The regretters include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues. When he delivered his 2011 State of the Union address in the shadow of the Great Recession, former president Barack Obama plugged math and science education and called on Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Since then, the number of new graduates in the arts and humanities has plunged.To get more news about 美国文凭, you can visit jzjy001.com official website.

Meanwhile, nearly half of humanities and arts majors have studier’s remorse as of 2021. Engineering majors have the fewest regrets: Just 24 percent wish they’d chosen something different, according to a Federal Reserve survey.

As a rule, those who studied STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those in social sciences or vocational courses second-guess themselves.

There doesn’t seem to be much relationship between loans, gender, race or school selectivity and your regrets. Though, as you may have guessed, our analysis of Fed data shows that the higher your income is today, the less you regret the major you chose back in college.

Regrets have remained relatively steady since 2016, the earliest year for which we have consistent data. The most notable exception, education, went from below-average regrets before the pandemic to above-average regrets in 2021. Life sciences, on the other hand, have seen a steady and substantial decline in regret.

The annual Fed’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking also asks if folks regret the specific school they went to. Those in vocational programs are most likely to regret their school, while education majors are least likely.

Regardless of major, half of those who went to private, for-profit schools regret their decision, perhaps because students at for-profit schools are much more likely to struggle to repay their student debt. Similar regrets plague only 21 percent of those who went to public colleges and universities and 30 percent of those who attended private nonprofits.

A substantial majority of vocational and technical students (60 percent) wish they’d gone for more schooling, while less than 40 percent of law, life science and engineering students believe the same.

There’s a pretty significant change underway,” historian and digital humanist Ben Schmidt said. “The numbers have dropped by 50 percent, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rebound.”

By 2021, disciplines such as history, English and religion graduated less than half as many students as they did in their early 2000s heyday, relative to the overall size of the graduating student body, according to Schmidt’s analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics.According to Schmidt, the Great Recession sparked the beginning of a downward spiral in humanities such as history, art, philosophy, English and foreign languages.

“In the period of the Great Recession, you had Barack Obama out there saying we need more STEM majors and fewer English majors,” Schmidt said. “That was a story you were hearing from a lot of people in influential positions … and I think that made a difference.”

In the decade since our national pivot to STEM, the number of people graduating with computer science degrees has doubled. Every STEM field notched significant gains. Nursing, exercise science, medicine, environment, engineering, and math and statistics are all up by at least 50 percent. Among the humanities, only two increased: cultural, ethnic and gender studies, and linguistics.