Bankrate, a site often used to help readers make smart financial decisions, recently outlined what they’ve found to be the most valuable college degrees.
What did they find? Of the 152 degrees they considered, it appears STEM majors dominated. All in all, engineering degrees claimed eight of the ten top places, all of which offer a high annual salary.
TOP THREE VALUABLE DEGREES
The top three most valuable degrees were Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Petroleum Engineering.
The outlier here was Actuarial Science, in which only 20% of the grads have an advanced degree while for the other nine top majors, anywhere between 31.70% - 47.60% of their grads have advanced degrees.
Since this can be subjective, what does Bankrate deem valuable and not valuable? In formulating the ranking, Bankrate considered median annual income, unemployment rate, and the percentage of workers with an advanced degree using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey (ACS).
TOP THREE LEAST VALUABLE MAJORS
This brings us to the next question - which degrees are the least valuable?
Bankrate used the same data from the 152 degrees. At the top of the list, you’ll find Visual and Performing Arts. In second place is Film, Video, & Photographic Arts, and finally Miscellaneous Fine Arts as the third least valuable degrees.
Within these majors, standing out significantly are the 69.1% of Clinical Psychology majors and 69.2% of Library Science majors who have advanced degrees, yet their majors are considered the least valuable. These degrees may have earned them some job security however, because these two majors have the lowest unemployment rate on the list.
“The data for bachelor's degrees in liberal arts and more general fields tend to show lower earnings, but there's a lot of complexity to that,” says Tatiana Velasco, Senior Research Associate at Community College Research Center. “These may be paths that require more time and investment for you to see the economic benefits.”
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