Bachelor’s Degree Holders’ Financial Satisfaction, by Field of Bachelor’s Degree, 2014

Despite the variations in earnings between the fields, there was considerable similarity in graduates’ perceptions of their personal financial situation, as college graduates from most fields appeared to have similar levels of comfort (and discomfort). Even among workers holding bachelor’s degrees in the highly paid field of engineering, only a bare majority (51%) said they had enough money to “do everything I want to do.” In comparison, 45% of graduates in the natural sciences and 42% of respondents in the humanities indicated they had enough money. Conversely, more than half of arts graduates (51%) reported they had worried about money in the past seven days, and 47% of the graduates from the social sciences shared that concern. The share of humanities graduates who had recently worried about money (42.4%) was close to the shares of graduates from the natural sciences, education, and business.1

Endnotes

• 1Christopher Wiese and Louis Tay, “Gallup Purdue Data Report on Humanities and Well-Being” (special data runs prepared for the Humanities Indicators, 2017), Table 29.