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The number of working Americans with analytics-related degrees has risen about 135% over the past decade and a half, according to my analysis of census data.

That figure supports what most business professionals already know: Demand for these skills has grown as firms have become more advanced in what they measure and how they use those measurements to make better decisions.

Before analyzing the results further, let鈥檚 pause and talk about how we arrived at them (come to think of it, that鈥檚 kind of an analytics lesson of its own!).

I am loathe to consider the rise of the analytics major based on my gut suppositions. That feels wholly inappropriate in an academic discipline and career path founded upon following the numbers.

So I downloaded 2.4 million survey results from the Census Bureau and got to work. What a world we live in where such robust tools are instantly available at no monetary cost!

The American Community Survey, an annual survey of about three million households, began adding data about college majors in 2009. Unfortunately, business analytics, as an emerging field, is not listed among the more than 175 major options. Instead, I take the major in 鈥渟tatistics and decision science鈥� as a proxy for gauging how much interest in analytics-related majors has grown.

I compared the first year data is available (2009) to the most recent (2023) and filtered for employed people ages 25 to 64. Economists would call that the working-age population. Each respondent in the survey has a weight assigned to them by the Census Bureau to reflect how much of the overall population they represent. I downloaded the data thanks to our friends at the University of Minnesota who host IPUMS USA (), which takes the raw census data and prepares it for analysis.

I compared growth in the number of majors in statistics and decision science to 12 other common business-related majors, including management, accounting, finance, economics, and marketing.

The mean growth rate for all 13 majors was 80%, reflecting a general rise, I think, in both college graduates in the workforce and students seeking practical majors with high returns on investment. Statistics and decision science had the second-highest growth rate, trailing only operations and logistics, which also clearly bears an analytical slant. Of course, as new fields, these two majors were smaller to begin with and, thus, it鈥檚 easier to obtain growth in percentage terms when you are starting out small.

This methodology is surely not without fault and is intended as more of a back-of-the-envelope calculation than a rigorous academic study. However, I feel confident in the overall point: The analytics major has taken off as part of the data revolution that has changed how firms in every sector do business.

Employment outcomes bear that out. The median early-career wage for business analytics graduates is $70,000, which was ninth out of 73 majors tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2023 (). The unemployment rate (2.4%) and underemployment rate (27.2%) for business analytics majors were also well below the averages.

The data point to a continued strong demand for analytics majors. Students with an interest in statistical analysis and how to apply that to improving business decisions are likely to find solid career options if they choose to study business analytics in college.