educational psychology news articles

• December 20, 2023

Debbie Golos, with other Deaf educators and researchers, publishes new book on teaching strategies

Debbie Golos and other Deaf educators and researchers have a new book available for preorder titled "58-IN-MIND: Multilingual Teaching Strategies for Diverse Deaf Students".

• December 14, 2023

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Many adults—from teachers to the U.S. surgeon general —will tell you that social media has the potential to dangerously erode K-12 students’ mental health.

School districts and lawmakers alike have responded to the growing chorus of concern. More than 200 districts (and counting) have sued major social media companies while lawmakers at the federal and state levels have been crafting legislation that would greatly curtail youth access to social media .

But there’s one constituency that policymakers, educators, and parents may not be listening to enough: students.

Nearly three quarters of high school students say that social media either has no impact or a positive impact on their mental health and well-being, according to a new EdWeek Research Center survey. Students who responded to the survey also point to many benefits arising from their social media use, such as making new friends, promoting creativity, and learning about other cultures and people.

The EdWeek Research Center surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,056 high school students in February and March.

That doesn’t mean all teens are having a positive experience—29 percent of high schoolers said social media has a negative impact.

Explore the Survey Results

Whatever adults may think of how kids view social media, experts say it’s important to understand teens’ perspectives in order to teach students the social-emotional and digital- and media-literacy skills they need to use these platforms in a productive and healthy way.

“Often the question [adults are always asking] is, ‘What is technology doing to young people?’” said Ioana Literat, an associate professor at Columbia University, Teachers College, and the associate director of the school’s Media and Social Change Lab. “I like to ask, ‘What are young people doing with technology?’”

The answer: Teenagers say they are doing a lot. Forty-one percent said they have used social media to make new friends or build positive friendships, according to EdWeek’s survey. Around a quarter have used social media to develop a hobby, acquire knowledge or skills related to what they’re studying in school, and gain a better understanding of what they want to pursue after high school.

‘Peer connection or peer support on social media’

Teens also say they have connected with mentors and developed their communication and entrepreneurial skills through social media.

Nearly 1 in 3 high schoolers in the EdWeek survey said that social media has made them feel less alone.

Social media can especially be a lifeline for certain groups of students, said Chelsea Olson, a research scientist in the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s pediatrics department and a member of the university’s Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team. LGBTQ+ youth, for example, are more likely to be bullied and struggle with depression and anxiety.

“And so, social media is a way that they can find community, they can connect with others, they can learn about themselves, they can seek resources online,” she said. “It could also be youth with chronic illnesses, especially illnesses that are rare or complicated. They might be able to go find others who are experiencing the same thing, getting that peer connection or peer support on social media, joining support groups, accessing information about their illness that they may not be able to find elsewhere.”

Even youth who are socially anxious can benefit from social media, Olson said, using it as a lower-stakes venue to practice social skills.

That’s not to say that teenagers’ social media experiences are all rosy. Nearly a quarter of high schoolers reported believing fake information they saw on social media and not getting enough sleep—the two most common answers when students were asked in the EdWeek Research Center survey about the negative consequences of their social media use.

Building a rapport with students to discuss the potential harm of social media

Understanding teens’ complicated relationship with social media is an important step to building a rapport with them that will allow educators to discuss the harm social media can cause, said Merve Lapus, the vice president of education outreach and engagement for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that provides curricula and ratings on technology and media.

“The more we try to push our perspective without trying to take theirs into account, the more you build a rift between you as an educator and the students,” he said. “As a teacher, if I can’t try to authentically connect with how my kids are thinking, then there’s no way I’m going to be able to get them to connect to the way I’m thinking.”

And educators’ thoughts on the issue are decidedly more negative than teens’. The overwhelming majority of educators in a separate EdWeek Research Center survey said that social media has had a negative impact on students’ mental health and self-esteem. The nationally representative survey polled 595 teachers, school leaders, and district leaders and was conducted Dec. 2023 to Jan. 2024.

Ninety-one percent of educators said social media has had a negative impact on how students treat people in real life.

Educators are also far more concerned than teenagers about how the content that high schoolers post on social media today could jeopardize their future employment. Eight in 10 educators are very or somewhat concerned while only 4 in 10 teens are.

A quarter of educators indicated in the survey that they could not think of any positive outcomes their students experienced as a result of using social media, compared with 14 percent of students in the student survey.

“The biggest challenge here is that young people, especially those in middle and high school, need both autonomy and guidance,” said Heather Schwartz, a practice specialist at the Collaborative for Social Emotional Learning, or CASEL, in an email interview. “They are more expert in social media than many of their teachers, and they do not respond well when they feel they are being talked down to.”

‘It’s just another day in 8th grade’

The fact that educators see social media as such a threat to students’ mental health fits historical trends, said Columbia’s Literat.

“Whenever there is a communications technology that has a huge social impact, there is a tendency to panic. Often when we see these moral panics, the objects of the panic are young people and women,” she said, while acknowledging that the enormous scope of social media means that any negative impact from its use will be far reaching for all ages and genders.

All of this isn’t to say that educators’ opinions on how social media affects kids are wrong, said Lapus. Teens may not fully understand how social media might be impacting their mental health and well-being.

“In general, [teens] don’t have a comparison,” he said. “Educators, parents, you know a time of what school was like [before social media] when all the same dramas occurred, but they didn’t follow you home in the same capacity they do now. That has major effects on your mental health. We can see that, but for them, it’s just another day in 8th grade.”

Where there is more agreement among educators and students on the issue of social media and mental health and well-being is educators’ roles in helping students learn to navigate the challenges. Majorities of both groups—65 percent of educators and 75 percent of students—think that teachers should be responsible for helping students learn how to use social media in ways that will support students’ mental health and well-being.

But only a little more than half the students reported in the survey that a teacher has ever discussed the topic with them.

One simple step to make things better

One simple step that educators—and all adults—can take to help promote healthier social media habits among the young people they interact with is to model good behavior, experts say. That means showing respect to others on social media, not using their cellphones during class, and not posting photos or information about students without their permission (or their parents’ permission).

But to really help students reap the benefits of social media while minimizing the harm, schools need to teach digital-literacy skills—such as understanding the addictive design features of social media—paired with social-emotional skills such as self-regulation, self-awareness, empathy, and relationship-building skills.

“Self-awareness includes understanding our own identities,” Schwartz said in an email interview. “Self-management includes agency, or a sense that what we do makes a difference. This also means understanding when something is getting under their skin, and pausing before responding.”

Just as students’ views on social media are nuanced, so, too, should educators’ approaches to discussing the platforms that have become an indispensable venue for teens’ communication, socialization, and identity-formation, experts emphasize.

For example, while it’s important for schools to teach social-emotional skills, educators should acknowledge that it’s not always easy for students to apply them in real life. Social media often creates a tension with the explicit SEL skills schools are teaching, said Emily Weinstein, the executive director of the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard University.

“It gets complicated when kids want to disconnect, but they have a friend who needs to talk: Their self-regulation and need for sleep, if it’s late at night, is pitted against their empathy,” said Weinstein. “It can be hard to figure this out in a world where you’re connected 24/7.”

The message educators should be driving home, said Lapus of Common Sense Media, is this: Yes, social media can be a positive force in students’ lives. But these platforms are also designed to override many of the social-emotional skills that help students protect their well-being, he said.

For instance, social media features such as the “like” button make it hard for users to exercise self-control, said Lapus, because they’re designed to keep users engaged on the app. “You see the number of likes and see people commenting, the impulse to not feel left out is real, and the ease of responding is built in by design.”

Teachers, he said, should encourage students to examine what’s important to them and how social media can help support those values. (For example, if family is important to a student, social media can help them stay connected with relatives who live far away.)

The goal, Lapus said, is to help students identify when social media isn’t serving their interests. “It’s up to you to be able to continue the cycle that’s helpful or break the cycle because it’s not giving you what you hope to get out of it,” he said.

Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.

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Jessica Grose

Screens are everywhere in schools. do they actually help kids learn.

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

A few weeks ago, a parent who lives in Texas asked me how much my kids were using screens to do schoolwork in their classrooms. She wasn’t talking about personal devices. (Smartwatches and smartphones are banned in my children’s schools during the school day, which I’m very happy about; I find any argument for allowing these devices in the classroom to be risible.) No, this parent was talking about screens that are school sanctioned, like iPads and Chromebooks issued to children individually for educational activities.

I’m embarrassed to say that I couldn’t answer her question because I had never asked or even thought about asking. Partly because the Covid-19 era made screens imperative in an instant — as one ed-tech executive told my colleague Natasha Singer in 2021, the pandemic “sped the adoption of technology in education by easily five to 10 years.” In the early Covid years, when my older daughter started using a Chromebook to do assignments for second and third grade, I was mostly just relieved that she had great teachers and seemed to be learning what she needed to know. By the time she was in fifth grade and the world was mostly back to normal, I knew she took her laptop to school for in-class assignments, but I never asked for specifics about how devices were being used. I trusted her teachers and her school implicitly.

In New York State, ed tech is often discussed as an equity problem — with good reason: At home, less privileged children might not have access to personal devices and high-speed internet that would allow them to complete digital assignments. But in our learn-to-code society, in which computer skills are seen as a meal ticket and the humanities as a ticket to the unemployment line, there seems to be less chatter about whether there are too many screens in our kids’ day-to-day educational environment beyond the classes that are specifically tech focused. I rarely heard details about what these screens are adding to our children’s literacy, math, science or history skills.

And screens truly are everywhere. For example, according to 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about 8 percent of eighth graders in public schools said their math teachers “never or hardly ever” used computers or digital devices to teach math, 37 percent said their math teachers used this technology half or more than half the time, and 44 percent said their math teachers used this technology all or most of the time.

As is often the case with rapid change, “the speed at which new technologies and intervention models are reaching the market has far outpaced the ability of policy researchers to keep up with evaluating them,” according to a dazzlingly thorough review of the research on education technology by Maya Escueta, Andre Joshua Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos and Vincent Quan published in The Journal of Economic Literature in 2020.

Despite the relative paucity of research, particularly on in-class use of tech, Escueta and her co-authors put together “a comprehensive list of all publicly available studies on technology-based education interventions that report findings from studies following either of two research designs, randomized controlled trials or regression discontinuity designs.”

They found that increasing access to devices didn’t always lead to positive academic outcomes. In a couple of cases, it just increased the amount of time kids were spending on devices playing games. They wrote, “We found that simply providing students with access to technology yields largely mixed results. At the K-12 level, much of the experimental evidence suggests that giving a child a computer may have limited impacts on learning outcomes but generally improves computer proficiency and other cognitive outcomes.”

Some of the most promising research is around computer-assisted learning, which the researchers defined as “computer programs and other software applications designed to improve academic skills.” They cited a 2016 randomized study of 2,850 seventh-grade math students in Maine who used an online homework tool. The authors of that study “found that the program improved math scores for treatment students by 0.18 standard deviations. This impact is particularly noteworthy, given that treatment students used the program, on average, for less than 10 minutes per night, three to four nights per week,” according to Escueta and her co-authors.

They also explained that in the classroom, computer programs may help teachers meet the needs of students who are at different levels, since “when confronted with a wide range of student ability, teachers often end up teaching the core curriculum and tailoring instruction to the middle of the class.” A good program, they found, could help provide individual attention and skill building for kids at the bottom and the top, as well. There are computer programs for reading comprehension that have shown similar positive results in the research. Anecdotally: My older daughter practices her Spanish language skills using an app, and she hand-writes Spanish vocabulary words on index cards. The combination seems to be working well for her.

Though their review was published in 2020, before the data was out on our grand remote-learning experiment, Escueta and her co-authors found that fully online remote learning did not work as well as hybrid or in-person school. I called Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, who said that in light of earlier studies “and what we’re coming to understand about the long-lived effects of the pandemic on learning, it underscores for me that there’s a social dimension to learning that we ignore at our peril. And I think technology can often strip that away.”

Still, Dee summarized the entire topic of ed tech to me this way: “I don’t want to be black and white about this. I think there are really positive things coming from technology.” But he said that they are “meaningful supports on the margins, not fundamental changes in the modality of how people learn.”

I’d add that the implementation of any technology also matters a great deal; any educational tool can be great or awful, depending on how it’s used.

I’m neither a tech evangelist nor a Luddite. (Though I haven’t even touched on the potential implications of classroom teaching with artificial intelligence, a technology that, in other contexts, has so much destructive potential .) What I do want is the most effective educational experience for all kids.

Because there’s such a lag in the data and a lack of granularity to the information we do have, I want to hear from my readers: If you’re a teacher or a parent of a current K-12 student, I want to know how you and they are using technology — the good and the bad. Please complete the questionnaire below and let me know. I may reach out to you for further conversation.

Do your children or your students use technology in the classroom?

If you’re a parent, an educator or both, I want to hear from you.

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

Adolescence

Narrating growth predicts college students' well-being, generation z faces the dual challenges of technology and the pandemic..

Posted March 28, 2024 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

• What Changes During Adolescence?
• Find counselling to support kids and teens
• Time spent online is related to the mental health crisis of Generation Z.
• Gen Z also spent much of their college years in pandemic lockdown.
• Personal growth stories across the college years are related to better mental health.

Young people are facing a mental health crisis. Talk to parents, teachers, and therapists, and they will tell you that adolescents and young adults are experiencing higher levels of depression and anxiety than ever before. The statistics bear this out: Rates of depression and suicide among young adults in Generation Z are substantially higher than in previous generations. Why and what can we do?

In his new book, The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt blames life online. As smartphones became ubiquitous, teenagers and young adults spent more and more time on social media , scrolling and obsessing over online posts, ads, and apps. Haidt argues that this “natural experiment” of the explosion of technology has led to the “great rewiring” of adolescent and young adult minds.

There is good evidence that an obsessive online life contributes to increasing mental health concerns, and surely, we should monitor their—and our own—online time and presence.

Gen Z experienced yet another natural experiment: a worldwide pandemic that led to lockdowns and social and political turmoil. They are not only the anxious generation; they are also the COVID generation.

My colleagues and I began studying first-year college students within weeks of the lockdown. Across four universities, we studied several hundred students during the lockdown year and as they returned to in-person activities. We continued to study them through graduation.

We chose to begin our study with college students in their first year because we knew they would be especially vulnerable. At this age, young adults begin to engage in an intense exploration of their identity , questioning who they are and who they want to be: living away from home, negotiating new and diverse friendships and romantic relationships , exploring possible career trajectories, and trying on new ways of being in the world. Just as this process was starting, the rug was pulled out from under them. First-year college students were mostly sent home to spend the next year-and-a-half in their childhood bedrooms, taking classes online, socializing through Zoom, and struggling to figure out what happened.

Anxiety skyrocketed. Along with many other researchers, our research team confirmed that depression and anxiety were substantially higher during this first year of the pandemic than at similar ages within previous cohorts. In addition to collecting lots of standardized measures of their mental health and identity exploration, we also collected narratives from these students, asking them to tell us how the pandemic affected their lives. Initial responses expressed their deep anxiety and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

With the return to in-person life, we saw a decrease in depression and an increase in positive identity exploration—good signs for these young adults. And their narratives provided details about this process. Initial despair and fear were dampened, and many students expressed personal growth and lessons learned.

But the pandemic left its mark. Generalized anxiety, which was so high at the beginning of lockdown, remained very high even as in-person activities resumed and students completed their educations. Perhaps most disturbing, students continued to express a strong sense of not belonging, not feeling like they were accepted or respected by others. They continued to express a sense of isolation and feeling distant, even as they came back together.

The long isolation from normal social activities seems to have left them unable to feel connected to others in meaningful ways. Between the technological revolution leading to living life online and the pandemic, which only reinforced online life, this generation of young adults struggles with making social connections, leaving them anxious and adrift.

Our narrative findings also demonstrate the power of constructing stories of strength through adversity. Those college students who were able to find personal meaning and narrate personal growth across their college years persevered and even flourished. Many expressed that they had learned they were strong and resilient , that they enjoyed their own company, and were able to structure their own goals and meet them. This narrated growth was related to mental health rebounds, less depression, and more positive identity work.

Gen Z, the anxious generation, faces unprecedented challenges. Technology has created a different, perhaps wider, and more dangerous world. But it also allowed some connection during the social isolation enforced by the pandemic. Like everything else, there are pros and cons. We found that those students who were able to see the pros, draw positive lessons, and see hope through the despair better coped with the consequences of the pandemic. For these young adults, the way they told the stories of their lives mattered.

Stories help us connect. Perhaps sharing our stories of challenge and difficulty, of feelings of anxiety, can help us forge connections. Maybe encouraging young adults to tell their stories and sharing our own can help heal some of the sense of disconnection that technology and the pandemic have created.

Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness. NY: Penguin.

Booker, J.A., Fivush, R., Follmer Greenhoot, A., McLean, K.C., Wainryb, C., & Pasupathi, M. (in press). Emerging Adults’ Journeys out of the Shutdown: Longitudinal Narrative Patterns in a College Career Defined by COVID. Developmental Psychology.

Robyn Fivush, Ph.D. is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Developmental Psychology at Emory University and the director of the Family Narratives Lab.

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Sheridan is first husker elected to national academy of education.

18 hours ago · 4 min read

Sheridan is first Husker elected to National Academy of Education

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Susan Sheridan has been elected to the National Academy of Education.

Sheridan is the first Husker faculty member selected for the honor. She is the George Holmes University Professor of educational psychology and the founding director of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools , which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

“The work that I’ve been able to do has only been possible because of the many relationships and partnerships that I’ve been a part of over the past 30-plus years,” she said. “My collaborations with colleagues and students that share in this vision and help push it forward has leveraged our efforts in ways that I could never have imagined.”

Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett said: “Dr. Sheridan has been an international leader in serving families and children for decades. Her commitment to bettering the lives of some of the most vulnerable is further evidence of the positive impact UNL’s work has on the state of Nebraska and beyond. We are very proud to see her recognized with this prestigious and well-deserved honor.”

Sherri Jones, interim vice chancellor for research and economic development, said it is a much-deserved honor for Sheridan.

“Sue truly exemplifies our university’s research mission of discovery, creativity and innovation advancing the state, the nation and the world,” Jones said. “And as with all our great faculty, so many students who have learned from and with her have been inspired to carry on that work.”

Sheridan has been at Nebraska since 1998 after several years at the University of Utah, but she traces her interest in helping schools and families work together to benefit children to her stint as a “baby school psychologist” early in her career. “I realized then that paradoxically, we have to support adults to make a difference in kids’ lives.”

“It’s been a lifelong dream to bring that to fruition,” Sheridan said.

In the years since, Sheridan has worked to develop a strengths-based approach for supporting families and children who are marginalized due to economic, developmental, educational or geographic factors, as well as those who represent cultural or demographic diversity. She developed two family engagement/partnership interventions — Teachers and Parents as Partners and Getting Ready — and has worked with several teams and students exploring the efficacy of such interventions.

She founded the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools at Nebraska in 2004. The center has served more than 5,700 pre-K to grade 12 educators and more than 105,000 children and adolescents.

“The real value of our work is hearing from people who are participating in the research — the parents, teachers, school psychologists, counselors and principals who have trusted us and agreed to work with us,” Sheridan said. “Hearing their stories about how the experiences changed their lives for the better is incredibly humbling and rewarding.”

She is also proud of how many of her students have gone on to continue to improve and expand the work. She noted that she has collaborated with many of her former students and still collaborates with her doctoral adviser from the University of Wisconsin. Sheridan will be formally inducted into the academy at its annual meeting on Oct. 25.

The mission of the National Academy of Education, founded in 1965, is to advance high-quality research to improve education policy and practice. The academy consists of U.S. members and international associates who are elected based on scholarship related to education. The academy undertakes research studies to address pressing educational issues and administers professional development fellowships to enhance the preparation of the next generation of education scholars.

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• Faculty profile: Susan Sheridan
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Steady Rise in U.S. Suicides Among Adolescents, Teens

By Ernie Mundell HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, Match 29, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. rates of suicide by all methods rose steadily for adolescents between 1999 and 2020, a new analysis shows.

During those two decades, over 47,000 Americans between the ages 10 and 19 lost their lives to suicide, the report found, and there have been sharp increases year by year.

Girls and minority adolescents have charted especially steep increases in suicides, said a team led by Cameron Ormiston , of the U.S. National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

"An overall increasing trend was observed across all demographics," the researchers wrote in a study published March 29 in the journal JAMA Network Open .

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The findings were based on federal death certificate data from 1999 through 2020.

By race, sex and means of suicide, some troubling trends stood out.

For example, while deaths from drug (or other substance) overdose rose by 2.7% per year between 1999 and 2020 among all adolescents, it rose by 4.5% per year among girls, specifically.

That trend has only accelerated in recent years: Between 2011 and 2020, suicides by overdose jumped 12.6% per year among female adolescents, Ormiston's group reported.

All of this suggests that "adolescents are finding more lethal means of poisonings, contributing to an increase in deaths by suicide," they said.

And while suicides using guns rose 5.3% per year during 1999 to 2020 among boys, it increased even more rapidly (7.8% per year) among girls.

Although older teen boys have traditionally had higher suicide rates than girls, "recent evidence suggests these gaps may be closing as suicide rates are increasing more rapidly among female adolescents than male adolescents," the researchers said.

However, it was among minority kids that the most dramatic, troubling increases were seen.

For example, between 2012 and 2020, suicide deaths using firearms jumped 14.5% per year among Black adolescents, with similar trends noted among Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native and Asian American adolescents, the study found.

"The recent, rapidly accelerating rates of firearm suicide among Black, Hispanic or Latino, and American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents are concerning," Ormiston's group said.

What's driving the rise in these tragedies?

Dr. Robert Dicker is associate director of child and adolescent psychiatry for Northwell Health's Zucker Hillside Hospital and Cohen Children's Medical Center in Great Neck, N.Y. Reviewing the findings, he said that, "Sadly, I could say that the results were not surprising."

As to factors driving the trends, Dicker said one obvious culprit is the pressures put on kids by social media.

"As social media became a primary area of teenage communication, that is when there was an increase in mood disorders, depression and suicide," he noted.

Economic downturns that strained families during the years covered by the data could be another factor, Dicker added. Adolescents are also facing more anxieties over scholastic achievement now than in decades past.

Then there's the increasing political polarization of American society.

"From my readings and from my work with teenagers, a lot of concern has been expressed around the future of our planet and global warming, conflicts between countries, and again the polarization here in the United States," Dicker said. "I think they all add to tremendous stress."

Minority youth are hardest hit, he believes, because of factors such as "systemic racism and cultural disenfranchisement," and the ease of access to guns in some communities.

Too often, guns are stored unsafely at home in white and Black families alike, Ormiston's team noted. That can lead to impulsive decisions by troubled youth, with sometimes fatal consequences.

"Ensuring the parents of at-risk youth are counseled on gun safety and safe storage practices may reduce youth firearm suicide," the study authors said.

Better outreach (for example, school-based suicide prevention programs) and access to mental health counseling could help all adolescents, but especially at-risk minority teens.

For example, "Black youth are often mislabeled as having behavioral problems rather than requiring mental health services, which can lead to failures in identifying suicide risk and providing adequate care," the researchers said.

The study data only extended to 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic.

Dicker believes things may have only gotten worse in the years since.

"I think the rates of anxiety and depression in youth have increased over these years," he said. "Suicide attempts have increased in this adolescent population. Visits to emergency departments have increased within this population. So, I can't say for sure, but I think if this study was extended, I think we would see even further worsening."

More information

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, reach out for help.  Dial or text 988 or visit  988lifeline.org  for free, confidential support.

SOURCES: Robert Dicker, MD, associate director, child and adolescent psychiatry, Northwell Health's Zucker Hillside Hospital and Cohen Children's Medical Center, Great Neck, N.Y.; JAMA Network Open , March 29, 2024

Copyright © 2024 HealthDay . All rights reserved.

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The best- and worst-paying college majors, 5 years after graduation

If you want to make the most money possible right after college, study to be an engineer.

As a major, it's the safest bet in terms of earning power. Engineering degrees occupy nine of the top 16 college majors with the highest incomes five years after graduation, a recent New York Federal Reserve study reveals. 

Computer engineering majors ranked first with an annual median salary of $80,000, followed by chemical engineering and computer science — the only two other majors that earn more than $75,000 annually.

They make roughly double that of the lowest-paid majors, which tend to be degrees in the liberal arts or humanities.

Here are the 16 highest-paying college majors, five years after graduation:

The technical knowledge, mathematical proficiency and problem-solving abilities required in engineering are valuable across many industries. As such, the profession tends to have higher salaries compared with other occupations.

In contrast, students who major in liberal arts, performing arts and theology earn the lowest salaries within five years of graduating from college, according to the study of full-time workers.

Graduates of all three majors earned a median annual income of $38,000, the lowest out of the 75 majors in the study. Other low-paying majors include leisure and hospitality, history, fine arts and psychology, all of which garnered median salaries of $40,000 or less per year.

For context, that's slightly less than the U.S. personal income median of $40,480 as of 2022, per the latest data available from the U.S. Census .

Here's a look at the 16 lowest-paying majors, five years after graduation:

With liberal arts degrees, graduates tend to be paid less overall for various reasons. For one, their skills may not be directly related to generating revenue, even if their vocation is a benefit to society.

Or, it can be a case of too few well-paying jobs compared with the number of graduates each year, as is the case for fine arts degrees . As such, the lack of demand can drive down wages.

Education majors tend to be paid less as well. While teachers have good job security, summers off and pensions, they're usually paid by state governments, which have lagged in keeping wages commensurate with inflation. In recent years, the "teacher pay penalty" has gotten worse, according to the Economic Policy Institute .

Data for this annual study was compiled from U.S. Census data from 2022, the most recent available. The study excludes students currently enrolled in school and is limited to a working population of those ages 25 to 65, with a bachelor's degree or higher.

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