In terms of career outcomes, the choice of college major is as important as the decision to attend college or not.
Yet, in making the choice students face a barrage of contradictory and confusing messaging. Based on people the student knows, it seems only certain degrees lead to good outcomes, but they aren’t necessarily in fields the student finds interesting.
On the other hand, some counselors advise choosing whatever is most interesting to you, as surely pursuing your passion is the wisest choice if all that the modern economy requires is that you have a college degree of some kind.
As a result, students largely make a decision based on intuition and momentum, not really knowing where the degree will lead them to. As a result, the choice is often suboptimal,
The College Majors Data Dashboard is intended to fix these informational gaps.
It includes the key outcome information by college major from data collected by the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, as well as other data sources.
Do you want to know the average income for a major? Its unemployment rate? The top 25 occupations people who graduate in that field actually work in and how much each of those careers pays? How about the difficulty of the major as it compares to other majors?
The Dashboard has all of these and more.
Here are several fun facts I discovered as I assembled and processed the data.
- The top two occupations of people who majored in Antropology and Archaeology are Retail Salespersons (3.7%) and Secretaries (3.7%). Just 1.4% work as Social Scientists, the presumed passion of people who chose to major in this field.
- The most common occupation of Physics majors is Software Developers and Systems Analysts (6.7%), who would’ve thought? And a sizeable share work as engineers of various kinds. These truly are surprising results.
- The most common career among those studying Public Administration is Supervisors of Sales Workers (3.6%).
So jump into the data and make your own findings.
I hope this data makes the process of navigating college and choice of major a little easier.
