Jobs related to your major

Computer science consistently rates near the top of majors in terms of the percentage of graduates that find jobs directly related to their major. You can spin this various ways. If your major is near the bottom of this list, you can claim that you are preparing students for a wide variety of careers! Okaaay. Of course, we will claim that the reason for this statistic is that there are lots of companies that want to hire people with CS degrees, so students only go a different direction because they want to, not because they have to. Another way to see this is to stare at Figure 1 in this news item from the NSF, which summarizes recent data on employment in science & engineering occupations. Notice the size of the pie chart corresponding to ‘mathematical and computer scientists’ and ‘programmers.’ And compare to ‘engineers,’ ‘physical scientists’ and ‘life scientists.’ Let’s just say that a similar pie chart of students majoring in the corresponding fields would look quite different.

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