Top Stories

As students return to campus and begin mapping out courses, majors, and possible careers, one question carries unusual weight: What can I actually do with this degree? For economics students, the answer is broader and potentially more lucrative than many may realize.

A new paper co-authored by Dr. Kevin Chiu, a lecturer in economics at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, offers a data-driven look at where economics graduates build their careers. Published in The Journal of Economic Education, the paper uses American Community Survey microdata to identify the most common occupations and industries for mid-career workers whose highest degree is a bachelor’s in economics.

Dr. Chiu and co-author Matthew Holian designed the study to fill two gaps in existing research. Previous analyses often grouped bachelor’s degree holders with those who had earned graduate or professional degrees, making the findings less relevant to undergraduates who do not plan to continue their education. And although students could find examples of careers in economics, there was no clear statistic showing how frequently graduates actually entered specific jobs.

“Economics is very versatile,” Dr. Chiu said. That versatility is the study’s clearest takeaway. Although finance looms large, economics graduates are not confined to a single profession or even a narrow cluster of roles. Their five most common occupations are other managers, financial managers, chief executives and legislators, accountants and auditors, and personal financial advisers. Together, those jobs account for only about one-quarter of economics majors in the study, leaving graduates distributed across careers ranging from software development and project management to marketing, real estate, education, and public service.

The findings also separate occupation from industry, a distinction that can be easy to miss when students think about careers. Two graduates may both work in finance and insurance, for example, while one focuses on analysis and the other on sales or management. Overall, 54.6 percent of economics majors work in four industries: finance and insurance; professional, scientific and technical services; manufacturing; and retail trade. The remaining graduates are spread across fields including public administration, education, health care, construction, information, and the arts.

The breadth of career opportunities, combined with the versatile skills developed through economics coursework, translates into strong earning potential. Economics ranked eighth among 73 majors for median income among mid-career workers, behind finance and computer science as well as several engineering disciplines. The study reported median income of $105,317 in 2022 for economics majors ages 35 to 45. Economics graduates also had an 11.1 percent self-employment rate — higher than the rate for most majors and well above the 7.6 percent average in the dataset.

Dr. Chiu sees the economics curriculum itself as part of the reason graduates can move among roles. Rather than training students for one defined job, economics teaches them to build models, examine incentives, weigh tradeoffs, apply theory to unfamiliar real-world challenges, and use data to evaluate problems and potential solutions. Those habits may become even more valuable as artificial intelligence changes how work is performed. AI can quickly retrieve and summarize information, but workers still need to decide which questions matter, test assumptions, and turn available knowledge into useful solutions.

For students selecting classes this fall, however, the study is not an argument to choose a major based on salary alone. The research is descriptive: It shows where economics graduates work and what they earn, but it does not prove that the degree itself caused those outcomes. Dr. Chiu’s advice is more personal and practical: Students who genuinely enjoy economics should feel confident that the major can support many different futures. “If you like economics in and of itself, then you don’t need to worry about whether you’ll be compensated,” he said.

In other words, economics does not require students to know their exact destination on the first day of class. It gives them a flexible way to start and evidence that many rewarding paths can follow.