Best College Majors for Remote Work

Does your choice of college major affect your options for working remotely after graduation? It certainly does! The latest data from employers hiring in 2022 show a clear pattern.

First off, a college degree in general provides a person with more options for remote work. Holding a college degree has many advantages, including having more earning power and career options in occupations with lower unemployment rates. The benefits of a college degree also include better chances of getting a job with remote work benefits—the option of working from home at least some of the time.

Not all majors are as likely to lead to a career with remote work options. The above chart shows some of the most popular majors that are the best for remote work. Computer science and mathematical majors lead the list, most often having remote work benefits included in job ads targeting these graduates. Nursing, on the other hand, is another story, as nursing work largely needs to be performed in person, thus limiting remote work opportunities. 

Some of the majors in the chart above are fairly broad in scope, and at finer levels of detail more variation exists for remote work options. There is a lot of variation, for example, within engineering. For a general, non-specified engineering degree, 12% of ads in 2022 include remote work options. The percentage is much higher, however, for a degree in computer engineering (19%). Next highest is electrical engineering (12%), aerospace engineering (10%), and industrial engineering (9%). Fewer options for remote work are available for graduates in mechanical engineering (6%), civil engineering (5%), and chemical engineering (4%).

About the Data

All job postings data above are derived from JobsEQ, the Real-Time Intelligence online job ad data set, pulled from over 40,000 websites and updated daily. Data presented above represent statistics from new ads posted from January through July 2022. Data related to requested college majors are from job ads with a stated requirement of a bachelor’s degree or higher. All ad counts represent deduplicated figures. The relationship between ad counts and actual hires is described here.

Note that “remote” as defined here includes any type of remote work situation. This includes jobs that are predominantly work-from-home as well as “hybrid” work patterns which includes a blend of in-office and at-home. This also includes jobs that are “remote” as in the sense of being “in the field”—such as a biologist researching plant and wildlife in the field. Only job ads that explicitly contain text designating a remote work opportunity are included in the above counts of remote work situations.