"The “free college” drumbeat rolls on, with Vice President Joe Biden joining the chorus last week in his call for sixteen years of free public education.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took to the pages of the Washington Post to reiterate his call for tuition-free public college.
Sanders claimed that free college would be “the driver of a new era of American prosperity.”Sanders correctly notes that those with bachelor’s degrees undoubtedly earn more than their counterparts with only high school degrees.
However, not all bachelor’s degrees are created equal.
Some fields of study, such as engineering and computer science, will lead to much higher lifetime earnings than others, such as art or music.
A report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce provides data on the popularity of 137 college majors relative to their expected annual earnings.
In theory, college students should adhere to the Law of Supply, and higher-paying majors should be more popular.
But in reality, there is almost zero correlation (an R-squared value of -0.0009, to be exact) between the popularity of a major and how much it pays."
The most lucrative major, with $136,000 in median annual earnings, is petroleum engineering.
But only four out of every 10,000 college graduates majored in that subject.
Meanwhile, several of the most popular majors—including psychology (404 majors per 10,000 graduates), general education (287 majors), and fine arts (148 majors) have median annual earnings below $50,000..."
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