Which College Majors Have the Best (and Worst) Career Paths?

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Congratulations, new college graduates! We hope you are enjoying your summer. Our extensive data analysis shows the most common job for all of you will be … unemployment.

But don’t panic yet. That’s always been true. It takes time to spin a thin résumé into a job offer.

And while we’re deluged with dire stories about the new-grad job market, the scariest predictions haven’t shown up in the data. Youth unemployment has fallen from its late-2025 highs, and the employment rate for young college graduates remains consistently higher than that of their degree-free friends.

Just as importantly, completing a degree will still bump your annual earnings by almost $13,000, relative to peers who didn’t graduate, even after taking student loans into account.

Much of that earnings boost, though, depends on your first job. One way to boost that inaugural paycheck? Luck into a job that matches your major.

So, we wanted to find the majors with the clearest career paths — the ones that set you up for a well-defined (and hopefully stable) job.

To do that, we sought out the most common real-world job for each major. Our ally in this effort was one of the few surveys in human history with enough data to look at individual major-and-job combos — the Census Bureau’s almighty American Community Survey. The annual survey’s so immense that even when you filter it down to young folks who completed a four-year degree, it has data on almost a quarter of a million of them from 2009 to 2024.

What does it show? Well, more than 75% of young grads with a bachelor’s in nursing are already working as nurses. Elementary education, accounting, computer science and civil engineering also stand out as majors that lock you into an obvious career. Usually, that’s good news — though in some cases, such as nursing and vocational training, it can mean that you start out earning more than your peers, but they pass you once your earnings plateau.

Mass media, philosophy, and anthropology or archaeology majors struggle with the opposite problem. Their career paths, especially for folks who stop at a four-year degree, remain so ill-defined that the most common career for a young graduate in those fields often involves retail work.

The major that looks bleakest, though, might also inspire the most hope. Fewer than 4% of drama majors will work as actors as their primary job by age 24. Young folks who studied drama are about three times more likely to be waiting tables — their most common primary job — or working in retail.

But! Of those who did become working actors in their early 20s, almost half (46%) have drama degrees. So, studying drama really does give you the best shot at an acting career — you just have to accept that it gives you an even better shot at working in the hospitality industry.

Career certainty comes with a few bonuses. Majors that clearly lead to a specific job tend to lead to bigger paychecks — especially relative to other work you’d be doing in your early 20s — and lower unemployment.

Those correlations do suffer from an obvious confound: The kids who choose the highest-value majors don’t always resemble those who don’t. They may harbor more ambition and focus more on future earnings, of course, but they also might have family backgrounds or other advantages to ease their path.

To cut through those confounds, you’d need data that followed individuals through college and well into the workforce.

Luckily for everybody involved, such data — once rare — is becoming commonplace. Grants from the National Center for Education Statistics have helped states fund datasets that link students’ college data to their performance in the workforce (with extensive privacy protections).

Using data like that enabled by those grants, researchers can pry apart correlation and causation — and they seem to back up what we found in the public federal data.

For starters, the stakes of your first job really are that high. In a recent working paper, economists Veronica Minaya, Judith Scott-Clayton, C.J. Libassi and Joshua Thomas from Teachers College, Columbia University followed 80,000 bachelor’s grads in a major urban public-university system into the workforce. They found that, all else being equal, every extra $1,000 you get from your first real job (that is, one that lasts at least nine months) is associated with an additional $700 advantage five years after graduation.

And a good job fit can make or break that first paycheck. Lauren Russell of the University of Pennsylvania and Taylor Odle of the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed about 115,000 Tennessee bachelor’s grads from the 2010s into the workforce and found that, all else being equal, folks who moved into an industry that fit their field of study got a raise of 5% to 10%, above and beyond the boost you’d get from moving into an unrelated industry. (Their work will soon be published in the journal Education Finance and Policy.)

Another piece of evidence: An analysis of almost half a million public-university students in Texas from the classes of 1996 to 2002 and earnings data looked at how much certain majors lifted their salary in the first two decades after graduation, all else being equal. The income trends found in the analysis bore a reassuring resemblance to ours, even after controlling for high school and college characteristics, students’ high school test scores, and demographics such as race and gender.

Degrees in engineering, business and IT, which tend to have clearer career paths, often lead to students earning tens of thousands of dollars more a year than their otherwise equivalent peers who studied the (noneconomic) social sciences or liberal arts. (The research, by Rodney Andrews — a University of Texas at Dallas economist who died suddenly while the research was in progress — Scott Imberman of Michigan State University, Michael Lovenheim of Cornell University and Kevin Stange of the University of Michigan, will soon be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics.)

Another paper using similar Texas data by the same team of scholars, along with Michigan State’s Patrick Massey, found that white and, to a lesser extent, Asian men tended to see higher boosts from their major than their otherwise similar female or Black and Hispanic peers.

But worry nipped at our heels. Were our data still relevant, given our most recent observations come from 2024, and the economy seems to be evolving with alacrity?

Laura Ullrich should know. She directs research at the Indeed Hiring Lab, which uses activity on America’s dominant job-search site to track the labor market on a moment-to-moment basis.

When we called, Ullrich helped us understand that in the past few years, something seems to have shifted deep within the new-grad job market. In a recent analysis with her colleague Arcenis Rojas, Ullrich found that the share of four-year college graduates who made (or updated) an Indeed profile soared 67% from 2023 to 2025.

Why do we care about young folks’ job-search proclivities? Because, traditionally, Indeed wasn’t always the first destination for students who already knew what their inaugural job journey would look like. Aspiring engineers, scientists and software developers relied on pipelines built up over decades: scaffolds of internships, on-campus recruiting programs and interpersonal relationships that helped match skilled grads with the jobs that needed those skills.

But if those students are now venturing into the rough-and-tumble employment free-for-all that is Indeed, it signals those pipelines have sprung a leak.

“Our data show that internship opportunities were lower for the most recent cohort of graduates,” Ullrich told us, “and the fact that more of them are coming to our platform likely indicates that the market has shifted, and new graduates are having to turn to other places to source employment.”

Which, she said, could help explain why students feel the job market is so bleak, despite the relatively standard situation painted by the employment statistics.

“There are blocks of college graduates that are doing quite well,” she told us, particularly in careers like nursing or teaching that have a strong work-experience component and robust recent job growth. But other blocks are struggling, and they’re not always the blocks you’d expect.

“Historically, students majoring in computer science, students majoring in business have had some of the best outcomes,” Ullrich said. “They come out, they get the highest wages, they do quite well.”

“I think that’s why you’re hearing about it so much,” she told us, “because some of the people who don’t normally have a hard time? They are!”

That felt right. But why trust our gut when we’ve got the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey — the fast-moving monthly data underlying stupendous statistics such as the unemployment rate?

In the CPS, we looked at the one-third of jobs that traditionally had the strongest links to a single college major. For a generation, such jobs have consistently outgrown their peers. But they’ve sputtered in the past three years — right around when today’s grads would have been choosing their majors — with a fall that rivals the COVID-19 lockdowns as their worst run since the Great Recession.

And the traditional strength of many of these majors — which, unlike the humanities, usually have a defined vocational path — has become their weakness. Because in times of rapid upheaval, the students who studied a narrow, practical skill will be stuck in a track to a destination that may or may not exist anymore.

“I think there’s real reasons to be focusing on those types of skills,” said Cornell’s Lovenheim, one of the researchers who helped determine how much value college majors really add — but “the downside of that is that the skills you’re learning are not very adaptable, and so they’re particularly prone to adverse shocks.”

What’s the “adverse shock” this time around? A real answer would require a 35-part series spanning much of the year (if you want to see that, let us know!). But AI seems an obvious culprit and/or scapegoat.

A recent analysis by Census Bureau economist (and swing-dance instructor) Lee Tucker chronicles how, in the wake of ChatGPT’s release, young folks’ jobs evaporated in the industries most exposed to AI.

But how can that be, if AI isn’t advanced enough to replace even the most junior employees in most industries (yet)?

Ullrich suggested one potential explanation: AI isn’t taking grads’ jobs; it’s taking their paychecks. As companies rush to stay ahead of the New New New Thing, they’re dumping so much cash into speculative AI investments that they can’t afford luxuries such as newly graduated greenhorns.

Does that mean the majors we highlighted, the ones with the clearest career path, aren’t worth it anymore? Probably not!

It just means that, as Ullrich pointed out, students in popular, high-paying majors now have to learn the fundamental skills long prized by the liberal arts: be flexible, take a few classes outside your specialization, broaden your definition of a good job fit and be willing to adapt your approach to what employers need at this particular moment.