09 November 2011

Small sample sizes lead to high margins of error, unemployment version

The ten college majors with the lowest unemployment rates, from yahoo.com. I've heard about this from a friend who majored in astronomy and a friend who majored in geology; both of these are on the list, with an unemployment rate of zero.

The unemployment rates of the ten majors they list are 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1.3, 1.4, 1.6, and 2.2 percent.

I would bet that the six zeroes are just the majors for which there were no unemployed people in the sample. The data apparently comes from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce; there's a summary table at the Wall Street Journal, and indeed the majors which have zero unemployment are among the least popular. Just eyeballing the data, some of the majors with the highest unemployment are also among the least popular. The red flag here would be, say, an unemployment rate of 16.7% (one out of six) or 20.0% (one out of five) for some major near the bottom of the popularity table, but I don't see it; I guess their sample is big enough that no major is that small, or maybe they actually made some adjustments for this issue.

The actual Georgetown report seems to be available here but I am having trouble viewing it.

In case you were wondering, mathematics is the 28th most popular major (of 173) and has 5.0% unemployment; "statistics and decision science" is 128th most popular and has 6.9% unemployment, which seems to go against the popular wisdom these days that statistics majors are more employable than math majors. (But I work in a statistics department, so my view of the popular wisdom may be biased.)

2 comments:

Phil! Gold said...

In case you haven't seen it before, Mark Dominus's statistical puzzle blog post is quite similar.

stephen said...

Which is why all statistics results should include sample sizes among other things (eg error margins). The polling organizations (Gallup etc), include sample sizes and error margins when they report results. Anyone who doesn't is by definition an amateur and should be ignored.