It has become a dispiriting summer ritual: Thousands of students graduate from college every year only to discover they still don’t have what it takes to land a decent-paying job. But they do have a huge school bill that needs to be repaid.



With hiring still weak in nearly every stratum of the economy, many recent grads are alarmed to discover the only jobs open to them involve low-skilled (and low-paid) work that doesn’t even require a college degree. That doesn’t mean they chose the wrong major: In some popular fields, there are simply more people with the same types of skills than the job market can absorb. In other fields, students may be on the right track but need further schooling or experience before they can nab the jobs they’re after.















The best majors for landing a good job tend to be engineering, computer science and other rigorous fields that prepare students for specific work in booming industries. For people in other majors, something that sets you apart from the masses — such as graduating from a top program or developing expertise in more than one discipline — might be needed to provide an edge. “It’s good to have a little right brain and a little left brain,” says Katie Bardaro, lead economist at Payscale, a compensation-research firm. “Go with what you’re strong in as your primary field, and what you’re not quite as good in as your secondary field.”



Payscale recently sorted through data on roughly 100 majors to identify those associated with the greatest portion of recent grads who end up overqualified for the work they do. Somebody who graduated with a business degree, for instance, would be considered overqualified if he worked as a waiter or an assistant manager at a retail store, jobs that require an associate’s degree or less. Students shouldn’t necessarily avoid such majors, but they should be aware that simply graduating with a degree in one of these fields may not be enough to land a desirable job.



Here are 10 majors with the weakest job prospects, based on the portion of workers employed in jobs for which they're overqualified:



1. Business administration / management. This is one of the most popular majors, which has produced a glut of grads with business degrees at a time when big companies are reluctant to hire. “A lot of students have the idea that if they just major in business, they’ll be a successful Wall Street banker,” says Bardaro. “Unfortunately, the number of jobs available in that sector is very, very small.” One way to distinguish yourself: Develop a concentration in quantitative courses such as statistics or finance.



View photos





2. Criminal justice. Glamour jobs in this field include FBI agent and intelligence analyst, but those positions typically require years of experience, technical knowledge or connections that recent grads don’t ordinarily have. Many criminal justice majors end up becoming police officers, paralegals or security officers — jobs that don’t usually require a college degree.







View photos

Story continues