Tech Industry Cooling Off, So How To Pick College Majors Now?
This year, global technology companies have laid off more than 120,000 employees, and Silicon Valley companies has accounted for one-third.
According to statistics, as of November 17, at least 132 technology companies with headquarters or offices in the San Francisco Bay Area have released 141 layoff announcements this year.
Globally, technology companies have shed about 129,000 jobs this year, according to layoff tracker website layoffs.fyi
As can be seen from the figure above, in the second half of the year, the US technology sector began to lay off workers, reaching a local peak in June.
In November, massive layoffs are starting to hit. In this past month alone, 188 technology companies laid off employees, and the number of layoffs exceeded 50k. The job market is rapidly cooling down.
Even after the epidemic, the job market in the technology industry had been hit hard. In the second quarter of 2020, 428 technology companies laid off employees. 2021 went steadily, however, the biggest wave of layoffs hit again this year, with numbers from the third and fourth quarters reaching close to the post pandemic layoff peak.
The industries with most severe layoffs this year are retail, consumer, transportation, finance, health, real estate, food, education and encryption.
Based on data provided by layoff.fyi, we screened several major cities in the United States, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, New York, Chicago, etc., and sorted them in descending order according to the number of layoffs in 2020-2022, to produce the following chart:
Meta, Amazon laid off more than 10,000 employees. Twitter also laid off 50% of its employees in its "power exchange." Overall, the entire Bay Area suffered from heavy unemployment.
This "layoff wave" in the technology industry has caused thousands of engineers to lose their jobs.
Computer Science is one of the most popular majors at present. The wealth-making myth of this major and the enviably high starting salary has attracted a large number of students every year.
Yet, Computer and Information Sciences actually has the highest unemployment rate, based on the report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NECS) in the United States. NECS analyzes the average unemployment rate of undergraduate degree holders aged 25-29 in different fields.
As in the figure below, from 2010 to 2018, except for computer and information science, the average unemployment rate of other undergraduate majors has dropped significantly, especially for majors related to business management, where the unemployment rate has dropped from 6.5% in 2010 It has dropped to 2.4% in 2018. Business management related majors has seen the biggest decline in unemployment rate among all majors reported.
Looking at the statistical data for 2018, in this sample, income of multiple majors related to business is above the average, exceeding US$50,000, including Finance, Accounting, Marketing and Marketing Research, and Business Management and Administration.
According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, business majors are among the most popular with the largest number of graduates in US universities besides STEM majors, accounting for 17% of the total number of graduates (undergraduate and graduate levels).
As business is a more professionally oriented major, not all US universities offer business majors at the undergraduate level. Here are U.S. News rankings of universities offering undergraduate business programs.
U.S. News Top10 Undergraduate Business Programs
