Which Degrees Have the Worst Return? An Honest Look at “Useless” Majors

Lists of “useless degrees” are among the most-shared and least-useful content on the internet. They rank subjects by median starting salary, present that ranking as a verdict on the subject’s worth, and quietly ignore that the same list would have called a computer science degree a poor bet in 1985.

The question underneath is real, though, and it deserves a proper answer. If you are about to spend four years and a large amount of money, you are entitled to ask what you get back. So here is what the evidence actually supports, and where it stops.

What “return” actually means

Return on a degree is not salary. It is what you earn, minus what you paid and what you gave up to be there. Two students with identical degrees and identical salaries can have completely different returns. The comparison below is an illustrative case, not measured data.

The price you pay is as much a lever as the subject you choose, and it is a lever more students can actually pull. Changing your major is hard and consequential. Choosing a cheaper route to the same qualification is often straightforward.

What the weakest-performing majors have in common

In the New York Fed’s table (below), fine and performing arts, liberal arts, psychology and several other humanities and social science majors sit at the lower end of early-career wages.

What they share is structural rather than intellectual:

• No defined pathway. Nursing graduates become nurses. There is no equivalent job called “philosopher”, so the graduate has to construct the route themselves, and many are never told this is their job.
• Supply exceeds demand at the entry level. Many people want to work in media, museums, publishing and the arts. That competition pushes entry wages down regardless of ability.
• The degree alone is not the credential. In the arts a portfolio is the credential. In psychology and social work the licence is. The bachelor’s is a step, not the qualification, and students who did not realise this are the ones who report the worst outcomes.
• Skills are real but not legible. These degrees genuinely teach analysis, argument and writing. Employers value those and cannot see them on a transcript, so the graduate has to make them visible with evidence.

What the New York Fed data shows

The New York Fed, Labor Market Outcomes of College Graduates by Major publishes a table for 73 majors (retrieved 18 October 2026, latest annual update; the page says the by-major tabs are updated each February; here is the data file). Early-career wages are medians for graduates aged 22 to 27 and mid-career wages for those aged 35 to 45 (see the NY Fed page for sample restrictions). Underemployment is the share of recent graduates in jobs that typically do not need a degree, and unemployment is for recent graduates. The ratio column is calculated: mid-career median divided by early-career median.

What this table corrects

• The lowest starting wage is not an arts degree. Of the 73 majors, Pharmacy has the lowest early-career median ($40,000), and 67% of its graduates hold a further degree. That suggests the early-career figure partly captures people still in training, and it is the clearest example of why a starting-salary ranking can mislead.
• Arts and humanities still sit low on starting wages and high on underemployment. Fine Arts and Performing Arts show underemployment of 58.9% and 63.9%, against 39.4% for all majors.
• Growth after the first years differs. History’s median rises from $47,500 to $80,000 (about 1.7 times) and Political Science from $52,000 to $100,000 (about 1.9 times), while Nursing rises about 1.2 times and Computer Science about 1.4 times. A year-one ranking misses this.
• Technical degrees are not risk-free. Computer Science shows 7.0% unemployment for recent graduates, above the 4.2% all-majors figure.

A worked example on price (illustrative)

Take a graduate with a $60,000 loan at an assumed 6.5% over 10 years. The standard payment formula gives about $681 a month, or $8,175 a year. Against the Fine Arts early-career median of $45,000 that is 18.2% of gross pay; against the Computer Science median of $87,000 it is 9.4%. Cut the loan to $30,000 and the payment is about $341 a month ($4,088 a year), which is 9.1% of the Fine Arts median. Halving the price brings the burden for the lower-paid major down to the level the higher-paid major faces at full price. The rate is an assumption and the wages are gross, before tax.

These are US figures. They show relative patterns between majors in one labour market, not what graduates in Cameroon or elsewhere will earn.

Why the averages mislead

Three specific problems make salary-by-major rankings much weaker evidence than they appear.

Medians hide the spread within a major

Every figure in the table above is a median, so half of the graduates in that major earn less, and the table does not show how wide the spread around it is. What you do within a major, and where you work, moves your position relative to that median.

Starting salary is measured, lifetime earnings mostly are not

Rankings almost always use earnings at graduation, because that data is easy to collect. Fields differ enormously in how steeply earnings rise afterwards. Some technical fields start high and flatten; some professional and management tracks start low and climb for decades. A ranking of year-one salaries tells you about year one.

Selection effects are everywhere

Students do not choose majors at random. Differences in earnings partly reflect who chose the subject and what else they were doing, not what the subject did to them. It is genuinely difficult to separate these, and rankings almost never try.

The related question: which majors are easiest?

People searching for the easiest degree usually want one of two different things, and it is worth separating them.

If you want the least demanding path to a credential, difficulty is mostly personal. Subjects with lower reported workloads tend to be those with fewer sequential technical prerequisites and more essay-based assessment. But a student who cannot write finds those brutal, and a student who cannot do mathematics finds engineering impossible. “Easy” almost always means “aligned with what you are already good at”.

If what you actually want is to graduate without failing, which is often the real question, the answer is different and more useful: choose the subject you can sustain attention on for four years. A subject you stay engaged with is easier to finish.

What actually improves the return, whatever you study

• Internships. They give an employer evidence of real work. The New York Fed table above does not measure their effect, so treat this as practical advice rather than a measured result.
• A quantitative or technical minor. Statistics, data analysis, accounting or computing attached to a humanities degree changes which jobs you can apply for, and it usually fits inside a BA’s free electives.
• Something you can show. A portfolio, a repository, a published piece, a dissertation someone can read. Evidence beats claims.
• Reduce the price. Community college transfer, in-state tuition, living at home, scholarships. This lever is fully under your control and it changes the return directly.
• Know the licence. If your field requires one, plan for it from year one. Psychology, social work, teaching, accountancy and counselling all have a step after the degree, and the graduates who struggle are usually the ones who found out late.

If you have already chosen one of these

Think carefully before switching in your third year, because the arithmetic often does not support it: switching late can add a full year of cost to escape a difference in median salary that your own choices could close anyway.

Do this instead. Add a minor or a certificate in something concrete. Get an internship, then get a second. Build one substantial piece of work you can show a stranger. Find out now, not in your final term, whether the field you want requires a licence or a graduate degree, and plan for it. Then learn to describe what your degree actually taught you in the words an employer uses, because “I can find the weakness in an argument and write clearly about it under time pressure” is a marketable sentence and “I studied philosophy” is not.

For what different qualifications require, see how a degree is structured. For the choice between broader and more technical versions of the same subject, see Bachelor of Arts versus Bachelor of Science.

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