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KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Computer science majors can generally pay off their student loans the fastest.
- However, employment for this degree has recently taken a hit from AI.
- Theology and religion students typically take out the most student loans but earn less than the average college student, making it more challenging for them to pay off their debt.
Approximately 6.6 million student loan borrowers are behind on payments, and the issue is worsening: Borrowers over 50 now have the highest serious delinquency rates of any age group. The difference between struggling for decades and paying off your loans in a few years often comes down to one decision—your major.
Investopedia ranked different bachelor’s degree majors utilizing the median wages in the early career, as recorded by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the amount of student loan debt per bachelor’s degree, as calculated by the Education Data Initiative.
Why This Matters to You
Every extra year you spend paying off student loans could cost you thousands in interest and delay major milestones like buying a home or saving for retirement. Choosing a major with good starting wages relative to what you’ve had to borrow can take years off your repayment timeline.
The best bachelor’s degree to consider if you want to pay off your student loans quickly is a computer science degree. The median wage for a computer science major in their early career is $80,000, and they usually take out about $23,184 in student loans.
However, computer science majors have been seeing job losses due to AI’s ability to handle many programming tasks. The unemployment rate for computer science majors is 6.1%, higher than the 4.1% for all workers and the 5.2% for all recent college graduates.
Important
There are many other factors to consider when choosing a major. This ranking is intended to show the amount of student loans college graduates have versus their starting wages.
The second- and third-best bachelor’s degrees for completing student loan payments the fastest were economics and chemical engineering. An economics major makes a median salary of $70,000 at the beginning of their career and takes out $21,537 in student loans. Chemical engineering majors typically earn around $80,000 and generally graduate with about $24,785 in student debt.
Both jobs have unemployment rates lower than the overall rate for recently graduated workers, and chemical engineering had an unemployment rate of 2%, the lowest of any major.
The majors are ranked below by the percentage of student loans that make up their median yearly wage at the start of their career.
A degree in theology and religion had the worst payoff in terms of early-career wages relative to the student debt they incurred. The median salary for a theology and religion graduate was $42,000, and the median amount of student debt was $38,722.
General education and social services degrees were the second- and third-worst degrees to get if you want to pay off your student loans quickly. This is mainly due to the wages of both jobs being lower than those of the average worker with a bachelor’s degree. Both jobs, however, had unemployment rates that were much lower than those involving other majors.
