Forbes ran a cheerful ranking in June, built from LinkedIn data. The most versatile college majors. English came first, with visual and performing arts close behind.[1] If you majored in one of those, the message was that you bet well. Your degree travels. You can work anywhere.
I want to show you what that ranking is actually measuring, because it is not what it sounds like.
Read LinkedIn’s definition. Versatility is the share of graduates working outside their major’s top two industries.[1]
Sit with that. The thing being celebrated is how often a field’s own graduates end up somewhere other than where that field mainly hires. English tops the list at 69 percent.
That is not a skill the major handed them. It is a headcount of who did not land in the two industries that take most of their classmates. Forbes took that number and presented it as adaptability.
The story is told by the survivors
Start with where the data comes from. LinkedIn built this from graduates who finished between 2022 and 2024 and were employed full time the May after they graduated.[1]
Read that condition again. Anyone not working full time that spring is not in the ranking at all.
Then add the platform. LinkedIn is a business professional network. People are on it when they have a job worth posting, a title worth listing, a career worth tending. The English graduate behind the espresso machine is usually not on it. Neither is the one selling sweaters at the mall. Nothing wrong with either job. They are simply not the kind of work LinkedIn profiles are built around, which means the data never sees them.
So when LinkedIn reports that English majors are thriving across many industries, it is reporting on the English majors who are thriving across many industries. The ones with a profile and a title to put on it. The others are not in the dataset. They never show up to pull the average down.
This is one of the oldest mistakes in reading numbers. You survey the people who made it and conclude the path is safe. The bombers that came back from the war had bullet holes in the wings, so the brass wanted to armor the wings, until someone pointed out that the planes hit in the engine never came back to be counted. LinkedIn is showing you the wings. The engine-shot graduates are off the network.
What the whole population actually shows
There is a number built to count everyone, because it comes from the Census and not from a profile people opt into. The New York Fed publishes the underemployment rate for recent graduates by major. It measures the share working in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree at all.[2] The barista is in it this time. So is the graduate selling sweaters.
Put the two side by side and the cheerful ranking turns inside out.
The majors Forbes calls most versatile are the majors the Census says are most underemployed. English, 69 percent versatile, 48 percent underemployed. Visual and performing arts, 68 and 51. Communication and journalism, 67 and 47. Social sciences and psychology sit in the same corner, roughly half their graduates in jobs that never needed the degree.
These are not the same graduates. LinkedIn counted the ones working full time who keep a profile. The Census is built to reach everyone. The two still move together. Where LinkedIn says versatility, the Census says underemployment, and Forbes picked the flattering word.
The major is not versatile. The graduate is forced to be. When a field turns out far more degree-holders than it has degree-level jobs, the surplus does not vanish. It scatters. It takes whatever is open, in whatever industry will hire, and that scattering is what shows up in LinkedIn’s column as versatility. Versatility is what oversupply looks like from the comfortable end of the telescope.
Not every underemployed graduate is a casualty, and none of them is a punchline. Some are funding the plan, the actor pouring coffee between auditions is running her plan, not failing it, and retail promotes from the floor into management every day. But when half a field lands there, that is not a thousand private choices. It is a shortage of jobs that need the degree.
The one major that proves the point
One major breaks the pattern, and it deserves a careful look.
Computer and information sciences is highly versatile by LinkedIn’s count, 63 percent. But its underemployment is low, 22 percent.[2] Its graduates do scatter across industries, into fields like finance, consulting, and product management, and those are degree-level jobs that use the training and pay for it. For computer science, the versatility is genuine. The pivot lands somewhere good.
That exception is the whole problem with the metric. LinkedIn’s number cannot tell the difference between a computer science graduate who left tech to run analytics at a bank and an English graduate who left publishing for full-time retail. Both work outside their major’s top two industries. Both score as versatile. One pivot uses the degree and raises the pay. The other parks the degree while the rent gets paid, and the ranking counts them the same. So a number that means opportunity for computer science means displacement for English, and Forbes reports the one figure as if it carried the same meaning for everyone.
Praising the wrong thing
Now think about who reads a ranking like this. An 18-year-old deciding what to study, and a parent trying to help. They see English at the top of a list called most versatile, and they read it as permission. Study what you love, the degree travels, look how adaptable these graduates turned out.
The ranking has it backwards. It takes the majors whose graduates most often land outside their field’s main industries and holds them up as the smart, flexible bet. It praises the symptom of oversupply and calls it a feature. The advice that falls out of it, pick the versatile major, points a teenager straight into the glut.
I am not telling anyone to skip English. I studied things that do not pay, and I do not regret all of them. I am telling you not to let a ranking sell you the underemployment rate as a selling point.
The question that actually helps
The useful question was never whether a major is versatile. Versatility, the way LinkedIn measured it, mostly tracks how thinly a field absorbs its own graduates. The useful question is whether the field is oversupplied. The tell for that sits in public data that counts everyone, not only the survivors.
Here is the same handful of majors, with LinkedIn’s flattering number next to the Census number it was hiding.
| Major | LinkedIn “versatility” | Census underemployment |
|---|---|---|
| English | 69% | 48% |
| Visual & Performing Arts | 68% | 51% |
| Communication & Journalism | 67% | 47% |
| Social Sciences | 62% | 45% |
| Psychology | 55% | 48% |
| Computer & Information Sciences | 63% | 22% |
| Engineering | 41% | 22% |
| Education | 34% | 22% |
The pattern is not subtle once both columns are in front of you. A field that places its graduates does not need the word. It just hires them. Versatile shows up on the list exactly where the hiring runs out.
I run these numbers school by school and major by major at collegeroi.org, because the cheerful version is everywhere and the honest version takes a little digging. Do the digging. It is your four years and your money, and the people ranking your major are working from a list that never included the graduates the field failed.
Reference Sources
- Connley-Hampton, Courtney. “The College Majors Most Likely To Get You Hired In Your Field And Outside Of It.” Forbes, 25 June 2026, updated 14 July 2026. Accessed July 30, 2026. The LinkedIn “most versatile college majors” ranking, defined as the share of graduates working outside their major’s top two industries. LinkedIn’s universe is US students who completed bachelor’s degrees from 2022 to 2024 who were employed full time in the May following their graduation year. Also the related “hardest hit” hiring-decline figures.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates: Outcomes by Major.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, updated 4 Feb. 2026. Accessed July 30, 2026. Underemployment rate by major for recent graduates ages 22 to 27, the share working in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree, from U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data. Group figures are unweighted means across the New York Fed’s sub-majors.