What To Study In College To Score The Jobs Of The Future

Students on their way to university sometimes think ahead to what kind of future they’d like their education to provide. Are they zeroing in on a specific career they’d like to pursue upon graduation? Do they have a specific job in mind they’d like to shoot for? Or, do they have only a vague notion of what they want, hoping that their interests will direct them toward opportunity?

Regardless of a student’s level of focus, certain fields of study can yield great jobs—ones that are in high demand among employers and that bring healthy salaries.

Recently, mammoth jobs platform, Indeed.com, released a study on job opportunities of the future. In it, the Texas-based company discovered that 92% of all jobs that bring salaries of over $57,700 and grow to keep up with inflation can be attained most easily through only a small handful of fields of college study. We highlight them in a slideshow, which you can view below.

Jobs that secure decent salaries that grow to keep up with inflation and that are thought to be in demand in the future by employers have been dubbed “opportunity jobs” by Indeed. (See some popular ones and their average salaries at the bottom of this post.) The company’s decision to make the cutoff salary $57,700 is due to the fact that it represents the purchasing power of the median household income in the year 2000, says Indeed chief economist, Tara Sinclair. “The median household income has actually been declining in purchasing power terms since 2000,” she explained.

One of the fields of study required by a portion of the valuable Opportunity Jobs, which should come as no surprise to anyone given the proliferation of technology and communication in the economy in recent years, is Computer and Information Sciences. Majors in that field would include such concentrations as computer science, computer programming and computer networking. In 2014, 55,367 students graduated with degrees in these fields. Do you think that number has risen in the past two scholastic cycles?

The most popular field of study that would adequately prepare a student for the jobs of the future is in Business—both management and finance. Majors in this arena include accounting, economics, and business administration. This concentration yielded more than 358,079 grads in 2014.

One field of study that might seem a stretch for a list of majors that, in the future, will yield great jobs with growing salaries is Architecture. Data shows that only 9,144 students graduate with such degrees in the United States in 2014.

So how did it make a list of paths to Opportunity Jobs? “This is also a play for demographics,” explains Sinclair. “We have a lot of Baby-Boomers who are in these roles and as they retire employers are really scrambling. As we’re seeing, there are a small number of graduates who are choosing this field, which is going to leave lots of opportunities for those that do choose it because there’s huge employer demand.” That demand, she added, could lead to higher salaries.

The degrees underscored by Indeed.com’s study, Sinclair says, are relatively specialized—those who pursue them have some idea of their own interests and are at least semi-focused on securing a job in those fields after graduation. “That does not mean,” she said, “that the only way to get a good high-paying job of the future is to (pursue) one of these job-oriented degrees. The other option is to get specialized training either in addition to your degree or after your degree or through internships and on-the-job employer training.”

To get a sense of some of the salaries one might expect from an “opportunity job,” Indeed released average salaries for some of the most popular ones right now. Check them out below: