Business: America's Default Degree
Bachelor's degrees in business, management, and marketing, annual since 1971. Business overtook education around 1980 to become the country's most-conferred degree and has held the position through every recession, tech boom, and enrollment cycle since — roughly 375,000 degrees a year, about one of every five conferred.
What does it show?
Business has been the most-conferred bachelor's degree since the early 1980s — 375,000 a year and still growing. Education, the field it displaced, has since fallen out of the top five entirely.
Methodology
Bachelor's degrees conferred in business, management, marketing, and related support services, from Digest 2019 table 325.25 extended with table 322.10, annual since 1970-71.