A college degree can help you financially get ahead, compared to a high school diploma alone.
In 2022, workers ages 25 to 34 with a bachelor's degree earned a median annual salary of $66,600, according to the latest National Center for Education Statistics data. Their counterparts with only a high school education earned $41,800 a year.
But not all college grads see that salary boost. Degree holders in studio arts, for example, earn a median salary of just $40,000, according to a recent Bankrate analysis of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey data.
Bankrate looked at median salaries among workers and job seekers with at least a bachelor's degree, along with unemployment rates and advanced degree rates, to rank the most and least valuable college degrees.
Studio arts degree-holders have low earnings prospects and an unemployment rate of 4.6%, nearly double the rate for all college graduates -- 2.4% in June 2024, per New York Fed data -- all of which factored into it being named the least valuable college degree.
Here are the 10 least valuable college degrees in 2024, according to Bankrate:
The most valuable bachelor's degrees, by Bankrate's standards, have a trifecta of high salaries, low unemployment rates and low rates of workers with advanced degrees.
The arts-related degrees on the least-valuable list do have low rates of workers with advanced degrees -- but they fall short on the other two factors, with median annual salaries below $50,000 and high unemployment rates, compared to other grads.
Among the 10 least valuable bachelor's degrees, just two see grads earning at least $50,000 a year: communications technologies and other foreign languages. Communications tech majors have a relatively high unemployment rate of nearly 5.3%, though, suggesting that higher paying jobs may be harder to come by.
People with bachelor's degrees in less-common foreign languages have a slightly lower unemployment rate, but nearly half (45%) of these grads have advanced degrees. Even larger shares (roughly 69%, each) of library science and clinical psychology undergrads hold higher credentials.
That data suggests an advanced degree -- and the years of school required to to earn it -- may be needed to to fare better financially in those careers.