A College-by-College Guide to Which Majors Pay Off — or Don't. A detailed study of how students fared salary-wise four years after graduating from hundreds of American university programs in 2017 and 2018. (Recent developments in AI make extrapolation for math and CS difficult.) "History majors can out-earn English majors by more than $50,000 four years after graduation. A Juilliard graduate — trained at one of the country's most prestigious music schools — may not earn more than the median high school graduate. And the place to get the single most lucrative degree in America wasn't in the Ivy League, and it wasn't in a computer science program. It was in the mathematics department at Duke, where the median income among graduates was $297,029."

Ivy League schools give graduates an advantage, although if you are ambitious enough to even apply, that may be enough. --- The Most Versatile College Majors: Degrees That Help Graduates Succeed in a Shifting Job Market. "...hiring has fallen for all 20 majors since December 2019. Health professions and education majors held up best, with hiring down 16%, the smallest decreases of any major. But both rank near the bottom in versatility: Just 21% of health professions graduates and 34% of education graduates work outside their field's top two industries. English is the most versatile major: Nearly 70% of its graduates work outside the field's top two industries, the highest share of any major. Hiring for English majors has fallen 21% since December 2019, near the middle of the 20 majors." ---- Time to consider becoming a brick layer? "Young people are heeding the call or, more to the point, following the money. Enrollment at public two-year vocational-training colleges climbed nearly 20 percent from 2020 to 2025. Enrollment at public four-year colleges rose just 2.1 percent. But the country still needs thousands more high-school graduates and early-career workers to gravitate toward these professions. And it needs to create significantly more training capacity too."