With total college debt at $1.2 trillion and climbing, it’s easy to assume every college-bound student is flocking to majors known for their lucrative salaries. For example, nine of the top 10 highest paying majors are engineering disciplines—petroleum engineering is No. 1 with an annual salary of $136,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The top bachelor’s degrees in demand by employers are finance, accounting and computer science.
Not everyone’s desperately forcing themselves into a finance or computer science degree in the hopes of a steady job post-graduation, though. Droves of students are still opting for degrees as diverse as performing arts and health professions, according to data recently collected from
Out of the 650 schools on FORBES’ Top Colleges list this year, social sciences is the second-most popular area studied. Communications and psychology also showed up in the top 10. Visual and performing arts majors may only make $42,000 annually on average, but the fields still place as the No. 10 most popular major among recent graduates, according to LinkedIn.
“As much as research suggests, people are coming out with majors that don’t directly align to trends we hear about popular career paths,” says Daniel Shapero, LinkedIn’s careers product leader. “A wide range of majors can lead someone into a wide range of fields and any number of things in a career. We’ve found LinkedIn has helped them discover what’s possible.”
As Shapero suggests, students are finding ways to turn their degrees into something valuable for employers in fields with promising salaries. Social sciences majors may market their data collection or spreadsheet skills to profitable businesses, and communications majors often enter public relations departments in various high-paying fields. Many visual arts majors are a perfect match for designing webpages for lucrative startups.
Read: That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket
Nearly 40 million students and recent graduates have LinkedIn accounts, and the millennial demographic represents the largest growing population of LinkedIn users. The platform has become one of the tools recent grads employ to explore career choices possible with their degrees.
“The way you can really understand what possibilities are out there is by looking at people who graduated with your degree a few years ahead of you,” Shapero says. “Sorting through groups of professions this way is like looking at a future version of you, and gives you a much richer sense of what’s possible.”
Data compiled by Jill Castellano, Natalie Sportelli, Sergei Klebnikov, Karen Hua, Lauren Feiner and Maxine Joselow.
