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.