The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), covering more than 11,000 US adults, found that 44% of social and behavioral science graduates and 43% of humanities/arts graduates would choose a different field of study — roughly 1.5 times the rate for engineering (27%) or computer science (31%). The nationally representative sample avoids the selection bias of job-seeker panels: the SHED captures tenured professors alongside unemployed graduates, giving a more balanced picture than earlier ZipRecruiter data that put passion-major regret as high as 72% for sociology.
The asymmetry fits Gilovich and Medvec’s temporal pattern. Choosing a practical major is an action whose downsides (boredom, identity misalignment) are concrete and manageable; choosing a passion major and watching the labor market punish it is an inaction-of-omission whose counterfactual (“I could have been a software engineer”) grows more painful with each salary comparison. ZipRecruiter’s 2022 survey of job-seeking graduates confirmed this: when asked what they would choose instead, computer science and business administration topped the list, suggesting that passion-major regret is driven more by economic opportunity cost than by intellectual dissatisfaction.
The main caveat is that the SHED question (“would you choose a different field?”) conflates mild second-guessing with genuine regret. A graduate who wonders whether an MBA would have paid better is not in the same psychological state as one who considers the degree a waste. The 15-point gap between practical and passion majors (29% vs 44%) is real but moderate — substantially smaller than the ZipRecruiter data suggested in isolation. The directional finding holds: more passion-major graduates wish they had chosen practically than the reverse.