Data Sources
A variety of data sources are used in order to create the estimates used. The primary source is the American Community Survey years 2009-2022. All dollar values are converted into real 2022 dollars throughout the analysis in order to be on a comparable basis over time. The sample is restricted to people who reported their college major, and thus excludes imputed values.
Analysis
Difficulty
Measures the share of professor within the major (department) that are rated as average difficulty (3 on 1-5 rating scale) or higher by college students. This measure has been found to be correlated with earnings and weekly study hours per week.
For details see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4275668.
Income Growth Over Career
The income growth rate is calculated as the percent difference between the early career income and mid career income.
Lifetime Income
The lifetime income is calculated for men aged 25 to 55 who majored in the major (regardless of graduate degree status), with data binned into 5-year age bins and the weighted median income calculated for each bin. The data from these bins are summed (each bin being multiplied by 5) to estimate the lifetime median income by major.
Mid-Career Income
Mid-Career income is calculated in the same way as starting income but for those men aged 40 to 44.
Pct Female ( or “% Female”)
The share of the major that is female is calculated by taking a person weighted count of all degree holders in the major that are female divided by the total number of degree holders in the major, -restricting to all degree holders aged 23 or older.
Salary Over the Career Charts
The sample is restricted to men, aged at least 23 years old. The restriction to men addresses concerns that women may sort into certain majors because they intend to have more or less children, which would bias estimates of returns for these majors.
The black dashed line (“All College Graduates”) includes BA holders only (no masters degree holders or higher) from all majors and is the baseline comparison group that all majors should be evaluated against.
The red dotted line includes BA holders only from the major.
The green solid line includes those who majored in the selected major but obtained a graduate degree of some sort (Masters degree or higher). From the data, we do not know what field the person obtained the graduate degree in.
For each subgroup above, we calculate weighted (person weight) median earnings by age. For bins with too few observations, we bin observations over several years. Finally, the charts are produced by fitting a LOESS trend to the median earnings by age, to produce the the black and red trend lines. The green line is produced by the best fitting quadratic equation to the data (earnings = a + b1*age + b2*age^2 + error) – this method is used to avoid overfitting to noise given the smaller sample for people with graduate degrees.
Note that we include all people who meet the subsample definition in each group, including those who are not earning any income at all.
Share with a Masters Degree
The share with a masters degree is calculated for degree holders (all graduate degree levels, including BA only) aged 40 to 50.
Share with a PhD
The share with a PhD is calculated for degree holders (all graduate degree levels, including BA only) aged 40 to 50.
Share with a Professional Degree
The share with a Professional Degree is calculated for degree holders (all graduate degree levels, including BA only) aged 40 to 50.
Starting Income (or “Early-Career Income”)
The starting income is calculated by first calculating the median (weighted) income by age (24-28) by major, then taking the average across the 5 bins within each major. For example: starting income for major X = average(median inc of people aged 24 who majored in X, …, median inc of people aged 28 who majored in X).
Top 10 Occupations
To obtain a sense of how career specific a major is, the share of graduates working in the top 10 most common occupations for the major is a helpful measure. For example, if the number is relatively high, it indicates the major leads to fairly specific career paths, suggesting the training received is specific. A major with a relatively low top 10 share, suggests the training the graduates receive from their coursework is very general, and does not readily apply to any specific occupation.
This value is calculated by restricting to men who reported their college major aged 45 to 55, who reported their occupation, and had exactly a bachelor’s degree (no graduate degrees). The top 10 occupations are the 10 occupations with the highest person weighted share of individuals working in them within a given major.
Unemployment (or “Early Career Unemployment Rate”)
The unemployment rate is calculated using respondents aged 24-28, as the weighted number that were unemployed divided by the total weighted number in the labor force (unemployed and employed) for each age bin. The final unemployment rate for the major is the average unemployment rate across these 5 years. Note that those not in the labor force are excluded from the calculation.
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