocate to one of several sites. Those who don’t lose their job without severance, as Amanda Goodall, a consultant in workforce information in aviation, oil, and tech, reported in an X post.
Tom’s Hardware reported that Intel is outsourcing its marketing to consultancy Accenture, which will use AI to do so.
Problems don’t face only tech employees. This graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows how employment in temp work is doing.
Number of temporary employee workers.
There is a lot of pain lining up for working people.