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How Risky is Your Degree?

Writer: Pranika Kalluru
Pranika Kalluru
11 minutes ago
9 min read

If you’re a college student right now, you’ve probably seen a headline suggesting that your major is either a golden ticket or a dead end. The truth is more interesting, and more useful. No degree is risk-free, and very few are hopeless. What matters is truly understanding which kind of risk your degree carries and what you can do about it while you’re still in school.


The Big Picture: A Tougher Market, But the Degree Still Pays

Let’s start with the numbers. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, labor market conditions remained challenging for recent college graduates through the second quarter of 2026, with unemployment rates holding at about 5.6 percent and the underemployment rate edging up to 42 percent. The New York Fed defines “recent graduates” as people ages 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree. 


This sounds grim, and in some ways it is. However, context matters. That 5.6% is significantly lower than the 7.8% rate for young workers without a college degree, although it is higher than the 3.1% rate for college-educated workers ages 22 to 65 and the 4.2% rate for adults overall. In other words, having a degree still gives you an edge over not having one. The problem is that the transition from campus to career has gotten harder.


Four Ways a Degree Can Be “Risky”

Before looking at specific majors, it is important to define risk. A degree can be risky in at least four distinct ways:


  1. Unemployment risk. Will you find a job at all after graduating?

  2. Underemployment risk. Will you find a job that actually requires your degree? The New York Fed defines underemployment as the share of graduates working in jobs that don’t typically require a college degree. Think of a history major working as a barista, or a business graduate stuck in a retail job. 

  3. Earnings risk. Will your pay justify what you spent on tuition and borrowed in loans?

  4. Disruption risk. Is the work your degree prepares you for likely to be reshaped by AI or automation?

A major can score well on one of these and badly on another, which is why simple “best and worst majors” lists often mislead.


What the Data Says About Specific Majors


The New York Fed’s annual breakdown by major released in February 2026 and based on 2024 Census data, offers some surprises. 

Highest unemployment: Anthropology majors had the highest unemployment rate at 7.9% followed by computer engineering (7.8%), fine arts (7.7%), performing arts (7.0%), computer science (7.0%), architecture (6.8%), art history (6.7%), physics (6.6%), early childhood education (6.6%), and environmental studies (6.3%) according to Forbes. 


Yes, majors that are often seen as the safest bets, like computer science and computer engineering are on that list.


Lowest unemployment. On the other hand, special education majors had the lowest unemployment rate at 0.7%, followed by miscellaneous education (1.1%), elementary education (1.2%), agriculture (1.4%), foreign language (1.6%), geography (1.6%), engineering technologies (1.7%), social services (1.9%), nursing (2.1%), and secondary education (2.1%) according to Forbes. 


Highest underemployment. The picture flips again. Criminal justice majors had the highest unemployment rate at 65.8%, followed closely by performing arts at 63.9%. Others above 50% include fine arts, leisure and hospitality, agriculture, anthropology, liberal arts, foreign language, animal and plant sciences, and communications. 


If you pay close attention to the numbers, you’ll notice that agriculture and foreign language graduates have low unemployment but high underemployment. They find work, but often not work that uses their degree. 


Highest pay. Starting salaries will tell you another story. Computer engineering majors earned the highest early-career pay with a median of $90,000, followed by computer science majors at $87,000, and nine of the top ten highest-paying majors were in engineering. Meanwhile, low unemployment often comes with a tradeoff, being that several of the highest-employment majors, including some in education, were among the lowest in early-career wages, averaging several thousand dollars below the $58,000 median for recent graduates. 


The takeaway: there is no single “safe major.” Education offers job security but with a lower pay. Computer science offers high pay but with a harder time at finding employment. Criminal justice and communication grads often land jobs, but not necessarily degree-level ones.


The Computer Science Paradox


Computer science deserves its own section, because that’s where the spotlight is right now. 


Two facts are simultaneously true. Recent CS grads face higher-than-average unemployment. Yet at the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics projects software developer jobs to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034, about five times the average for all occupations. One career site summed up the situation well: a soft entry-level market is layered on top of strong long-term demand. 


For CS students, that means the degree still leads to a growing, well-paid field, but getting that first job now requires more than a diploma. Portfolios, internships, and skills matter more than ever.


Where AI Fits In


Much of the recent entry-level squeeze is being linked to generative AI, and the best research so far supports some of that concern while pushing back on the panic. 


Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab has been tracking this using payroll data from millions of workers. An August 2026 update found that employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. That gap is up from 15% a year ago, and appears driven mainly by reduced hiring rather than layoffs. 


Who isn’t affected is just as important. Experienced workers in those same occupations show no comparable decline. Instead, the drops are concentrated among younger workers in roles relying on codified knowledge that AI can increasingly reproduce, while experienced workers rely more on tacit knowledge built through judgement and experience. The researchers also found that declines are concentrated in occupations where AI usage is used as a substitute for human tasks; where AI mainly complements workers, employment is flat or rising. 


And the authors are careful not to overstate things: they do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI. They describe their findings as early,descriptive indicators rather than casual estimates. 


So the real AI risk for students is not “my field will disappear.” It’s mainly that “the entry-level tasks that used to be how beginners learned are being automated, so employers are hiring fewer beginners.” That’s a different problem with different solutions.


A Word of Caution About the Numbers


Before you switch majors over a single statistic: keep this in mind: the by-major figures simply estimate from survey samples, and some samples are small. One economist analyzing the New York Fed data pointed out that for some fields the uncertainty is enormous. For example, we can only be 95% certain that the unemployment rate for recent physics majors is somewhere between 2 and 12 percent. His conclusion is that in most cases, the confidence intervals are so large that it makes no sense to use them to draw concrete conclusions about the returns to particular majors. Use rankings as a signal, not a verdict. 


Playing the Long Game


Starting salaries are only the opening chapter of a long career. There’s an ongoing debate about whether humanities and social science majors will “catch up” to STEM grads over time.


Some evidence says yes. Harvard economist David Deming found that male computer science or engineering majors roughly doubled their starting salaries by forty, while social science and history majors reached a slightly higher average, lifted partly by high-paying jobs in management, business, and law. Other evidence is less optimistic. A study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences found that the data does not support the catch-up claims: gaps narrowed relative to engineering and business majors, but still lingered.


Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce offers a useful middle ground. While humanities majors are often assumed to lead to low earnings, 14 of the 19 humanities and arts majors lead to median earnings above the 25th percentile for STEM majors ($65,000), though the range for humanities and arts is relatively narrow ($58,000 to $73,000). Meanwhile, STEM itself varies hugely, with median earnings ranging from $64,000 for miscellaneous agriculture to $146,000 for petroleum engineering. 


The honest summary: STEM and business majors tend to have higher earnings ceilings, but a humanities degree is not a financial death sentence, especially for students who build toward management, law, or other professional paths. 


The Single Biggest Risk Factor: Your First Job

If there’s one finding every college student should know, it’s this one. A major study by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work, which tracked the career histories of millions of graduates, found that 52% of graduates are underemployed a year after graduation, and even a decade later, 45% still are. 


Worse, underemployment is sticky. Seventy-three percent of graduates who start out underemployed remain so 10 years after completing college, making them about 3.5 times more likely to be underemployed than those who start in a college-level job. But the reverse is also true: graduates who start out in a college-level job rarely slide into underemployment, with 79% remaining in a college-level occupation five years later. 


The final stakes are big. A recent graduate in a college-level job typically earns about 88% more than a high school diploma holder, while an underemployed graduate earns only about 25% more.


In other words, your first job may matter as much as your major. And the report points to one of the strongest levers you can control: internships. Strada’s CEO argued that students need access to high-quality education to-employment coaching and at least one paid internship. 


How to De-Risk Any Degree

The good news is that most degree risk is manageable, and much of it is in your hands while you're still in school.


Get at least one internship, ideally paid. This is the most consistent finding across the research. Relevant experience is often what separates a college-level first job from an underemployed one.


Build quantitative skills. The Burning Glass research found that degrees involving substantial quantitative reasoning, such as computer science, engineering, math, finance, and accounting, see the lowest underemployment rates. You don't have to switch majors to benefit. A minor in data analytics, statistics, or finance can pair powerfully with communications, political science, or English.


Build skills AI complements. Stanford's research suggests the safest work involves judgment, relationships, and experience rather than routine, codified tasks. Seek out projects, leadership roles, and client-facing experiences that build those.


Check your specific program, not just your major. Outcomes vary by school. The U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard lets you look up earnings and debt for specific programs at specific colleges.


Treat your first job strategically. Given how sticky underemployment is, it can be worth holding out for a role that uses your degree, or taking a lower-paid job that builds the right skills, over a better-paid one that leads nowhere.

Ask yourself these questions:


Your Degree Risk Self-Check


  • Does my major lead to a clear set of degree-level jobs, or will I need to build that bridge myself?

  • Will I graduate with at least one relevant internship or work experience?

  • Do I have at least some quantitative or technical skills on my résumé?

  • Is the entry-level work in my target field mostly routine tasks AI could handle, or does it involve judgment and people?

  • Will my expected starting salary let me manage my student loan payments?

  • Am I planning for graduate school, and does that change the math?


The Bottom Line

How risky is your degree? The answer depends less on the name of your major than on what you build around it. Some majors carry more built-in risk than others, and the entry-level job market is genuinely tougher than it was a few years ago, especially in fields exposed to AI. But a degree remains one of the better bets you can make, and the students who fare the best are the ones who treat college as more than collecting credits. Get experience, stack a practical skill set alongside your passions, and think hard about that first job. That’s how you turn a risky degree into a smart one. 



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