It’s difficult to predict what the job market will be like when this fall’s college freshmen enter the job market. As is the cyclical nature of the economy, the current unprecedented economic expansion will likely wane. Innovations in artificial intelligence and automation are poised to create and eliminate a large portion of today’s jobs. Some experts predict that by 2030, some 400 million to 800 million people worldwide could be displaced in the modern economy. Even now, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is running on a single issue platform based around the threat of automation to the current economic status quo.
Future college grads will likely need to be able to quickly adapt and acquire new skills to thrive in this new world. This unpredictable future makes it difficult to choose a course of study that will lead to a successful career. In anticipation of this looming change, we conducted a study to determine which majors provide the most career flexibility. We expect that majors that currently lead to a wide variety of jobs will be similarly flexible in the future. To better equip students to make this choice, we also considered the estimated earnings by major.
Over three-fourths of the majors studied were relatively flexible. Business, social science and humanities majors are more flexible than majors within education, computer science and math. And while STEM degrees tend to pay the most, having a STEM degree doesn’t lock workers into a STEM career.
CALCULATING A MAJOR’S “TRANSFERABILITY”
In order to figure out which majors offer the most flexible career options, we conducted a two-part analysis. First, we looked at what job titles are most associated with respondents’ majors. Then we devised a system to rank these majors by the breadth of career options. To achieve this, we analyzed a sample of 438,342 individuals who took PayScale’s survey between July 2015 and July 2019. Respondents provided data on their current job title, current pay, their degree, and their area of study. Calculating the proportion of jobs to specific majors against the total sample gave a “Relative Commonness Score”. To understand how flexible a major was, we devised a “Transferability Score.” This measures the breadth of job titles a respondent could have with any given degree.
The Transferability Score is represented relative to the average score of 1.82. Majors with transferability scores greater than 1.82 are considered to have a wide range of career options. Majors with scores less than 1.82 are considered to have relatively specific career paths available to them. Transferability scores clustered around 1.82 can be considered to be something of a coin toss; there is a relatively equal chance that a student will end up with a job that is the same as the most common job titles associated with that major.
Table 1: Most Transferable Majors, by Category
| Rank | Major Group | Transferability Score |
| 1 | Business Majors | 5.86 |
| 2 | Social Sciences Majors | 5.85 |
| 3 | Humanities Majors | 5.57 |
| 4 | Physical & Life Sciences Majors | 5.32 |
| 5 | Communication Majors | 5.31 |
| 6 | Art Majors | 5.26 |
| 7 | Health Science Majors | 5.24 |
| 8 | Engineering Majors | 5.06 |
| 9 | Education Majors | 4.89 |
| 10 | CS Majors | 4.56 |
| 11 | Math Majors | 4.15 |
THE MAJORS THAT KEEP YOUR CAREER OPTIONS OPEN … OR CLOSED
Generally, we find that majors within the business, social science and humanities categories have more varied potential career outcomes than majors within education, computer science or math major categories. However, we find that most individual majors have a wide range of career paths open to them.
Choosing a major with a high transferability score such as in business administration, communication, business management, psychology or sociology suggests there is scope for a wide variety of career outcomes. For example, respondents in our dataset with a psychology major were found to have the most common job titles of ambulance driver, office machine operator or transportation attendant. A job that is actually relevant to psychology, industrial-organizational psychologist, pops up fourth. This wide spectrum of job titles is potentially an indicator of a lack of available jobs within a psychology specific career tracks for the supply of graduates with a psychology degree. Additionally, the breadth of jobs is perhaps indicative that students who complete a psychology degree have significant opportunities to pursue other career paths as well.
Conversely, choosing majors with extremely low transferability scores leads to careers that are extremely specific to the chosen field of study. Within our data, we found the least transferable major to choose was audiology, with all respondents with a degree in audiology turning out to be audiologists. This is a trend with all majors with very low transferability scores. For example, students who major in nuclear physics tend to become physicists, students who choose a nursing degree are much more likely to be nurses and so forth. When you look at the pay trends for these more niche majors, they generally have jobs that pay fairly well and are in consistently in demand.
EDUCATION DOESN’T PAY AND IS HARD TO LEAVE
Degrees within the education major group represent some of the least transferable majors along with some of the lowest early career wages. Education majors have an average expected early-career salary of just $37,600, which isn’t enough to pay rent in many American cities. While teachers may benefit from having the most meaningful jobs, their salaries come up short. In the past two years, the lack of a living wage led to significant unrest within teachers’ unions across the country. An annual poll by PDK found that 55% of educators would like to go on strike for higher pay, with half of teachers considering quitting their jobs.
Unfortunately, most other job titles associated with education degrees outside of teaching are also low paying in nature. For example, the most transferable education degree is a Bachelor of Education, for which elementary school teacher is only the sixth most common job. The most common job title associated with an education degree is photographic processing machine operator, followed by painting, coating and decorating workers. As such it is difficult to see how students enrolled in education majors can make comfortable living without significant structural changes to how we pay educators.
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