Data Source
The College Majors Dashboard is created using public data collected by the US Census Bureau. Specifically, the American Community Survey years 2009 thru 2019.
To analyze early career outcomes by major, only those respondents between ages 23 and 30, who were not enrolled in school, and had completed a maximal education of a bachelor’s degree are retained and pooled together to create the dataset. The statistics derived from this data include average income, 25th income percentile, unemployment rate, percent female, major popularity ranking, occupation shares, and income by occupation.
To analyze the share of respondents who went on to obtain graduate degrees, respondents between the ages of 45 and 60 are retained and pooled together.
Double Majors
For respondents with more than one major, one of them was chosen at random and used for analysis.
Field
To obtain a major’s field, it was determined if the major was considered a STEM degree by the Department of Homeland Security. Next, the major was classified into one of the other fields based on its name and research by the author.
Incomes
All incomes are adjusted for inflation into 2022 dollars. To eliminate the influence of outliers, all incomes greater than the 1-percentile are assigned the 1-percentile income value of bachelor’s degree holders.
The incomes analyzed are income from wages, salaries, or bonuses from an employer. Only those respondents with a positive income (income > 0) are included in the calculations (the unemployed are excluded).
The occupational incomes are the average incomes of respondents who have a bachelor’s degree in the indicated major and work in the specified occupation.
Major Difficulty
Major Difficulty is estimated using data collected from a popular website among college students in which they rate their coursework on a scale of 1-5. These ratings are aggregated across America to create the overall average difficulty. For more see this page.
Major Popularity Ranking
Major popularity ranking is calculated using the ACS 2009-19 pooling all respondents between ages 23 to 30 and counting the number of people by major.
Masters, Professional, and PhD Degrees
The graduate degrees are not necessarily in the same field as the respondents’ undergraduate degree. For example, someone obtaining a BS in Civil Engineering might have obtained a master’s in business administration (MBA).
A Professional Degree is a graduate degree in a specific profession, such as medicine (Medical Doctor), Lawyer (Law Degree), etc.
A PhD degree indicates the respondent obtained a non-professional doctoral degree.
Occupation
Occupation shares are calculated using the ACS 2009-19 pooling all respondents between age 23 to 30. Thus, the occupation shares represent early career outcomes by college major. Note these are for the respondents who have a bachelor’s degree only (no graduate degree of any kind) to reflect the potential outcomes for the college major alone.
Percent Female
Percent Female is estimated for the pooled respondents between ages 23 and 30. It includes all respondents who obtained a bachelor’s degree in the major (i.e., includes those who went on to obtain graduate degrees).
Unemployment Rate
The unemployment rate is calculated using a variable indicating the employment status of the respondents. This variable is not necessarily comparable to the official unemployment rate referenced in the news, but is useful as a relative measure to compare among
Weighting
Weights are used for all calculations.
