This happy news comes with an important asterisk. A large chasm has opened between the fates of young liberal-arts majors and their peers in STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math) fields. The former are struggling to find work that pays, at least before their late twenties. The latter are mostly finding lucrative work after they graduate.

The story of underemployment among 20-somethings is one with several major implications for the value of college for young people today and the state of the U.S. economy. Since 2010, the labor market has added millions of jobs, and wages have increased for just about every cohort and demographic. But young college grads have faced several unexpected hiccups. While joblessness for the broader economy has fallen steadily in the last few years, the unemployment rate for recent college grads has been a much more jittery decline (see the red line below). Underemployment for recent college graduates is still higher today than it was in 2010 (or any other time in the 21st century).

Meanwhile, something deeper seems to have changed. In the labor market for young college grads, non-college jobs have proliferated faster than jobs that have historically required a college degree.

The Conference Board, Help Wanted Online; U.S. Department of Labor, O*NET.

Which young people are going into these less skilled, lower-paid jobs? Humanities majors, it seems. Liberal-arts majors “are two to three times more likely to be underemployed than those with engineering or nursing majors,” the authors found.

Indeed, the gap between humanities and STEM students is striking. Underemployment afflicts more than 50 percent of majors in the performing arts, anthropology, art history, history, communications, political science, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and international affairs.

But the undergraduate majors that promise the best shot at a high-paying job all have one word in common: engineering. Civil-, mechanical-, aerospace-, and industrial-engineering majors all have extremely low underemployment percentage and they are the least likely of all majors to land their degree-holders in a low-paying, low-skilled service sector job. “Our work does suggest that certain skills have a higher demand relative to supply than others—such as those majors related to the STEM fields and healthcare,” the authors write.