Easiest Major: GPA Data, Job Risk & Admission Odds

20 min read

Which major is easiest? By the only two things anyone measures at scale, average GPA earned and weekly hours spent preparing for class, the answer is special education, with early childhood education, communications, and elementary education close behind. Special education majors average a 3.80 GPA. Chemistry majors average 2.78. That gap is a full letter grade, and it is real.

What almost no page tells you is what that ease costs you later, and whether writing an "easier" major on your Common App actually changes your odds of getting in. Both of those have data behind them too. This page puts all three together.

The short answer: the easiest majors, ranked by the only two things you can actually measure

There is no official government ranking of the easiest college majors. Nobody, not the Department of Education and not any accreditor, publishes one. What exists are two independently collected proxies: average GPA by field of study, and self-reported weekly hours preparing for class from the National Survey of Student Engagement. Every honest "easiest major" list is built from those two numbers. Every dishonest one is built from vibes.

The measurable definition of "easy"

Ease, defined so it can be checked, is two things. First, grading generosity: what GPA does the average student in this major actually earn? Second, time cost: how many hours per week does coursework demand outside of class? A major where the median student earns a 3.6 while studying twelve hours a week is objectively lighter than one where the median student earns a 2.8 while studying nineteen.

The all-major benchmark to hold in your head is roughly 3.15, the average undergraduate GPA across fields cited from federal transcript data by BestColleges' affordable-degrees network. Anything meaningfully above that is grading upward. Anything below is grading downward.

The list

The majors that appear on essentially every credible list, in rough order of how consistently they show up:

1. Special education

2. Early childhood and elementary education

3. Communications and media studies

4. Psychology

5. English and literature

6. Sociology

7. Social work

8. Business administration and management

9. Liberal arts and general studies

10. Anthropology and criminal justice

What the numbers actually say

The hard decimals come from the per-major GPA study covered by Poets&Quants for Undergrads, which remains the most-cited public source carrying two-decimal figures:

On time cost, NSSE's annual results consistently split students into two bands. Engineering, architecture, and physical science students report roughly 18 to 19 hours per week preparing for class. Communications, social science, and business students report roughly 11 to 14. Over a fifteen-week semester that difference is about a hundred hours, or two and a half full work weeks.

One more number worth having: psychology, the single most popular "easy" major in America, was ranked the easiest field in the study Poets&Quants covered, with median pay around $49,000. Hold onto that figure. It comes back in the next section.

How to read any list that claims a ranking

Three questions kill most of them. Does the page name a dataset (NCES, NSSE, a specific GPA study) or just assert? Does it give GPA to two decimals or round everything to "high"? Does it separate grading generosity from workload, since those are different axes and a major can be light on one and heavy on the other? If a ranker fails all three, it is a list of guesses in a table.

The Easy-Major Trap Matrix: workload versus what the labor market pays for it

Ease and safety are not the same axis, and they do not correlate. Plot average GPA and study hours on one side, and the New York Fed's recent-graduate unemployment, underemployment, and early-career wage data on the other, and majors fall into four quadrants. Two of those quadrants are fine. One is a trap. One is a surprise.

The context number first. In the New York Fed's labor market for recent college graduates release covering Q2 2026, recent graduates overall showed 5.6% unemployment and 42% underemployment. Underemployment means working a job that does not require a bachelor's degree. Four in ten. That is the baseline any major has to beat, and it is why unemployment alone is a bad way to judge a degree.

Quadrant 1: the quiet winner

Education majors carry the highest average GPAs in American higher education and some of the lowest recent-graduate unemployment rates on the Fed's list. Special education sits near 1%. That combination is not an accident: there is a national shortage of licensed special educators, and licensure creates a closed door that only graduates of the program can walk through. The tradeoff is salary, which is capped by public pay schedules rather than by talent.

Quadrant 2: the actual trap

Criminal justice is the clearest example on the whole list. It is genuinely light coursework, it sounds vocational, and roughly two-thirds of its recent graduates end up in jobs that never required the degree. Anthropology pairs a 7.9% unemployment rate with about 56% underemployment. Fine and performing arts land similarly. These are not worthless degrees. They are degrees where the major alone does not open a door, so the internships, portfolio, licensure, or graduate school have to.

Quadrant 4: the number that changed

For fifteen years the standard advice was that hard majors are hard because they pay. That has stopped being uniformly true. Computer science and computer engineering, two of the most demanding undergraduate programs in the country, now show recent-graduate unemployment above 6% and 7.5%, higher than several humanities fields. Wages for those who land jobs are still strong. But the guaranteed-outcome argument for grinding through a low-GPA major has weakened, and any 2026 advice that ignores this is out of date.

The practical read: choosing a major on difficulty alone is a bad strategy in both directions. Picking the easiest thing and picking the hardest thing are the same mistake with different symptoms.

What "easy" actually means: four different things students are asking for

When students search for the easiest major, they mean one of four things, and the right answer changes completely depending on which. Score yourself 1 to 5 on each (1 = not a problem for me, 5 = this is the thing that will break me).

Axis 1: Low grading pressure. You want a high GPA, either because you are anxious about failing or because you are protecting a number for med school, law school, or a scholarship renewal condition. This is a GPA-distribution question. Education, English, and communications grade generously; chemistry, physics, and economics do not.

Axis 2: Low time cost. You want fewer hours, not easier concepts. Labs, studios, clinicals, and design juries eat evenings and weekends in ways that do not show up in the credit count. A three-credit lab science can cost more clock time than two lecture courses.

Axis 3: Low math and prerequisite chaining. Two separate problems live here. One is math itself. The other is chaining: majors where Course A gates B gates C gates D, so one bad semester delays graduation by a year. Engineering, nursing, and accounting chain hard. Sociology and communications barely chain at all.

Axis 4: Low uncertainty. Some students do not mind work, they mind not knowing what is coming. A syllabus with four scheduled exams and a fixed rubric is manageable. A studio course graded on subjective critique, or a research seminar with a vague deliverable, is not, no matter how few hours it technically takes.

Reading your score

If Axis 1 is your highest, look at education, English, and communications. If Axis 2 is highest, avoid anything with a lab, studio, or clinical requirement, which quietly rules out most sciences and nursing. If Axis 3 is highest, avoid engineering, accounting, and the physical sciences, and check whether your target major's course sequence is offered every semester or only in the fall. If Axis 4 is highest, you may be miserable in a "light" arts major and perfectly happy in a structured business or health-sciences program.

Most students discover their high axis is 4, not 1. That changes the whole recommendation.

Does declaring an easier major help you get in? What the 2026-27 cycle rewards

Sometimes, and the difference is entirely mechanical. Some colleges admit you to the university and let you sort out your major later. Others admit you to a specific school, college, or program, and your odds are set by that program's capacity, not the university's headline rate. At the second kind, intended major can swing your odds by a factor of two or more. At the first kind, it changes almost nothing.

Admit-to-university versus admit-to-major

At an admit-to-university school, the admission office reads your file against one standard and your listed major is context, not a gate. Writing "sociology" instead of "biology" does not create a back door. At an admit-to-major or admit-to-college school, you are competing only against other applicants to that program, and program capacity is fixed.

The cleanest public example is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where recent admissions data showed computer science admitting about 7.4% of applicants while the CS+X blended majors admitted about 17.4%. Same university, same year, same applicant pool quality, more than double the admit rate. You can check the current-year version of this on the UIUC admissions site. California's public systems publish similar information through CSU's impaction listings, and UC campuses vary program by program, which is why our breakdown of the UC Berkeley acceptance rate by major and residency looks so different from the single number Berkeley publishes.

The switch-in trap

Here is where the tactic backfires. Schools that cap a program at the front door also cap it at the side door. Internal transfer into an impacted major typically requires a specific set of prerequisite courses, a minimum college GPA that is often higher than the admitted-freshman average, and a competitive review that can reject you outright. Some programs bar changes into the major after the first year entirely. If you apply as a humanities major to a school where computer science is capped, plan on staying a humanities major.

So the honest rule: applying to a less competitive major is a legitimate strategy only if you would be happy graduating in that major. Treat the switch as impossible when you decide. If it turns out to be possible, that is a bonus.

When it reads as strategy and when it reads as a mismatch

Admission readers see your transcript, your activities, and your essays alongside your intended major. Four years of robotics club, three AP math courses, and a listed major of "art history" with no art history anywhere in the file reads as a tactic, and tactics undercut the coherence readers are looking for. A student with strong English grades, a school newspaper, and a listed major of English reads as a person. If you are unsure how your file currently reads, that is exactly the coherence problem covered in our guide to college application red flags.

How to check any school's policy in ten minutes

1. Search the school name plus "Common Data Set" and open Section C. It tells you what the admission office weighs and whether it admits by program. commondataset.org explains the standard format.

2. Search the school name plus "admission by college" or "freshman profile by major." Public flagships often publish per-college admit rates.

3. Search the school name plus "change of major" or "internal transfer requirements." If a GPA minimum and a prerequisite list appear, that major is capped.

4. If the school is in California, check the CSU impaction list or the campus's per-major capacity page.

5. Confirm what the Common App actually asks each school: some collect a first and second choice major, some collect none.

Ten minutes per school, and you will know whether your major choice is a lever or a label.

The costs nobody puts in the listicle

Licensure hours you are not paid for

Several of the highest-GPA majors on the list carry unpaid full-time requirements that never appear in a credit-hour comparison. Teacher preparation programs generally require a full semester of student teaching, which functions as an unpaid full-time job you cannot work around. Social work programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education require a minimum of 400 field-education hours at the bachelor's level and 900 at the master's. Counseling requires a master's degree before you can practice at all. Accounting has historically required 150 credit hours for CPA licensure, roughly a fifth year, though state boards began adopting an alternative competency-based pathway in 2025, so check your state's rule rather than assuming.

A major with a 3.6 average GPA and 900 unpaid hours is not obviously easier than a major with a 3.1 average and none.

Regret, quantified

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking asks graduates whether they would choose the same field of study again. Around 44% of social and behavioral sciences graduates and 43% of humanities and arts graduates said they would pick a different field. That is not a reason to avoid those majors. It is a reason to be specific about why you are choosing one, because "it looked manageable" is the answer that produces regret.

Underemployment is the metric that matters

Unemployment tells you whether you can find work. Underemployment tells you whether the degree did anything. With 42% of all recent graduates underemployed, the useful question about any major is not "will I get a job" but "does this degree open a door that would otherwise be closed to me?" Nursing, engineering, and education answer yes because of licensure and technical screening. Criminal justice, communications, and general studies answer maybe, depending entirely on what else is on your resume.

The internship argument

The most repeated finding in this space, cited in extern's roundup from NACE survey data, is that around 91% of employers weight internship or work experience above the specific major. Whatever the exact figure, the direction is not controversial. An easy major with two real internships is an easier sell than a hard major with none. If you pick a light major, you are trading study hours for experience hours. Actually make that trade, or the ease was just lost time.

How to pick an easy-enough major without boxing yourself in

Pick the department, not just the major

At most universities you apply into a college (arts and sciences, business, engineering, education) and moving inside that college is administratively simple while moving between colleges is not. Before you commit to "psychology," look at what else lives in that same college: cognitive science, public health, statistics, human development. Those are lateral moves. Psychology to mechanical engineering is not.

Pairing rules

The reliable structure is one light major plus one quantitative or credentialed add-on. Communications plus a data analytics certificate. English plus a statistics minor. Sociology plus a public health minor and a research assistantship. Business administration plus an accounting concentration. The pairing keeps your weekly hours reasonable while giving employers a screen-in signal that the major alone does not provide.

The switching reality check

About 30% of bachelor's degree students change their major at least once within three years, and roughly one in ten change more than once, according to an NCES Data Point on major changes. Two implications. First, whatever you write on the application is probably not what you graduate in, so the anxiety is overrated. Second, switching costs time and money when the new major chains hard, so the switch to worry about is into a sequenced program, not out of one.

Undeclared and open-major pathways

At schools that admit to the university, applying undeclared is often the honest and strategically fine choice, and some campuses run exploratory-studies programs with dedicated advising. At schools that admit by major, undeclared can be the weakest application in the pile because you are competing for general-pool seats without a program advocate. Check which kind of school you are dealing with before deciding, using the same ten-minute method above. Our full guide to college majors and how to choose one goes deeper on the exploration side.

The 8-question Easy-Major Decision Checklist

1. What is this major's average GPA at the schools on my list, and does the department publish grade distributions?

2. Does it require labs, studios, clinicals, or student teaching, and how many unpaid hours total?

3. How long is the prerequisite chain, and are the gateway courses offered every semester?

4. Is this major capped or impacted at each school on my list?

5. If it is capped, what exactly does switching in require, and what is the GPA cutoff?

6. What is the recent-graduate underemployment rate for this field?

7. Does a license, certification, or portfolio sit between this degree and a job, and when do I start it?

8. If I never switch and never go to graduate school, am I fine with the job this leads to?

Eight yeses means you are choosing. Fewer means you are guessing.

Easiest major by goal: quick-reference table

And the counterpoint, since half of this query is really about the other half: the majors consistently ranked hardest are chemistry (2.78 average GPA), chemical and electrical engineering, physics, architecture, computer science, and nursing. Nursing is the interesting one. It is hard, it grades tightly, it requires clinicals, and it produces one of the lowest underemployment rates on the Fed's entire list, which is why we broke down direct-admit nursing programs and NCLEX pass rates separately.

Build your shortlist with Unive

The real question underneath "what is the easiest major" is "which major fits my profile at the schools I can actually get into." That takes school-by-school data, not a listicle.

College Matching filters schools by how they admit, so you can see which of your targets admit to the university and which admit to a specific college or program, and how restrictive changing majors is once you are there. That single filter changes which majors are safe to list.

Profile Evaluator reads your GPA, course rigor, and activities against a specific intended major, so you find out whether "applied physics" reads as ambitious or as a mismatch before an admission officer decides for you.

Application Roadmap locks your major decision to the 2026-27 dates that follow it: supplements that ask why this major, portfolio or audition requirements, and the November and January deadlines for Fall 2027 entry.

Unive is an AI admissions team built by Yale graduates: essay grading, scholarship matching, profile evaluation, college list building, and deadline tracking in one workspace. It is a paid subscription with a 7-day money-back guarantee, which is roughly what one hour with a private counselor costs. Start building your list at unive.ai.

Easiest major FAQ

What is the single easiest major in college?

By average GPA, special education is the easiest major, at 3.80 versus a roughly 3.15 all-major average. Early childhood education follows at 3.64. By weekly workload, communications is lightest, at roughly 12 hours per week of class preparation compared with about 19 for engineering. No official ranking of easiest majors exists, so treat any list as an interpretation of those two datasets.

What is the easiest major that still pays well?

Health sciences, health administration, business administration, and education are the strongest combinations of manageable workload and low underemployment. Education wins on job security, with special education showing around 1% recent-graduate unemployment, but pay is capped by public salary schedules. Business administration keeps higher pay ceilings and a light course load, but only if you add internships, since the major alone is not a screening credential.

Is psychology an easy major?

Psychology is one of the lighter majors at the undergraduate level and was ranked the easiest field in the GPA study Poets&Quants covered, with median pay around $49,000. The catch is that most psychology careers require a master's or doctorate, and undergraduate psychology carries high underemployment. Required statistics and research-methods courses also surprise students expecting no quantitative work.

Is business administration easier than communications?

They are close, and the difference is which kind of easy you need. Communications typically has fewer weekly study hours and almost no math. Business administration adds accounting, statistics, and finance, which chain into each other, but usually offers more structure and clearer grading. If your worry is math, choose communications. If your worry is unpredictable, subjective grading, choose business.

Does my major affect my chances of getting into college?

It depends entirely on whether the school admits to the university or to a specific college or program. At admit-to-major schools, the effect is large: UIUC recently admitted about 7.4% of computer science applicants versus about 17.4% for CS+X. At admit-to-university schools, your listed major is context rather than a gate. Check each school's Common Data Set and admission-by-college pages.

Can I apply as an easier major and switch later?

Sometimes, but plan as if you cannot. Schools that cap a program at admission almost always cap internal transfer too, usually with prerequisite courses, a GPA minimum higher than the admitted-freshman average, and a competitive review. Some block changes into capped majors after the first year. Only list a major you would be content to graduate in, and confirm the change-of-major policy before you apply.

Are online degrees easier than on-campus degrees?

Accredited online degrees cover the same curriculum and award the same credential, so they are not academically easier. They are logistically easier for students juggling work, since asynchronous coursework removes commuting and fixed class times. They are harder on self-discipline: completion rates are generally lower without the structure of scheduled classes. Verify regional accreditation before enrolling in any online program.

Do employers care what I majored in?

Less than students expect, outside licensed and technical fields. Nursing, engineering, accounting, and teaching screen on the degree itself. Most other roles screen on experience first. NACE survey data cited widely across career sites puts internship or work experience above major for the large majority of employers. An easy major plus two internships beats a hard major with none.

What is the hardest major?

By average GPA, chemistry is hardest at 2.78, a full letter grade below special education. Chemical and electrical engineering, physics, architecture, and computer science follow closely, with NSSE data showing engineering students preparing for class about 19 hours per week. Nursing belongs on the list too, given clinical hours and tight grading, though it produces some of the lowest underemployment of any major.

How late can I change my major?

Most students who switch do it in the first two years, and NCES found about 30% of bachelor's students change majors within three years, with roughly one in ten switching more than once. Changing after sophomore year is usually possible in majors with short prerequisite chains and expensive in sequenced ones like engineering, nursing, and accounting, where it commonly adds a semester or a full year.