What's the best major for this job?

Ididio Explores

We’ll give you a quick look at the top-paying majors for the job you want!

There are lots of wonderful reasons to choose a particular major, but for a given career goal the questions that we can answer with data are:

Which majors are most frequently hired?
Which majors tend to earn the most?

You can always find this information in Ididio’s career pages, which you can access from our Career Explorer at any time, and in this story we’ll cheat and go straight to the answers! Just follow the steps 1 - 2 - 3 below!

Here’s how to find the best major for a job

1) Use this drop-down menu to choose a job category

Look at only these types of jobs

All

2) Check the box for the career you’d like to see.

Careers

Select the career name to go to Ididio’s career page for that job.
Sort by any column by selecting the column title.

Architectural and Engineering Managers

Pharmacists

Petroleum, mining, mining safety, and geological engineers

First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers

Computer and Information Systems Managers

Chief executives and legislators

SOURCES:

2018 ACS microdata

3) Check out the data for majors who work in the career you selected in step 2.

Salaries by major for Architectural and Engineering Managers

Select any row for Ididio’s major page.
Sort by any column by selecting the column title.

Electrical Engineering

Chemistry

Chemical Engineering

Specialized Program in Engineering

Electrical Engineering Technologies

General Business

Mechanical Engineering

Methodology

We aggregated salary and education for major/career combinations using person-level responses to the American Community Survey.

In our analysis, we presume that any graduate degree would be much more important than a college major, so our main view is for bachelor’s-only salaries. Additionally, we have omitted careers or career/major combinations for which at least 80% of workers have a graduate degree.

One final note: here and in our career pages, we didn’t include career/major combinations that reflected fewer than 1,000 workers. If you see a salary figure that you don’t quite believe, check out the number of workers with that career and major. If it’s a small number, maybe those outcomes are anomalies.