Who Majors in Engineering and Computer Science?
Are there gender and/or racial differences in the percentage of college graduates that have attained engineering and computer science degrees? Choice of college major is highly correlated with after-college earnings, and engineering majors as well as computer science majors often receive the highest renumeration in salary.
Percentage of College Graduates with Engineering Degrees
In all races, men are significantly more likely to hold an engineering degree than women. When we look at all graduates, men hold around 8% of engineering degrees, while women hold a little over 1% of engineering degrees. About 4% of all college graduates hold engineering degrees. Though the gender gap holds among all races, the size of the gap differs between them. Asian women are more than twice as likely to have an engineering degree than other women on average, and Asian men are almost twice as likely the population as a whole to hold an engineering degree.
Percentage of College Graduates with Computer Science Degrees
A similar pattern exists for computer science degree holders. For the college graduate population as a whole, 5 percent of men hold computer science degrees, while less than 1% of women do. Among different racial groups, black women are least likely to hold a computer science degree, having an attainment percentage close to 0%, and Asian women are slightly more likely than all women to hold a degree.
Interestingly, among men of different races, the percentage of male graduates who have attained a computer science degree doesn't vary more than 2 percentage points. While black men are less than half as likely (4%) as Asian men (13.5%) to major in engineering, black men major in computer science more frequently than they do in engineering and they are around as likely as Asian men to do so.