Summary
Is a bachelor’s degree worth it? The evidence says yes: Prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 70 percent more at the median than workers with a high school diploma alone and face much lower unemployment rates (2.9 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively). However, median earnings vary significantly by major for prime-age workers, from $58,000 in education and public service fields to $98,000 in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
The Major Payoff: Evaluating Earnings and Employment Outcomes Across Bachelor’s Degrees provides insight into key outcomes associated with various undergraduate fields and majors for prime-age workers (ages 25–54) and recent college graduates (ages 22–26), including median earnings, the graduate degree earnings premium, and unemployment rates.
Explore the Data
This report features an online data tool that provides a comprehensive overview of the outcomes associated with 152 majors for prime-age workers and 142 majors for early-career bachelor’s degree holders.
Earnings Vary Across Majors
Workers with bachelor’s degrees in architecture and engineering; business; computers, statistics, and mathematics; health; and physical sciences have the highest median earnings, but earnings vary widely across majors. For example, within the 65 STEM majors, median earnings range from $64,000 for workers with a bachelor’s degree in miscellaneous agriculture to $146,000 for workers with a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering. While humanities and arts majors are often thought to lead to lower earnings than STEM majors, 14 of the 19 humanities and arts majors lead to median earnings above the 25th percentile of earnings for workers with STEM majors ($65,000). However, the range of median earnings for humanities and arts majors is relatively narrow ($58,000 to $73,000).
Racial/Ethnic Disparities by Major Persist
As higher education has become more inclusive of students from historically underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, disparities in representation persist in lucrative fields of study. Male, white, and Asian/Asian American workers with bachelor’s degrees continue to be overrepresented in STEM fields of study relative to their share of the bachelor’s degree–holding workforce overall. Meanwhile, women are overrepresented in education, healthcare, and social science fields. These disparities risk leaving talent on the sidelines at a time when many critical occupations face growing skills shortages.
Resources
In The Major Payoff: Evaluating Earnings and Employment Outcomes Across Bachelor’s Degrees, CEW analysis underscores that a college degree is a worthwhile investment.
