Something has shifted in how people talk about college. Not long ago, getting a degree felt like an unquestioned rite of passage, a ticket punched and cashed in for a stable career. Today, the math looks messier. According to a recent NBC News poll, nearly two thirds of registered voters agreed that a four-year degree is “not worth the cost, because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” That figure has risen sharply over just a decade.
Student loan debt continues to saddle borrowers for decades, while tuition has doubled at public colleges and surged roughly three quarters at private schools since 1995. The question is no longer whether college can be worth it in the abstract. The real question is which degrees are quietly failing students before they’ve even started paying back their loans.
Criminal Justice: The Underemployment Champion
Criminal justice is the major with the highest underemployment rate at 71.5%, in part because many positions in law enforcement, such as police officers and detectives, only require a high school diploma. Spending four years in a classroom and accumulating significant debt to qualify for a job that doesn’t legally require the degree is a hard arrangement to defend financially.
Criminal justice majors earned a median wage of roughly $41,000 in their early careers. Many criminal justice jobs do not require a degree and also don’t pay more just because the graduate has a diploma. The credential adds cost but often doesn’t add salary in proportion to that cost.
Fine Arts: A Passion With a Punishing Price Tag
Recent anthropology graduates had the highest unemployment rate at 7.9%, nearly double the overall rate across all majors, while fine arts at 7.7% and performing arts at 7.0% also ranked near the top. Fine arts in particular sits in a rough spot where both unemployment and underemployment pile up simultaneously.
Fine arts majors experience a high underemployment rate in their early careers, reaching as high as roughly 58%, one of the highest figures in the liberal arts and humanities category. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for fine arts majors in the United States is around $42,000, placing them at the low end of earnings for humanities graduates. The degree rarely closes the gap between its cost and its typical economic return.
Performing Arts: When the Curtain Falls on the Finances
Graduates of the performing arts major face an underemployment rate of 65.9% and a higher unemployment rate than criminal justice graduates at 5.5%, with a median early-career wage of $38,000 and a mid-career median of $64,000. Those numbers are sobering when measured against the cost of a four-year degree at a performing arts school, which can run well into six figures.
Students who major in liberal arts, performing arts, and theology earn the lowest salaries within five years of graduating, with graduates in all three fields earning a median annual income of $38,000, the lowest out of 75 majors studied. The performing arts field can absolutely produce successful careers. The problem is that the career outcomes are extremely concentrated among a small number of people.
Liberal Arts: The Degree That Overpromises Versatility
Liberal arts and humanities degrees carry a negative lifetime ROI of roughly negative 43%, meaning that when all the costs are factored in, many graduates with a terminal bachelor’s in these fields never fully recover financially from the investment. That’s a striking number considering how many students pursue these programs each year.
Liberal arts majors have an underemployment rate of 56.7% and an unemployment rate of 7.9%, with an early-career median salary of $38,000 and a mid-career median of $65,000. Supporters of a liberal arts education rightly point to transferable skills and long-term adaptability, and those arguments have genuine merit. The friction arrives when the tuition bill lands and the entry-level salary doesn’t meet it halfway.
Art History: A Rich Discipline With Thin Job Market Returns
Art history majors had early-career median wages of $41,000, an underemployment rate of 62.3%, and an unemployment rate of 8.0%. That unemployment rate is notably high and makes the degree one of the riskier bets in terms of immediate post-graduation outcomes.
Half of the top 10 majors for highest underemployment are in the arts and humanities, including performing arts, art history, and fine arts, fields where graduates often face intense competition for limited job openings. Art history specifically suffers from a mismatch between the volume of graduates and the narrow set of industries, such as museums, galleries, and auction houses, where the specialized knowledge actually applies.
Education: A Negative ROI That Surprises Most People
A bachelor’s degree in Education offers the lowest lifetime ROI of any degree at roughly negative 55%, representing a loss of approximately $149,000 in degree-based earnings. That figure accounts for both the cost of the degree and the earning potential of a typical teacher’s career versus the alternative. It is the starkest financial underperformer in the entire bachelor’s degree landscape.
Bachelor’s degree holders in education and public service rank among the least lucrative fields studied by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, with recent graduates earning a median of $46,000 and that figure rising to only $58,000 for prime-age workers. Teachers provide irreplaceable social value, but the financial structure of the profession consistently fails to reward the years and money invested in getting the credential.
Anthropology: Fascinating Subject, Brutal Job Market
Recent anthropology graduates had the highest unemployment rate among all tracked majors at 7.9%, nearly double the overall unemployment rate of 4.2% across all majors. That gap signals a significant structural problem. The academic study of human culture and society is genuinely valuable, but the pipeline from graduation to steady employment in the field is extremely narrow.
An anthropology bachelor’s degree is interesting and dives deep into cultures, but it can be hard to find specialized jobs without further education, with many of the better-paying roles requiring a master’s or a PhD. To avoid the degree becoming a dead end, students often have to spend considerably more time and money. In other words, the bachelor’s alone rarely completes the picture.
Hospitality and Tourism: A Sector That Doesn’t Need Your Degree
Leisure and hospitality majors had early-career median wages of $39,700, an underemployment rate of 57.6%, and an unemployment rate of 4.1%. The hospitality industry is a massive employer, but it largely promotes from within based on experience and performance rather than academic credentials. A degree can help, but it is rarely the decisive factor in hiring or salary.
Some majors high in underemployment are in industries where degrees are simply less important, and leisure and hospitality is the clearest example of this pattern. Ambitious students often break into senior hotel management, events, or travel coordination roles through shorter certification tracks and hands-on experience at a fraction of the cost of a four-year program.
Sociology: Genuine Insight, Limited Financial Return
People who enter the field of sociology generally are interested in helping their fellow citizens, but that kind of focus doesn’t typically translate into high earnings. The discipline itself produces genuinely useful thinkers, but the job market at the bachelor’s level offers limited direct pathways where a sociology degree functions as a hard requirement for employment.
Among all college graduates, roughly one quarter actually see little return on investment, making less than $10,000 more in income than the median high school graduate, with a rate of return of only around 2.6% compared to the average of 12.5%. Sociology majors make up a considerable share of that lower-return group, particularly those who don’t continue on to graduate or professional school.
Photography: A Craft That Technology Has Democratized
It’s hard to succeed as a photojournalist or well-known fashion photographer, with roughly 60% of photographers leaving the industry within their first year. With inexpensive digital cameras and accessible editing software widely available, the skill barrier to entry has collapsed significantly, making it worth questioning whether spending years on a photography degree is the right path.
Photography graduates face an average annual salary of around $30,984, which represents one of the lowest earnings figures among all tracked college degree fields. The combination of a low salary ceiling, high early-career attrition, and a commoditized skill set makes the formal degree program a difficult financial case to build. Talent, portfolio, and a disciplined personal brand tend to matter far more in this field than the institution name on the diploma.