College Majors Ranked by Regret: Most to Least (2026)

Ask a room full of adults whether they'd pick the same major again and you'll get a lot of laughter, then a lot of very specific stories. One wishes she'd done nursing. One wishes he'd done anything but finance. The Federal Reserve actually asks this question, in a nationally representative survey of more than 11,000 adults, and the answers are remarkably consistent.

This post ranks every major group from most regretted to least, using the Fed's numbers as the backbone and ZipRecruiter's job-seeker survey for individual majors. We also show where the regret seems to come from, because "would choose differently" usually tracks one thing more than any other: how easily the degree turned into a good job.

Where does the regret data come from?

Main ranking: the Federal Reserve's Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023 report (published May 2024), Figure 31, "Would now choose a different field of study." It covers adults who enrolled in education beyond high school, grouped by their most recent program. It's the most recent Fed report with the by-field breakdown, and the most rigorous regret data we know of.

Individual majors: ZipRecruiter's November 2022 survey of more than 1,500 job-seeking college graduates, as reported by CNBC. It's narrower (people who were job hunting at the time), so we use it for detail, not as the main ranking.

Context: underemployment rates for recent grads from the New York Fed's Feb. 2026 outcomes-by-major release, to show whether regret lines up with the job market. We didn't run our own survey, and we don't extrapolate these numbers to individual schools.

Which majors have the most and least regret?

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023 (May 2024), Figure 31. Among adults who enrolled in education beyond high school; grouped by most recent educational program. Example majors are MajorMatch's illustration of each group.

Click any major in the table to open its free loan-vs-upside calculator, or compare debt and lifetime earnings with your own numbers in the degree loan vs. upside calculator. Then take the assessment to see which of these majors actually fit your teen.

Which individual majors do grads regret most and least?

The Fed groups majors broadly. ZipRecruiter's 2022 survey of job-seeking graduates names specific majors. We've added the New York Fed's underemployment rate for recent grads (the share working jobs that don't need a degree) wherever there's a matching major.

Sources: ZipRecruiter survey of 1,500+ job-seeking graduates, Nov. 2022, as reported by CNBC and BestColleges; underemployment from the New York Fed, Feb. 2026 release (2024 ACS), recent grads aged 22–27. Ranges show the spread across the Fed's education or engineering sub-majors.

Why do graduates regret some majors more than others?

The Fed puts it plainly: the share who'd change their field "is broadly consistent with patterns for how people see the relative costs and benefits of their education." In the same survey, 73% of engineering grads said the benefits of their education exceeded the costs, the highest of any field. Regret tracks payoff.

You can see it in the right-hand columns of the table. The most regretted majors cluster around 43% to 55% underemployment. Nursing (12.8%) and computer science (19.1%) sit near the bottom. When a degree leads straight to a job that needs it, people rarely wish they'd done something else.

There's one fascinating exception: criminology. ZipRecruiter found 72% of criminology grads would choose it again, tied for the most loyal major, even though the New York Fed shows criminal justice grads with the highest underemployment rate in its entire dataset (65.8%). Our best read is that many of these grads wanted careers like policing or corrections that don't require the degree, and they're doing exactly the work they set out to do. Regret isn't only about money. It's also about whether the job matches the person.

Has major regret changed recently?

The shape holds, but the specifics shift. In ZipRecruiter's 2025 Graduate Survey of more than 3,000 recent and soon-to-be grads, just over one in five recent grads said they regret their major, and the most-regretted list among recent grads was led by interdisciplinary or general studies (46.2%), followed by mathematics or statistics (33.7%) and public health (30.2%). Computer science also showed up on that list (25.8%), a sign of the tougher entry-level tech market. Smaller samples make these single-major numbers jumpy, which is why we lean on the Fed's larger survey for the main ranking.

Are hard majors less regretted?

Often, yes. Engineering is the least regretted field in the Fed data, and it also dominates our hardest majors ranking. But the students answering the survey are the ones who finished. Those who switched out of engineering after a brutal sophomore year aren't counted as engineering grads at all. Difficulty doesn't cause satisfaction; finishing a degree that pays off does.

If you're weighing a major in the high-regret groups, that's not a reason to drop it. It's a reason to plan the bridge to a job early. Our deeper guides on the most regretted college majors and the least regretted college majors go field by field.

How can your teen avoid major regret?

Here's an illustrative scenario, not a real family: a junior loves her psychology class and wants to major in it. Her parents worry about the 44% regret number. The useful move isn't to steer her away. It's to ask two questions now: what job does she picture at 25, and does that job need a graduate degree? If the answer is "therapist" and "yes," she's choosing a six-to-seven-year path, and that's a very different plan from a four-year one.

Our free assessment is built for exactly this moment. It scores your teen against 100 majors with our own proprietary scoring method and flags majors that fit their strengths, not just their current favorite class. Then run the leading choice through the loan vs. upside calculator so the cost side is clear before anyone signs anything.

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