According to a recent study, UT students in computer engineering and human resource management may have an easier time finding employment after graduation than others.
Research done by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and the UT Center for Business and Economic Research projects that, during the years 2008 to 2018, there will be more job openings in those fields than new graduates to fill those jobs.

For example, in computer programming and information systems, there is an estimated shortage of almost 400 graduates annually during 2008 to 2018.
David L. Wright, THEC chief policy officer, said THEC supplied 10 years of historical data on college graduates by program or degree level to CBER. CBER then paired that data with data the Tennessee Department of Labor provided on growth in occupations.

"We tried to pair up degree programs with occupations," Wright said.

But some comparisons between degrees earned and occupations work better than others. Programs like nursing and physical therapy are more straight-forward, but degrees in history or political science can lead to a wide variety of jobs.
Wright said history majors can become historians, museum curators, politicians or any number of professions, making direct comparisons hard to come by.

"There are people who prepared for law by majoring in English or majoring in political science or majoring in history,"

Wright said. "Some colleges may actually offer a pre-law curriculum, but someone can become a lawyer with any number of pre-graduate curriculum programs."

So the organizations decided to engineer the study using career pathways and career clusters.

CBER Associate Director Matt Murray calls a career pathway "the root that one takes to secure a particular degree."
"So, for example, a student that was interested in a graduate degree in nursing, that student may choose an associate's degree first, then a bachelor's degree and then pursue graduate study," Murray said. "So that particular student may not actually use the associate's degree as a free-standing degree and work accordingly."

Meanwhile, career clusters are "a grouping of careers that have considerable similarities in terms of skills and training and the occupations the individual might pursue," Murray said.

According to the study, the largest under-supplied career pathways are programming and software development, construction, environmental service systems, accounting, business financial management, human resources and marketing.

The most over-supplied career pathways are journalism, administrative and information support, science and mathematics, therapeutic services, management and teaching, the study said.

"There is not a one-to-one relationship between a particular degree and an occupation," Murray said.

But Wright said that, due to clustering careers and grouping degree programs, high-need professions like nursing and teaching were downplayed in the study.

With nursing, the study had to count certified nursing assistants, which requires a certificate and not a bachelor's degree, in the classification of nursing jobs, skewing the number of openings in nursing as a profession. But taking that variable out for a profession like nursing proves the opposite is true, he said.

"We do, in fact, have a nursing shortage," he said.

Other studies cited within this one, Wright said, affirm this claim.

With teaching, it's all in the perspective. Wright said the study was done from a state-wide view, simply stating that teachers, state-wide, were needed.

But that does not mean that any new graduate, looking to get a job in teaching, can get one anywhere in Tennessee.

There could be a low demand in some cities in the state and a high demand in others, he said.

Murray called the study important because it helps guide where the university should put its resources.

"Where do we need to focus our resources, our funding, our faculty, in order to meet the degree demands of college students in systems of higher education?" Murray said.

Wright called it especially important in light of declining funding.

"Given the fact that we don't have enough money to do everything we want to do," Wright said, "how can we work smarter?"