Free College Major Quiz

Start with what you are actually good at and can sustain for four years, then check where it leads before you commit. That is what the quiz above does: it matches your answers to majors, and every match comes with the real occupations and pay that follow.

The decision feels enormous at eighteen because it is presented as the moment your life narrows. It is not. What you are really choosing is which set of rooms you spend four years in, which people you spend them with, and which first jobs will look at your application without needing an explanation.

Four things are worth weighing, roughly in this order.

1. 1

   What you can sustain

   The major you can still do work for in week eleven of a bad semester beats the one that sounded better in August.
2. 2

   What it trains you in

   Look at the actual course list, not the department brochure, and ask whether those skills would be useful to somebody who is not your professor.
3. 3

   What it leads to

   Check where graduates of that programme went, and be suspicious if the department cannot tell you.
4. 4

   What it costs

   Not just fees, but the extra years some routes require after graduation before you can practise.

Notice what is not on that list. Prestige of the field, what your friends are doing, and what your parents did are all real pressures and none of them predicts whether you will finish the degree well. If you need a tiebreaker between two options that score similarly here, pick the one with the better transfer options out of it.

Usually not, and the data on this is fairly blunt. Only a minority of US graduates end up working in a field closely matched to their degree, and the connection gets looser with every year after graduation. Employers outside licensed professions mostly care that you finished something demanding, can write, can handle numbers, and have done something practical.

Everywhere else, what you do alongside the major matters more than the major. Two internships, a portfolio, a part time job with responsibility in it, and one real project you can talk about for ten minutes will move you further than switching from one respectable subject to another.

Every occupation shown in your results carries its median annual wage and projected growth from US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Those are the real national figures, and they are more reliable than the salary claims most quizzes make. They still need reading carefully.

• A median is the midpoint of everyone in the job today, from the first year to the thirtieth. Your starting salary will usually be well below it.
• Pay is a national figure. The same job can differ by forty percent or more between metro areas, and so can the cost of living that goes with it.
• The typical entry education is what most people currently in the job hold. It is a description of the field, not an admissions rule, and some routes in are shorter than the average suggests.
• Projected growth is a ten year national forecast for the occupation. Fast growth from a small base still means few openings, and slow growth in a huge occupation can still mean plenty of hiring through replacement alone.
• Earnings tables that rank majors compare people as much as subjects. Part of the gap between fields reflects who chooses them and which industries they enter.

Twenty of the most commonly chosen US undergraduate fields, spanning the sciences, engineering, business, health, education, social sciences, and the creative disciplines:

• Computer Science
• Nursing
• Mechanical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Business Administration
• Finance and Accounting
• Marketing
• Psychology
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Education
• Communications and Journalism
• Graphic Design
• Political Science and Pre-Law
• Environmental Science
• Kinesiology and Exercise Science
• Social Work
• Mathematics and Statistics
• Hospitality and Event Management

If none of your matches feels right, that is useful information rather than a failure of the quiz. Look at which interest areas scored highest in your result and search your own institution for a course list that hits those, because every college offers combinations that no national list can hold. Our free career quiz approaches the same question from the job end instead of the study end, which some people find easier to answer.