So which college majors are the least valuable in terms of career prospects and expected salary?
Those are the second-lowest incomes in both cases in our study of the most lucrative college majors.
So which college majors are most likely to land you a well-paying job right out of school?
Last week, ForbesWoman looked at the most popular college majors for women.
In conjunction with CollegeGrad.com, Schools.com mined the survey for the most promising (or hire-worthy) college majors this year.
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But in too many schools, teachers don't have college majors -- or even minors -- in the subjects they teach.
Conversely, the worst-paying college majors are child and family studies, elementary education, social work, culinary arts, special education, recreation and leisure studies, religious studies, and athletic training.
While college majors may seem irrelevant to employers who mainly want to hire young people who can think critically and communicate well, that doesn't mean all majors are created equal.
In addition to the hiring forecast, all firms were asked about their hiring process: what they look for, how they recruit and what college majors score the highest earning positions.
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Using data provided by the CEW from the 2009 and 2010 American Community Survey, Forbes discovered the 10 worst college majors based on high initial unemployment rates and low initial median earnings of full-time, full-year workers.
Analysts at PayScale compared its massive compensation database with 120 college majors and job growth projections through 2020 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to determine the 15 most valuable majors in the current marketplace.
Askew and Helmes, both entertainment journalists, were English majors in college and fans of classic literature.
By comparison, about a quarter of the students entering the school this year were business majors in college.
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Though the numbers in the NACE report are encouraging for college grads who land jobs related to their majors, the picture is still weak for college grads overall.
Rahim Kanani: In search of discovering my own passions, I switched majors twice in college: from computer science to business, and from business to philosophy.
Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though.
It will also require concerted focus on the retention of STEM majors during the initial years of college because, today, fewer than 40 percent of students who enter college intending to major in a STEM field complete a STEM degree.
Other mid-majors like UCSB, Southern Methodist and the College of Charleston have ranked in the top 20 recently in soccer spending.
As a young college professor I reassured parents that even the frequently sneered at majors, such as art history, helped produced job market success.
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Shaw feels students need more rigorous majors to prepare them for the job market, but the late college dropout Steve Jobs pointed to a calligraphy class that he audited as one of his major commercial inspirations.
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USciences is a small, private college with about 2, 500 undergraduate students, about half of whom are pharmacy majors.
He recently designed a program for Chrysler to teach new salesmen about the complexities of four-wheel-drive Jeeps, and he is talking with Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. about a game that will help students design their own majors.
Plus, few majors can guarantee a financial return that will offset the financial debt many students will accumulate during college.
For example, recent college grads with a degree in architecture have a 13.9% unemployment rate, while English literature majors had a 9.2% rate, according to a study conducted by Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workplace.
Health care, business and the STEM majors (science, technology, engineering and math) are more stable and higher paying for recent college graduates, whereas graduates of the arts, humanities and social sciences face higher unemployment rates and earn lower salaries.
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