RANKING · MAJORS

The major you pick swings your lifetime ROI by a million dollars

Same degree, same four years — but the field you pick swings your thirty-year payoff by $1.24M. Two major categories come out negative on average, and a third of the graduates in several popular ones end up behind. Ranked by FREOPP’s own published lifetime-ROI figure, across every U.S. bachelor’s program. No school named. No villain. Just the math.

Worst category

−$112K

Philosophy and Religious Studies

Best category

+$1.13M

Engineering

Ranked by FREOPP’s own published “Lifetime return on investment” figure · FREOPP 2021 · bachelor’s degrees · cohort-weighted · names no institution.

  1. 1 Philosophy and Religious Studies −$111,915 59.8% underwater
  2. 2 Visual Arts and Music −$68,014 67.9% underwater
  3. 3 Psychology +$68,424 27.9% underwater
  4. 4 Life Sciences and Biology +$106,017 31.5% underwater
  5. 5 Education +$121,114 23.1% underwater
  6. 6 English, Liberal Arts, and Humanities +$144,506 27.5% underwater
  7. 7 Social Sciences excluding Economics +$183,047 19.1% underwater
  8. 8 Miscellaneous +$189,612 30.1% underwater
  9. 9 Public Administration and Human Services +$199,831 15.6% underwater
  10. 10 Communications and Journalism +$228,465 16.5% underwater
  11. 11 Agriculture and Natural Resources +$303,357 15.8% underwater
  12. 12 Physical Sciences +$404,220 6.8% underwater
  13. 13 Business and Management +$578,915 1.5% underwater
  14. 14 Mathematics and Statistics +$593,764 3.2% underwater
  15. 15 Economics +$638,790 2.1% underwater
  16. 16 Health and Nursing +$775,786 6.8% underwater
  17. 17 Transportation, Construction, and Architecture +$816,671 0.8% underwater
  18. 18 Computer and Information Sciences +$936,339 2.5% underwater
  19. 19 Engineering +$1,132,553 0% underwater
How this is computed (and what it isn’t)

Cohort-weighted mean of FREOPP's own published per-program lifetime-ROI figure, grouped by FREOPP 'Program category', bachelor's degrees only. Names no institution. See ADR-0031. “Lifetime ROI” is FREOPP’s estimate of the increase in lifetime earnings from the degree, net of its cost — their number, not ours. We group their per-program rows into FREOPP’s 19 major categories and cohort-weight by graduate count, so a category’s figure reflects where students actually are.

A category mean hides a wide spread — a high-ROI engineering specialty and a low-ROI one sit in the same bucket, and an individual program at a specific school can land far from its category. This ranks fields, not schools or people. The honest read is the swing: the decision moves the number by $1.24M, and the “% underwater” column is the share of graduates whose own ROI came out below zero.