Top 100 Undergraduate Majors 2019

We’re celebrating back to school by releasing some stats on college majors in 2019. We’ll start by delving into the top 20 before we present the full top 100. For all majors, we also include salary data for the median salary after a median number of years experience.

Computer Science remains the top major, effectively tied with Business Administration. As usual, we see many strong STEM fields represented among the top 20, with business related degrees constituting the remainder. Most students pursue degrees in fields with the expectation of achieving six figure salaries, with the only exceptions in the top twenty being social science and arts degrees: Psychology (13) and English (18).

We opt not to bucket similar majors into similar categories. Some could argue there’s a lot of overlap among, say, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, and Software Engineering. However, whenever we drill down to try to make cuts, we find colleges who cite reasons for keeping these various flavors distinct. MIT, for example, gets very persnickety about being called a “School of Management” as opposed to a “Business School”.

Therefore, in most cases we defer to the wisdom of colleges in assigning names to their major fields of study. It’s true, the phrase “wisdom of colleges” might enrage Peter Thiel. We would clean up some obvious things, like misspellings, but allowed similar sounding majors to remain their own distinct category. At any rate, a college major is still a lot less important than what you actually end up doing on the job, so we put more work into distinguishing between actual on-the-job behavior than we do slicing and dicing majors. If you are interested, here is more details about the clustering we use to cluster job skills.

Annual Trends

From the rankings changes it may seem as if there was a lot of volatility, but in fact these top majors remain relatively constant year over year.

Contrary to the heavily-hyped claims by the Computing Research Association that degrees in Computer Science has doubled since 2013, it actually looks fairly flat by our metrics. If there’s been an increase, it’s maybe a 20% increase at most. The difference may be due to methodologies, they rely on a survey of universities, while we analyze the raw impact on the actual data. Potential biases to our data are discussed below.

Generally, the numbers have stayed fairly constant over the past five years. In 2014, the top majors were also Computer Science and Business Administration at a near tie for the top, with mechanical engineering and accounting falling into a statistically significant third and fourth.

We do observe the Psychology major has been dropping fairly steadily over the years. It used to regularly rank 5–9, but has fallen outside the top ten for three years running. We do note that, according to Google Trends, searches for “insane” have also tapered off over the same period, so maybe there’s just less demand for psychologists.

Another surprising chart that could countermand a media narrative

Electrical Engineering also appears to drop slightly. For both Psychology and Electrical Engineering the data shown here are noisy, but pop out as significant in regression analysis. You can judge for yourself it you think Psychology and Electrical Engineering are becoming less popular of it is just statistical noise:

The Top 100

We know you just came here to see where your major was listed, so we’ll go ahead and cut to the big list:

1. Computer Science: $110K (14.3%)
2. Business Administration: $101K (14.2%)
3. Mechanical Engineering: $111K (6%)
4. Accounting: $92K (4.6%)
5. Finance: $109K (3.6%)
6. Economics: $95K (3.3%)
7. Information Technology: $108K (3.3%)
8. Electrical Engineering: $99K (2.9%)
9. Business: $108K (2.8%)
10. Computer Engineering: $117K (2.7%)
11. Business Management: $111K (2.6%)
12. Management: $113K (2.6%)
13. Psychology: $84K (2.5%)
14. Industrial Engineering: $112K (2.4%)
15. Civil Engineering: $105K (2.2%)
16. Engineering: $105K (2.2%)
17. Information Systems: $114K (1.8%)
18. English: $88K (1.8%)
19. Mathematics: $103K (1.6%)
20. Software Engineering: $113K (1.5%)
21. Nursing: $79K (1.4%)
22. Political Science: $109K (1.4%)
23. Applied Science: $90K (1.4%)
24. Project Management: $105K (1.3%)
25. Chemical Engineering: $81K (1.3%)
26. Criminal Justice: $84K (1.2%)
27. Commerce: $92K (1.2%)
28. Electronics: $109K (1.1%)
29. Communications: $97K (1.1%)
30. Biology: $81K (1.1%)
31. Business Analytics: $111K (1.1%)
32. Chemistry: $97K (1%)
33. History: $88K (0.9%)
34. Physics: $93K (0.9%)
35. Sociology: $89K (0.8%)
36. Communication: $97K (0.8%)
37. Arts: $65K (0.8%)
38. Journalism: $77K (0.8%)
39. Data Science: $114K (0.8%)
40. Law: $83K (0.8%)
41. Engineering Management: $108K (0.7%)
42. International Business: $118K (0.7%)
43. Public Administration: $85K (0.6%)
44. Computer Applications: $111K (0.6%)
45. Biochemistry: $85K (0.6%)
46. Education: $91K (0.6%)
47. Architecture: $97K (0.6%)
48. General Studies: $103K (0.6%)
49. Computer Information Systems: $111K (0.6%)
50. Public Health: $97K (0.6%)
51. Technology: $108K (0.6%)
52. Statistics: $106K (0.6%)
53. Information Management: $114K (0.6%)
54. Information Systems Management: $105K (0.5%)
55. Human Resources: $90K (0.5%)
56. Liberal Arts: $67K (0.5%)
57. Petroleum Engineering: $94K (0.5%)
58. Graphic Design: $84K (0.5%)
59. Human Resource Management: $94K (0.5%)
60. Aerospace Engineering: $113K (0.5%)
61. Biomedical Engineering: $99K (0.5%)
62. Industrial: $101K (0.5%)
63. Philosophy: $99K (0.5%)
64. Advertising: $83K (0.4%)
65. Data Analytics: $108K (0.4%)
66. International Relations: $96K (0.4%)
67. Cybersecurity: $108K (0.4%)
68. Public Relations: $98K (0.4%)
69. Geology: $79K (0.3%)
70. Telecommunications: $108K (0.3%)
71. Mass Communication: $109K (0.3%)
72. Administration: $96K (0.3%)
73. Applied Business: $67K (0.3%)
74. Film: $101K (0.3%)
75. Management Studies: $81K (0.3%)
76. Communication Arts: $94K (0.3%)
77. Applied Accounting: $100K (0.3%)
78. Kinesiology: $107K (0.3%)
79. Sports Management: $89K (0.3%)
80. Human Services: $88K (0.3%)
81. Technology Management: $110K (0.3%)
82. Microbiology: $94K (0.3%)
83. Biotechnology: $87K (0.3%)
84. Informatics: $113K (0.3%)
85. Organizational Leadership: $105K (0.3%)
86. Machine Learning: $115K (0.3%)
87. Analytics: $114K (0.3%)
88. Agriculture: $77K (0.2%)
89. Counseling: $76K (0.2%)
90. Anthropology: $82K (0.2%)
91. Chinese: $106K (0.2%)
92. Social Work: $71K (0.2%)
93. Entrepreneurship: $113K (0.2%)
94. Liberal Studies: $78K (0.2%)
95. French: $82K (0.2%)
96. Botany: $85K (0.2%)
97. Pharmaceutical Sciences: $76K (0.2%)
98. International Studies: $84K (0.2%)
99. Photography: $84K (0.2%)
100. Music: $76K (0.2%)

Notes on Methodology

• The resumes are collected from public uploads to https://rezscore.com/ but none from our wonderful API partners.
• We only considered US schools, as it is our primary geography.
• We remove all resumes that users request to be private at upload, because we seem to be the only job search company these days that cares about your privacy.
• Users of RezScore are disproportionately from top schools. It’s possible this may bias our results in favor of patterns at elite institutions.
• Similarly, we cannot get data on users if they never touch the job market. Our bias runs toward people who are actually endeavoring to get jobs, which may mean we undercount, say, philosophy majors.

Notes on Salary Estimates

Understandably, salary is quite a sensitive topic, so we wanted to add a few notes based on questions. You may be interested to read more in our full series on how how we estimate salary ranges.

We observe many factors at play in salary expectations, including location, experience, and education. You may find a degree from an Ivy League school in San Francisco results in a very different salary than one from a degree mill off the grid. We do routinely adjust our numbers from user feedback and accuracy is always improving as we collect more data.

The salary value can be interpreted as the median salary for a graduate in the major at the median number of years of experience. That is, entry level salaries are likely to fall under this value, which can be taken more as an indicator of potential.

With a list this size we acknowledge some, especially at the tail end, could be subject to bias in either direction. For instance, does a degree in Entrepreneurship really command one of the higher average salaries, or did this entrepreneurial set of users find a way to game our system? We don’t yet know, although as entrepreneurs ourselves it might inspire us to ask ourselves for raises so we can afford fancier ramen.

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