The Best Majors for Working from Home

During the pandemic, remote work emerged as one of the largest developments in workplace culture in the last few decades. Economist Nick Bloom writes that pre-pandemic, 5% of worked days were worked from home. Today it is 20%. Bloom expects work from home and especially hybrid work arrangements to continue to grow in popularity, as the latter has been shown to maintain worker productivity while cutting costs for companies.

But if you are looking to get a degree that will lead to a remote job, what should you major in?

Luckily, we have hard data on this from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, where respondents are asked how they transport to work, with one option being that they work from home.

I analyzed data from between 2009-2022 to estimate work from home rates by college major both before and during the pandemic. As it turns out, the remote work rates over the two periods are pretty closely related. You can use this data to choose a major that has a high chance of leading to remote work.

Let’s jump in.

The methodology is described below. The major hyperlinks provide additional detailed data on each college major.

Top 15 Remote Work Degrees Before the Pandemic

Pre-Pandemic, work from home rates were pretty low. The four majors with the highest remote work rate were Composition and Speech, Mathematics and Computer Science, Fine Arts, and Commercial Art and Graphic Design – each with 11% of graduates working from home.

There appear to be two themes for the majors on the list. Many are either tech related (Mathematics and Computer Science, Commercial Art and Graphic Design, Information Sciences, Computer Science, Management Information Systems and Statistics) or are often associated with self-employment (Composition and Speech, Fine Arts, Miscellaneous Agriculture, Film, Video and Photographic Arts, Music, Art History and Criticism, Agricultural Economics, Studio Arts).

(You can see the full list of majors at the bottom of the post.)

Top 15 Remote Work Degrees During the Pandemic

During the pandemic, remote work rates rose dramatically: 3.6 times higher for each major, on average. Whereas before, just 11% were working remotely for the most remote friendly major, during the pandemic 56.6% of graduates in Mathematics and Computer Science were working remotely. The list below shows a shift away from just tech and self-employment oriented majors, to majors like Actuarial Science, Statistics, Economics, and Public Policy, among others. In short, this data suggests that remote work or at least hybrid work may play a more prominent role for many more majors in the post-pandemic economy. No longer is remote work going to be reserved for tech workers and the self-employed.

It would be helpful to know what the work from home rates are today, but unfortunately this data isn’t yet available.

Remote Work Rates Before and During the Pandemic Closely Related

It’s interesting to see how pre-pandemic remote work rates relate to those during the pandemic. If the two are very closely related, it suggests that some majors lead to jobs that are very friendly for remote work, while others just don’t. What the graph shows is that there is indeed a very strong relationship. Thus, most majors that were a poor fit for remote work before the pandemic, continued to have a low remote work rate during the pandemic, such as Nursing. At the same time we see that some majors increased their remote work rate by more than expected and others by much less. It does look like for many majors, the pandemic may have permanently opened the door on remote/hybrid work as a permanent arrangement. The full tables can be seen below.

Pre-Pandemic % Remote for All Majors

The table below shows the % of graduates that were remote by major pre-pandemic (American Community Survey years 2009-2019).

Pandemic % Remote for All Majors

The table below shows the % of graduates that were remote by major during the pandemic (American Community Survey years 2020-2022).

Methodology

I use American Community Survey data from 2009-2022, restricting to respondents who reported their college major. The respondent is considered to have worked from home if their response to how they transport to work was “Worked at home”. Only the employed were included in the tabulations. Responses between 2009-2019 were considered to be pre-pandemic. While responses from 2020-2022 were considered pandemic responses. Results are person weighted.