Why You’ll Go Broke Chasing Regret: 7 Majors to Avoid

The Disappointment of College Degrees

Walking across that graduation stage in a cap and gown feels triumphant, like the beginning of something remarkable. You’ve earned a degree, invested years of effort, and now the job market awaits with open arms. Yet for a startling number of graduates, that feeling evaporates quickly when reality hits. According to recent surveys, nearly two in five American college graduates look back with regret, wishing they’d chosen a different path entirely.

Let’s be real here, when you’re facing mountains of student debt and job prospects that seem more like mirages than opportunities, that regret becomes crushing.

Journalism: A Degree with Few Opportunities

The journalism major claims the unfortunate title of most regretted college degree, with a staggering 87% of graduates expressing remorse about their choice. Traditional newsrooms and newspapers are disappearing, but a budding newswriter can usually find a website willing to publish their work, though a journalism degree is not required.

The industry has fundamentally transformed in the digital age, leaving many journalism graduates scrambling for positions that either don’t exist anymore or pay barely enough to cover rent. It’s hard to watch your engineering friends pull in six figures while you’re piecing together freelance gigs and wondering if your degree was worth the paper it’s printed on.

Liberal Arts and General Studies: A Lack of Clear Career Pathways

Liberal arts and general studies ranks among the top three most regretted majors, with 72% of graduates wishing they’d made a different choice. Students who majored in liberal arts can expect to earn the lowest salaries within five years of graduating from college, with alumni making a median annual income of $38,000 five years out.

The problem isn’t that these degrees lack intellectual value or fail to teach critical thinking. Rather, they simply don’t translate into obvious career pathways that employers recognize. Salaries can be harder to track because degrees in the liberal arts don’t necessarily correlate to specific jobs, with art and design workers earning $65,190 on average. When you’re competing against candidates with technical skills and measurable expertise, explaining how your thesis on 19th century literature applies to a marketing position becomes exhausting.

Sociology: Fascinating but Unrewarding

Sociology lands in the second spot for most regretted majors, with 72% of graduates expressing regret. 7%, and those who do find work often discover their earnings fall well below what they’d hoped for.

The degree offers fascinating insights into human behavior and social structures, which honestly sounds compelling in a college brochure. However, the marketplace doesn’t reward that fascination with robust job offers or competitive salaries. Many sociology graduates end up in roles that have nothing to do with their studies, making those four years feel like an expensive detour rather than a strategic investment.

Social and Behavioral Sciences: A Broad Field with Limited Job Growth

Social and behavioral sciences including sociology, anthropology, and psychology represent the most regretted category, with 44% of graduates wishing they had chosen a different field. 4%, the highest among analyzed fields. 4%, with projected job growth of 8% but only about 800 openings per year on average.

These disciplines examine the complexities of human societies and cultures, which feels profoundly meaningful when you’re studying it. The harsh truth emerges later when you realize most employers need specific, measurable skills rather than broad theoretical knowledge. Psychology majors often find they need a master’s or doctoral degree to actually practice in the field, meaning that bachelor’s degree alone becomes merely a stepping stone requiring years more education and expense.

Life Sciences: High Hopes, Low Pay

Life sciences also ranks among the most regretted majors, with 43% of graduates expressing regret about their choice. Many students enter these programs dreaming of groundbreaking research or medical careers, only to discover that meaningful positions require advanced degrees and years of additional training.

High regrets related to college majors may stem from beliefs that the degree may not be useful for some jobs, with graduates noting their degrees offer few job opportunities or quality pay, and that skills from the degree aren’t valued in the workplace. The laboratory work that seemed exciting in undergrad becomes repetitive and poorly compensated without that PhD or medical degree backing you up.

Education: Valuable Work, Poor Pay

Education rounds out the top regretted majors with 38% of graduates wishing they’d chosen differently. Here’s the thing that makes this particularly painful: teachers perform vital work that shapes entire generations, yet they’re consistently undervalued financially.

Education majors tend to be paid less, with teachers having good job security, summers off and pensions, but usually paid by state governments which have lagged in keeping wages commensurate with inflation, making the teacher pay penalty worse in recent years. When looking at mid-career graduates aged 35 to 45, education majors are the worst paid among all majors, with early childhood education majors earning a median annual income of $48,000, only $8,000 more than right after graduation.

The emotional toll of managing classrooms while earning less than your college friends in corporate jobs creates a special kind of resentment.

Law: A Field of Mixed Outcomes

Law represents another highly regretted field, with 41% of graduates expressing regret. This might surprise people who assume lawyers swim in money, but the reality splits sharply.

Sure, some law graduates land prestigious positions at major firms with eye-watering salaries, but many others struggle with crushing debt and limited job prospects. It’s hard to find a job without an advanced degree in addition to a bachelor’s degree, which explains why 35% regretted this major, and it also often requires getting a license of some sort.

The investment required for law school creates enormous pressure, and when graduates can’t secure high-paying positions to justify that investment, the regret becomes overwhelming. Looking at these statistics, it’s impossible to ignore how financial realities shape our feelings about education choices.

The Bigger Picture

8 percent, its highest level since 2020. These aren’t just numbers on a page, they represent real people confronting the gap between their educational investments and career outcomes.

The pattern becomes painfully clear when you examine the data: degrees with direct pathways to specific careers tend to produce satisfied graduates, while broader, more abstract fields leave people wondering what exactly they paid for. It’s worth thinking carefully about this before signing those student loan papers.

What major would you choose if you could start over?