26 Sept 2026
Is Econ Worth It? What do econ majors do and what do they earn?
This week on the Decode Econ Podcast, I sat down with Matt Holian, an economics professor at San Jose State. When Matt was department chair, he needed an honest answer to the question every recruiter gets: what jobs do econ majors actually get? He went looking for the data.
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Using Census microdata, Matt and his coauthor Kevin Chiu tracked mid-career econ grads (ages 35 to 45, bachelor’s as their highest degree) into the jobs they actually hold. Their paper (https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2026.2666059) came out this year in the Journal of Economic Education.
Holian, M., & Chiu, K. (2026). Earnings, occupation, and college degree: A focus on the economics major. The Journal of Economic Education, 57(3), 326-334.
Here’s what jumped out at me:
Economics is a top-10 earning major, with a median income around $105,000. Seven of the other nine are engineering fields.
A quarter of econ grads land in five occupations: managers, financial managers, chief executives, accountants, and personal financial advisors. The other three-quarters are everywhere. Analysts. Sales. Software developers. Teachers.
Econ grads working as securities and financial services sales agents earn a median of nearly $298,000.
11.1% of econ majors are self-employed. That’s one of the highest rates of any major.
So is the degree doing the work? Matt was careful here, and I respected it. The data can’t tell you that. Economics may attract people who are already comfortable with risk, and those people might have done well in any major. That might be a selection issue.
We also got into his textbook, Data and the American Dream, which teaches econometrics by having students replicate real published studies using free software.
If you’re a student picking a major, a parent paying for one, or a professor who keeps hearing “what can I even do with this?”, this episode is for you.
The research
Earnings, occupation, and college degree: A focus on the economics major (https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2026.2666059) (Holian & Chiu, 2026, Journal of Economic Education). The analysis code is archived on OpenICPSR (https://www.openicpsr.org/), and you can modify it to look up the top jobs and earnings for any college major.
Methods in open policy analysis: An application to California’s building energy codes (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/coep.12610) (Holian, 2023, Contemporary Economic Policy). Extends the cost-benefit analysis from Chapter 2 of his book. Replication package here (https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/187383/version/V1/view).
The books
Data and the American Dream: Contemporary Social Controversies and the American Community Survey (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-64262-4)(Holian, Palgrave Macmillan/Springer). Matt’s advice: check your library before you buy. Many university libraries give you the full PDF free through SpringerLink. Replication files on OpenICPSR (https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/135661/version/V1/view).
Mastering ‘Metrics (https://www.masteringmetrics.com/) by Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. “The most undergrad-friendly econometrics book out there”, with the same notation as Matt’s book, so the two pair well. Angrist’s free Mastering Econometrics video series (https://mru.org/mastering-econometrics) goes with it.
The data (all free)
American Community Survey via IPUMS USA (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/). The largest household survey in the U.S., with college major, occupation, and income.
Current Population Survey via IPUMS CPS (https://cps.ipums.org/cps/). The monthly survey behind the unemployment rate.
Historical U.S. Census data via IPUMS USA (https://usa.ipums.org/usa/). Goes back to the 1800s with consistent coding.
ipumsr (https://tech.popdata.org/ipumsr/), an R package that pulls IPUMS data straight into R.
The tools
Posit Cloud (https://posit.cloud/). Run R in your browser with nothing to install.
OpenICPSR (https://www.openicpsr.org/). A free archive where researchers post the data and code behind published studies.
Find Matt: mattholian.com (http://www.mattholian.com/)
For economics educators: Matt is exploring an edited volume that expands Data and the American Dream to other IPUMS datasets, one chapter per contributor. If that’s you, reach out to him.
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