While bachelor’s degrees bring their holders higher salaries than they would otherwise earn, not all degrees from the various majors have the same economic value, and disturbing pay disparities persist for minorities and women.
Such are two of the major conclusions that can be drawn from a new report released Tuesday and titled What’s It Worth? The Economic Value of College Majors.
Produced by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, the report—funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Lumina foundations—is meant to take the national discussion about the economic benefits of a higher education to the next level.
It does so by using federal census data to delineate—in painstaking detail—the earning power of college degrees in 171 specific majors, and then breaking the data down further by gender, ethnicity and other factors within various fields and occupations.
Dr. Anthony Carnevale, a labor economist and director of the Georgetown center that produced the report, said in a webcast that the key findings of the report are twofold.
“Our essential conclusion is that, while it is important to go to college and certainly advantageous to get a bachelor’s degree, what is even more important in the end is what you take, what you major in,” Carnevale said. “The other finding is, in general, college majors in America are highly segregated by sex, by race, by ethnicity and segregated in a way that looks like America.
“That is, males, especially White males, do considerably better than either females or minorities.”
