Compare fields and cohorts
Pick a degree, a graduating cohort and a field, and read off where those graduates went, what the panel estimates they were paid, and how many were still in academia five years on.
Everything on this page is one of 17 research fields crossed with one graduating cohort. Fields come from what the dissertation says it is about; destinations, employers and pay come from the career panel. Nothing here needs the AI-adoption story that Part 02 tells: the question is simply whether the topic you pick changes where you land.
What the four readings mean
Where they were one year after the degree. The position the panel records in the calendar year following the dissertation year. No position recorded covers people who left the United States and people who never kept a public professional record, so it is not an unemployment rate.
Estimated pay. The panel’s estimate for that position, in same-year dollars, read as a comparison rather than as a paycheck. It follows the sector, and universities pay less than firms, so a field with a large academic share looks cheap on the default setting: switch the pay basis to industry only and the comparison is between fields instead of between sectors.
Still in academia at year five. The same people counted twice, at year one and at year five, so a fall is people leaving rather than a change in who is in the denominator. Five years of career history have to exist, which is why this reading stops at the 2015-2019 cohorts.
Biggest employers. First-year employers, largest first, with the estimated pay of that field’s hires there.
Cohorts are grouped in threes because single years are too thin once a field is crossed with a degree level; cells under 10 people are withheld at source and appear as a hatched segment, and pay medians need 30.