Every field of study sits somewhere on four dimensions at once: how often graduates end up underemployed, working in jobs that do not require a degree, how hard it is to find work at all, what the work pays, and how many people graduate into it each year. This tool shows all four together for 73 bachelor's fields, so you can see both the odds and the scale.
Each bubble is a field of study. Horizontal position is the underemployment rate, the share of graduates working in jobs that do not require a degree. Vertical position is early-career pay, bubble size is the number of graduates per year, and color is the unemployment rate. Fields toward the right pair a degree with work that does not use it.
Source: IPEDS 2023 Completions (graduate counts) and the New York Fed, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (rates and pay, updated February 2026). Download the combined dataset (CSV).
Split the same plane in two on each axis at the all-graduate medians (39.4% underemployment, $58k early-career pay) and four zones appear. Top-left is the favorable corner: high pay, low underemployment. Bottom-right is the unfavorable corner. The other two zones are different kinds of trade-off. Dot color is the field group.
Source: IPEDS 2023 Completions and the New York Fed, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates, outcomes-by-major (annual February release; latest published February 2026, the most recent vintage available). The same source the broader policy field is reading from.
Switch from rates to people. Apply each field's NY Fed unemployment and underemployment shares to its IPEDS 2023 graduate count and three flows fall out of every group: graduates working in jobs that require a degree, graduates working in jobs that don't, and graduates without work. The other charts on this page treat every major as one dot, which hides the volume story; here the bar width is the number of people.
Method: assume the NY Fed underemployment and unemployment rates for recent graduates aged 22 to 27 apply to a single year's graduating class, and use IPEDS 2023 Completions as the scale. Multiplying the rates by completions gives the relative magnitude of underemployment across field groups, not a precise population count.
The same fields, now placed by unemployment rate, the share actively looking for work and not finding it, and colored by underemployment. Fields toward the right are the hardest to get hired in at all. The fields with the highest unemployment are often not the ones with the highest underemployment, which is why both views matter.
Source: IPEDS 2023 Completions (graduate counts) and the New York Fed, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (rates and pay, updated February 2026). Download the combined dataset (CSV).
The same 73 fields, with controls. Switch the horizontal axis between unemployment and underemployment, swap early- for mid-career pay, scale the bubbles by graduates or show them uniform, and type to highlight a field. Color is the underemployment rate throughout.
| Field | Graduates | Share | Unemp. | Underemp. | Early pay | Mid pay | Est. unempl. | Est. underempl. |
|---|
"Est." columns apply each field's recent-grad rate to its 2023 graduating class to illustrate relative scale. They are not population counts: rates cover all recent graduates aged 22 to 27, while graduate counts are a single year.
The data sources, the field-taxonomy crosswalk between the New York Fed and IPEDS, how the four dimensions are defined, how the estimated counts are derived, and the limitations are documented in a separate methodology note.
Read the methodology note (PDF) →
Primary sources: New York Fed, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates (outcomes by major, February 2026) and IPEDS 2023 Completions (graduate counts). Download the combined dataset (CSV).