The Bachelor's Degrees With The Lowest Starting Salaries In 2016

College graduates in the class of 2016 with bachelor’s degrees in advertising can expect an average starting salary of just $35,700 when they graduate in the spring, the lowest sum of any of 35 majors measured in a new study from Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute (CERI). The next-lowest: Music/Drama at $36,700. Close behind is public relations, with an average starting salary of $36,200.

This is the 45^th year CERI has run the most comprehensive survey of its kind to gauge employers’ plans for hiring new graduates in the coming year. To project spring starting salaries, CERI collected data from 4,700 employers who recruit on campuses across the country. It reaches employers through career offices at 200 schools, including Northwestern, MIT and a range of state universities. The survey ran from late August through September.

To calculate salaries Philip Gardner, MSU economist, lead author of the survey and head of Michigan State’s career office, says that he collected at least 50 salary reports for each of 35 college majors, from software design to social work, and averaged out the starting pay for students graduating in each field. His numbers don’t include commissions, stipends, bonuses or allowances for moving or other incentives.

At the bottom of the heap, close behind advertising, music/drama and PR, are five teaching majors. Special education teachers make the most, at $38,400, though not by much. High school teachers start at $38,100. Middle school teachers make the least, at $36,800. Special education teachers do the best, at $38,400. Gardner says that schools like Michigan State offer teacher education degrees. Aspiring high school teachers also earn degrees in their specialties like biology or literature. For his report, Gardner spelled out the salaries for each type of teacher. In the slideshow above, I’ve combined the five teacher salaries for an average of $37,800.

History majors also do poorly, starting at $37,800. After that come social work majors, who start at $39,100.

A couple of majors missing from the list because Gardner didn’t collect enough salaries to represent them: English and philosophy. I bring those up because in July, my colleague George Anders wrote a wonderful feature on Silicon Valley companies hiring liberal arts majors for their creativity and original thinking. Some of tech’s most successful founders also didn’t study computers or engineering as undergrads or even in graduate school. Example: Stewart Butterfield, 42, cofounder of San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, which makes team-based messaging software. Butterfield majored in philosophy at the University of Victoria in Canada and got a master’s in philosophy from Cambridge. Eight-year-old Slack is now considered a so-called unicorn, worth at least $1 billion. Slack’s editorial director Anna Pickard, 38, has of all things a theater degree from Manchester Metropolitan University in England. So a liberal arts degree is not necessarily a sentence to low-salary purgatory if you can be creative about your job search.

The excellent news for students finishing their bachelor’s degrees in 2016 is that college hiring is seriously rising in 2016, expected to jump 15% over last year. This is the second year of significant growth. Last year starting salaries climbed 16% over 2014.

See our slideshow above for the 15 worst-paying bachelor’s degrees in 2016. You can also check out this story and slide show to see which majors are projected to pay the highest starting salaries next year. Clue: engineering degrees take the top three slots.

See also: The Industries Hiring The Most College Grads In 2016