Not to sound like your parents—because, honestly, follow your passion!—but if you major in theology, theater arts, or Renaissance art history, you may find it harder to get a job after graduation. And if it’s hard to find a job after graduation, you may have to go on a game show to pay off your student debt.
But getting such a job requires a little planning. The 2017 end-of-year report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that people with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $1,193 per week, compared to $761 those with just a high school diploma.
However, certain majors were more likely to result in jobs and CareerCast put them together into a helpful list:
- Nursing: Demand for nurses ranks among the highest for all careers, according to CareerCast.
- Accounting: Employment rates historically linger over 90% for accounting majors
- Computer Science: Get a job at the next Twitter, Google, Facebook
- Information Systems and Information Security: See above.
- Marketing and marketing research: According to CareerCast, people who graduate with this degree have employment rates of around 94%.
- Finance: Please start a hedge fund!
- Business management: See above.
- Mechanical engineering: Get ahead of the coming robot revolution.
- Mathematics: If you’re actually good at math and maybe even enjoy it, you owe it to the rest of the world to work in this field.
- Chemistry: See above.