The Market for Economists  

Economics provides great preparation for a job in just about any field. You'll graduate with broad-based liberal arts degree and a set of tools and analytic techniques to analyze a variety of problems. An organization looking for a good liberal arts graduate will also be looking for an economics major: this includes government, marketing, sales, finance, and research.

If you're interested in a job that specifically relies on economics, there are several career paths open to you, including economic or management consulting firms. You could be doing anti-trust work, macroeconomic or market analysis and projections, demographic analysis, or litigation support, to name a few. Most state and local governments have jobs for economists in the areas of tax policy, planning, energy and telecommunications regulation, and others. Economics provides a very good background for many different types of graduate programs.

Economics graduates are sought-after in the labor force. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “Employment of economists is projected to grow 6 percent from 2022 to 2032, faster than the average for all occupations. About 1,200 openings for economists are projected each year, on average, over the decade.” In a recent survey of UVM Economics alumni, more than 75% said that their economics degree was helpful or essential to getting hired for their current and 75% said it was helpful or essential to the work that they did.

BusinessWeek asked CEOs of major companies what they thought was the best undergraduate degree. Their first choice was engineering. Their second choice was economics. Economics scored higher than business administration. 

The economics degree is fairly standard across the country. Thus, employers know what to expect from economics graduates and the skills and structured thinking are desirable to them.  Surveys and salary data show that economics is second only to engineering as a discipline that employers value and that lead to high career earnings. BLS data shows that for “economists of all educational levels, the median earnings in 2023 were $115,730 with $62,520 at the tenth percentile and $216,900 at the 90th percentile.”