Most and least lucrative college majors, by state
Student debt and college tuition prices have soared sky-high in recent decades. As of the second quarter of 2024, college grads collectively owed more than $1.7 trillion to private and federal lenders. Meanwhile, the average price for a year of college education and living expenses has hit $38,270, according to a May 2024 report from the Education Data Initiative.
It's little wonder, then, that many Americans have begun to question whether a college degree is worth the spend. According to a May 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center, just 22% of adults believe that getting a degree is worth taking out student loans.
The decision to drop big bucks on a bachelor's comes down to many different factors, including where you plan to attend college—and what you want to study. On a national level, those who study nuclear engineering technologies or become technicians in that field have the highest median earnings three years after graduation at $107,804, followed by the fields of biomathematics, bioinformatics, and computational biology ($98,074), operations research ($96,452), marine transportation ($94,032), and petroleum engineering ($93,515).
Yet, while it remains true that college graduates have higher lifetime earnings than noncollege graduates, some of the lowest-earning majors still earn less than a living wage, and earnings vary considerably by state, owing to differences in local economies and industry location.
EDsmart used data for the 2020-21 school year from the Department of Education to rank degree majors in each state by median earnings after graduation for those with bachelor's degrees. Some degree programs listed are only offered at one college in the state. When a major is offered at multiple colleges, the analysis lists the median earnings between them.
