17 Worst-Paying College Majors: 2023

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The last couple of years has been a job-seeker’s market, with the unemployment rate for recent college graduates — those ages 22 to 27 — sitting at 4.1% at the end of 2022. The rate of underemployment for this group was down as well, to 38.1%, according to recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But having a job is one thing; having a job in your chosen field that pays well is another.

New York Fed’s research includes a list of college majors whose median early-career wage is $50,000 and median midcareer wage is $75,000. The results show a wide discrepancy between the best- and worst-paying majors. Engineering careers tend to be well remunerated by midcareer, while careers in education, unfortunately, are much less so.

In the gallery, we list the 17 worst-paying majors by median wages for midcareer employees, ages 35 to 45. In order to showcase more fields, we grouped five different education careers together as a single “major” on our list, presenting their early-career and mid-career salaries as a range.

Following is a breakdown of each education field’s median wages.

The New York Fed collected 2022 data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click through the gallery for the lowest-paying college majors at midcareer, according to the bank’s research. When possible, ties were broken by early-career salaries.

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