Brian Snyder/Reuters file

Harvard Business School students cheer during their graduation ceremonies in Boston, Mass., in June 2009.

The tap that once led from the nation’s top MBA programs to the skyscrapers on Wall Street isn’t flowing as freely as it used to. That’s leaving many young MBA graduates looking for careers beyond the nation’s Fortune 500 companies.

“They want to be on their own path,” said Kristen Fitzpatrick, senior director of MBA career and professional development at Harvard Business School.

The change is driven largely by necessity, but partly by choice.

The financial crisis of 2008, and the weak economy that followed, has left fewer major investment banks and big corporations offering lavish compensation packages to large crops of young MBA graduates, recruitment officials say.

Meanwhile, many new MBA graduates also aren’t as enamored with the prospect of that path, and are more interested in working for a small startup or going into business for themselves.

 “If the compensation isn’t there anymore like it used to be, students look at that and say, ‘If I’m going to work that hard I’d rather do it for myself than for a big bank,’” said Maryellen Reilly Lamb, director of MBA career management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

A decade ago, Lamb said perhaps 70 percent of Wharton graduate students were landing jobs at big corporations, consultancies and investment banks

These days, around 50 percent of students are getting those types of jobs, and the big companies that do hire on campus may pick just one student, instead of a large group.

A similar shift is going on at Harvard. Fitzpatrick said a decade ago about 60 percent of the students graduating from the MBA program landed a job at a Fortune 500 company, often months before graduation.

These days, perhaps 30 to 40 percent of students are landing those kinds of jobs in that predictable way. Some will even be graduating without a job, something she said used to be much less common.

The fact that more students are taking longer to land jobs, and doing so at smaller companies, has meant big changes at Harvard’s recruitment office, and in the classroom. But Fitzpatrick said the Harvard students themselves seem more willing to hold out for the job they really want.

“Students are way more comfortable waiting for that right opportunity versus just jumping on the (first job offer),” Fitzpatrick said.

Nationally, about 17 percent of students who graduated from full-time U.S. MBA programs in 2012 intended to go into finance or accounting, according to an annual survey done by the Graduate Management Admission Council. That’s down from 28 percent in 2008,

About 60 percent of students who graduated from full-time U.S. MBA program in 2012 had a job offer at the time of graduation, according to GMAC’s survey data. That’s a sharp increase from 2010, when just 37 percent of those students had a job offer at graduation, and about the same level as in 2008.

At UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Lisa Feldman, the executive director of MBA Career Management, said she’s also seeing a lot more interest in finding jobs with startups or other small companies. She thinks that’s partly because millennials are more focused on finding a job where they feel like they can have a big impact.

Even though many of these graduates have come of age amid a difficult economy, Feldman said there’s plenty of appetite for taking a chance on a less established company.

“You would think that after everything they’ve seen perhaps they’d be risk-avoidant, but it may be that they’ve seen that large institutions are not necessarily reliable,” she said.

It’s that time of year when many high school graduates are anxiously trying to figure out where they will go to college.

But many college graduates are wrestling with another kind of anxiety: How to pay off their student loan debt.

A recent Life Inc. story about the possibility that interest rates will go up for certain newly issued government student loans got many readers talking about their own debt woes.

About 65 percent of the nearly 20,000 readers who took our survey said they are carrying some student loan debt.

Some said they are paying off debt but either don’t have a degree to show for it or haven’t been able to get a job in the sector they studied.

“I have an MBA, $55k in student loan debt, and no job prospects. So much for education making you more likely to find a job.,” one reader wrote.

Others lamented that their high debt load was making it harder for them to keep their heads above water.

“Our Student Loan debt repayment takes almost half of our income. It's crazy,” one reader wrote.

Even many of the readers without student loan debt complained that the high cost of college is making it hard for financially strapped people to achieve the American dream of going to college.

“College education is fast becoming a luxury that only the wealthy will be able to afford in a few years,” one reader wrote.

Others said they feel sorry for those who are juggling high debt loads.

 “I am 70 and that stuff is long past me. But I have a great deal of empathy for young people struggling to get an education,” a reader wrote.

Still, not all readers had sympathy for those who have taken out student loan debt.

“Nobody said Capitalism was fair. Going to college is simply another risk in the game of capitalism. It's never too late to learn a trade!” one reader wrote.

Paul Hellstern for NBC News Digital

Karla Gourley, a nurse, has put further studies on hold because the interest rate on Stafford loans are set to increase to 6.8 percent this summer. She and her son, Clayton McEwen, live in Oklahoma.

She loves her job as a nurse and makes a pretty good living at it, but Karla Gourley’s dream is to become a nurse practitioner.

It’s a step up that Gourley figures would increase her current salary of $55,000 by as much as $30,000, while giving her more freedom to pursue the kind of health care work she loves.

She’s putting that dream on hold, for now.

Gourley, 36, is worried that interest rates on the subsidized Stafford loans that she had planned to rely on for her bachelor’s degree in nursing will double unless Congress intervenes. That would add to the already daunting cost of going back to school.

“I’m going to wait until they decide what they’re going to do,” said Gourley, who currently works with lung cancer patients at a hospital in Oklahoma City.

The news this week that interest rates on newly issued government-subsidized Stafford loans could rise to 6.8 percent, from 3.4 percent, is just the latest worry for many Americans who are already weighing the burden of debt against the expected payoff of a higher education. 

“It’s the one major student loan-related issue that’s risen up,” said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, a subsidiary of jobs site Monster.com that lays out options for tuition aid.

For now, raising the interest rates is just one option on the table. In his budget released this week, President Barack Obama also proposed having the interest rates tied to market rates.

Any change in those student loans - currently among the most affordable available - would affect a wide swath of students, including some of the most financially strapped.

About 31 percent of undergraduates relied on government-subsidized Stafford loans to fund at least part of their education in 2011-2012, according to the College Board. About 69 percent of those loan recipients (or their families) had adjusted gross income of under $50,000 a year in 2008 according to Kantrowitz’s latest data.

Related: Hey 2013 college grads, we want to hear from you!

The stress over the Stafford loans also is a symptom of broader, growing unease about student loans in general.

Private and government-backed student loan debt has ballooned to around $1 trillion by some measures, as the cost of going to college has risen steadily.

 Meanwhile, easy access to student loans, combined with the weak job market, has left many former students unable to pay off their debt.

The high levels of student debt were even cited this week by Federal Reserve members as one potential threat to household spending.

Despite the high costs, the percentage of Americans enrolling in higher education has continued to rise. Experts say that makes sense, since there’s also plenty of evidence that it’s still worth it to get a college degree.

A batch of government data released earlier this month showed that people with college degrees are still earning more than their less-educated peers.

A separate analysis of government data, released by the Economic Policy Institute earlier this week, also found that unemployment rates for young college grads are much lower than for young high school graduates who are furthering their education. Still, both groups are facing higher rates of joblessness than before the economy soured in late 2007.

Gourley said the uncertainty over interest rates is another example of how little control she feels she will have over education costs.

That’s got her wondering if she should just try to pay for her training out of pocket. To do that, the mother of three would probably have to take nine years – instead of three – to complete her training. That would mean she’d have to delay her goal of retiring by age 62.

 “That puts me closer to 70,” she said.

Gourley also has to consider how much student loan debt she and her husband may have to take on for her 17-year-old son, who is currently a junior in high school. The family has saved $8,200 for his education, but unless he gets a scholarship or other grants she may need to take out as much as $30,000 in loans for him.

Gourley already is setting aside money for her three-year-old and four-year-old daughters. Like many Americans, she thinks an education will be key to their success, despite the daunting cost.

“With my kids, I feel they most absolutely will have to have a degree, or have some sort of vocational technical training or have some sort of skilled trade,” she said. “The days of our fathers or grandfathers are gone.”

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The moms who graduate from the nation's best universities are also among the least likely college grads to be working full-time - or at all -  a new analysis of government data finds.

About 70 percent of married moms who attended top-tier universities such as Princeton and Harvard were employed in 2010, the analysis showed.

That compares to about 80 percent of married moms who attended the nation’s least competitive universities, said Joni Hersch, the law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University who prepared the data.

The married moms from the nation’s best universities also tended to take more time out of the workforce than those who attended the least competitive universities, and to work fewer hours if they did work at all, she said. About 45 percent of the married moms from the best universities were working full-time, compared with about 57 percent of the married moms from the least selective universities.

Hersch’s analysis looked at married women between ages 21 and 54 who also had children under age 18, and is based on the National Survey of College Graduates, which provides government data on around 77,000 college graduates.

 “Every dimension showed lower labor market activity,” Hersch said.

Hersch said she thinks the results are surprising in that women who attend the best universities in the country would seem to be the most coveted potential employees. That means that employers would presumably be more likely to accommodate their desire for work/life flexibility.

“The flexibility alone doesn’t explain it,” she said. “The elites are going to dominate the non-elites in terms of flexibility.”

She thinks it’s possible that the married moms who attended the most prestigious universities are more likely to work part-time, or not at all, in part because they can afford to do so.

That’s because other research has shown that graduates from top schools are more likely to come from wealthy families and to marry men who also attend prestigious universities and come from similarly wealthy families. That could give them more financial flexibility to opt out.

Related: Class of 2013 grads, we want to hear from you

Still, she said there appears to be more to the decision than that.

“It’s not all explained by the husband’s income,” she said.

The tendency for these highly educated moms to work part-time or not at all even extended to many who had also earned advanced business degrees. But the weak economy seems to have played a role in sending some of these moms back into the workforce.

Hersch found that just about 35 percent of the married moms with MBAs who went to the best universities were working full-time in 2003, but that had increased to 54 percent by 2010.

By contrast, about 66 percent of the moms with MBAs who attended the least selective universities were working full-time in 2003, but that fell to about 48 percent in 2010.

She said that implies that in a strong economy, married moms who graduated from the best universities can hold out for the job they want. And in a weak economy, they can likely beat out the women from less selective universities to land a job if they want it.

Other researchers also have found evidence that moms with MBAs who attended prestigious universities tend to be more likely to “opt out” than their peers who get other advanced degrees, such as medical doctors and lawyers.

Catherine Wolfram, an associate professor at the University of California’s Haas School of Business who has studied this issue, said one problem may be that women who earn MBAs tend to be most qualified to work in business and finance. Unlike other fields such as medicine, she said it could be that women in business and finance find that there is little flexibility for going part-time or making other family accommodations.

“The work environment really matters,” she said.

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard who also has studied these issues extensively, said it’s always been true that many women will slow their careers when they have children. But she questioned whether that should be considered a problem when women have long lives to pursue both professional and personal goals.

“There isn’t any change in opting out. Professional women, women who have advanced degrees - even women with BAs and nothing else - are having their kids a lot later,” she said. “So, seeing women slow down a bit in their 30s may have been a surprise to some, but it’s not a surprise to anyone on the ground.”

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The members of the class of 2013 have spent their entire college careers under the cloud of the weak economy. New grads, we want to hear from you about how the economy has affected what you chose to study in college and what you expect to do now that you are graduating.

Please send us an e-mail telling us a little about yourself, including where you live, how old you are and what college you are graduating from this year. Don’t forget to include contact information so we can get in touch.

You can also share your thoughts on Twitter using the #2013CollegeGrads hashtag.

Selected responses may be used in an upcoming story.

The interest rate on government-subsidized Stafford student loans is set to double on July 1,  to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent, unless Congress acts. 

Will you be affected by rising interest rates on this type of student loan? If so, we want to hear from you for an upcoming story. Please send us an e-mail telling us what you are studying and how your finances would be affected.

The high cost of college has left some Americans questioning whether it pays to pursue a higher education, especially at a time when jobs remain scarce.

A new batch of government data suggests it's worth the investment, even in a tight economy.

People with a college degree earned nearly twice as much as people with a high school degree in the last three months of 2011, a Census Bureau report released Tuesday found.

The Census report showed that the median – or midpoint – of personal earnings for people with a high school degree was $5,984 in the last three months of 2011. That compares to median earnings of $11,749 for those with a college degree.

People with a post-graduate degree - such as doctors, lawyers and MBAs -  fared even better. They had median personal earnings of $15,733 for the three-month period, the Census report found.

Soaring tuition costs have left many Americans reconsidering whether a higher education is worth the long-term payoff. Many are especially worried about the number of Americans who are struggling to pay off thousands of dollars in student loan debt when it is tough to find good-paying jobs.

But proponents argue that the cost of college can be worth it, if students are careful about the school and major they choose, and don’t take on too much debt. Besides higher earnings, they note that college graduates are more likely to be employed. The unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher was 3.8 percent in January, compared with 7.9 percent for those with a high school degree.

A separate report from Pew Charitable Trusts, released in January, found that 21- to 24-year-olds with a college degree saw smaller drops in both employment and wages than those without a college degree. That suggests that the extra education helped them weather the recession better than their less-educated peers.

Tip of the hat to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on this data.

Related:

Economy leaves many returning students disappointed, deep in debt
The majors with the best job prospects

Mark Humphrey / AP file

H&R Block customers can file online or at an office, like this one.

UPDATES story to clarify that H&R Block was not the sole software company affected by the problem.

A filing error has resulted in the delay of up to 600,000 tax refunds -- among them students who need the money to pay for books and the tax receipt to apply for financial aid, the IRS said Tuesday. 

One of them is Franccesca Parodi, a 26-year-old interior design student from Seattle, who filed her taxes early this year at her neighborhood H&R Block office. She paid about $150 for 30-40 minutes with a tax consultant. 

When the $2,500 refund Parodi was expecting didn’t show up, and the IRS Where’s My Refund? feature online said her tax return was still being processed, she went to the H&R Block website to see if others were having the same problem. That’s when she learned that Form 8863, relating to student tax credits, had been filed incorrectly. 

On H&R Block's blog and Facebook page, she saw thousands of angry customers sounding off. She wrote that she, too, was frustrated.  

H&R Block explained that the form had changed, and that in previous years, five lines on the form could be left blank for a “no” answer. Starting this year, preparers must enter an “N” in those fields or risk a delay. The tax-filing company said it learned about the tax form change after it had submitted hundreds of thousands of tax returns. The IRS said it was aware of the problem and it is continuing to review the situation and work with "affected software companies to assist in the processing of those tax returns."  

In separate statements on Tuesday, H&R Block and the IRS said those who submitted tax returns between Feb. 14 and Feb. 22 would receive their tax refunds within 21 days -- not eight weeks as stated in an earlier letter from the IRS to those impacted.  

“We want to assure the impacted clients that we are doing everything we can," H&R Block said in a statement. "The IRS has informed us and other impacted providers that they are currently processing returns.”

In a statement, the IRS said: “While the number of tax returns affected is around 10 percent of the total returns claiming the credit, the IRS continues working aggressively to address this situation and hopes to reduce those projected refund time frames further.”

About 6.6 million tax returns include Form 8863, although only about 10 percent are affected, the IRS confirmed to NBC News. 

For Parodi, 26, the new timeline for her refund not good enough. Financial aid officers at her school told her that if she didn’t file her return from the IRS, she would likely not receive grants to pay for school. Her part-time waitressing job at Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub in downtown Seattle brings in less than $20,000 a year, and she worries she won't be able to afford school this summer. 

Hoping for more answers, she returned to the H&R Block office Tuesday, where she was assured the problem had been fixed.

Parodi said she is overwhelmed, but that she doesn’t want to demand a refund from H&R Block because she is preparing for finals.

“They’re not assuming responsibility, they’re saying it’s the IRS," she said. "I’m like, ‘What do I do? Stay here and fight with these people all day or go home and do my homework?’” she said.

H&R Block, the nation's largest tax preparer, posted updates to its Facebook page and apologized on its blog to individual filers who have complained.

H&R Block isn’t the only tax filing company that has been in trouble recently. Last week, the Minnesota Department of Revenue warned taxpayers against using TurboTax to file their state income taxes, finding 10,000 returns had problems, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. 

In a terse statement Friday, the Minnesota Department of Revenue said it would stop processing tax returns filed through Intuit -- which operates TurboTax -- if the problem is not fixed.  

As for Parodi, she says she’ll either file by pen and paper next year, or she’ll ask a friend for help.

“Nobody told me anything,” she said. “They didn’t even call us. I had to go to their office and talk to them, ask what’s going on? I’m very unhappy.”

In October, Teri James says her supervisor at San Diego Christian College called her to her office and got straight to the point: Was James pregnant?

James, 29, of El Cajon, Calif., was indeed pregnant – and she was also unmarried, a violation of school rules, according to the lawsuit she filed in San Diego County superior court. She says she was fired because, as the termination letter included in the suit stated: “Teri engaged in activity outside the scope of the Handbook and Community Covenant that does not build up the college’s mission.”

Speaking by phone with her lawyer, Gloria Allred, James said she felt humiliated. 

"I had to leave right after the meeting. I had to go into the office with all of my co-workers and say I'm leaving," James said. "I never came back so I don't know what my co-workers thought, but for me, it was humiliating. I felt like I was in trouble." 

Also insulting, James said, was that after firing her, the school offered a job to her then-fiancé – they are now married – even though it was known that he, too, engaged in premarital sex. He did not accept the job, she said. 

In filing the suit, James joins a group of women who in recent years have sued the religious schools that fired them for getting pregnant out of wedlock. In each case, the school pointed to moral codes, “community covenants” and handbooks that employees must sign, typically every year, promising to abide by school rules.

San Diego Christian College asks that its employees sign its “community covenant,” a two-page contract that asks its community, which includes employees and about 500 students on-site, to abstain from drugs, alcohol and tobacco and “abusive anger, malice, jealousy, lust, sexually immoral behavior including premarital sex, adultery, pornography and homosexuality, evil desires and prejudice based on race, sex or socioeconomic status.”

"We all had to sign it," James said. "I needed a job in this economy and so I never thought that anything would happen -- I just needed a job." 

Added Allred: "It does not say that you will be fired if you do not comply." 

San Diego Christian College did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The college has not responded to the suit. 

James, who had worked at the college as a financial aid specialist for two years, signed the letter in August, weeks before she became pregnant. She is currently six-and-a-half months pregnant with a boy, due in June. 

In two recent cases out of Ohio, two moms-to-be say they were fired by Catholic schools after they told the principals at their schools they were pregnant.   

In Kettering, Ohio, Ascension Catholic School first-grade teacher Kathleen Quinlan became pregnant with twin girls in the fall of 2011. Four days after Christmas that year, she was told she would lose her job, according to a lawsuit she filed in December in U.S. District Court in Southern Ohio.

The lawsuit notes that Quinlan was not an ordained minister and that she did not lead children in prayer. The point may seem random, but it is a reference to a unanimous Supreme Court decision handed down in 2011, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC. The high court dismissed a lawsuit by a Christian schoolteacher who alleged she was fired for a disability, saying that churches and their schools may choose who will minister to their faithful.  

Court records include Ascension School’s letter to Quinlan, which stated that she was fired because she did not comply with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. But her suit says that her gender played a large role in her dismissal because it does not become obvious when men have premarital sex.

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati filed a response to the suit this week, admitting that she had told church leaders she was pregnant and that she was fired for a breach of contract. 

In nearby Cincinnati, Ohio, Christa Dias, who oversaw computer systems at Holy Family and St. Lawrence schools, became pregnant by artificial insemination. According to the 2011 suit she filed in U.S. District Court, she says she was fired because church officials said artificial insemination is a violation of Church doctrine. 

The court handed down their decision last month, which did not come out in Dias' favor because she was living with a long-term female partner, a violation of the very contract she was saying the church had breached. But the court determined that she could not be considered a minister because she was not Catholic and was not responsible for religious instruction. The court said it wasn't enough to call her a role model simply because she was affiliated with a religious school.   

So can a school fire an unmarried, pregnant woman? 

Simply put, yes, if she violated a school contract. But it's not clear cut, as case law has not settled these claims, said spokeswoman Christine Nazer of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission via email. 

An organization can require employees not to engage in premarital sex but cannot fire her because she becomes pregnant, Nazer explained. 

Back in San Diego County, James says she hopes that the lawsuit will change the lives of women employed by Christian organizations. 

"I want to pave the way, say, Christian organizations, you can't necessarily fall back on this," she said. "You can't hurt people like this. If you say that you stand for love and mercy and grace -- stand for those who are weak." 

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Young grads didn't suffer as badly as less educated peers in the aftermath of the recession, a new report finds.

The Great Recession was hard on young college graduates, but a new analysis finds that it was much tougher on people in their early 20s who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree.

The analysis of government data, released Wednesday by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found  that 21- to 24-year-olds with a college degree saw considerably smaller drops in both employment and wages than their peers with just a high school or associate degree.

“Having a college degree really helped individuals weather the recession at much better rates … than for those with lesser credentials,” Diana Elliott, research manager with the Pew Economic Mobility Project, said in a conference call with journalists Wednesday.

Pew’s findings come as some experts have started to question whether going to college is as valuable as it once was, given the rapidly rising cost of tuition and the growing burden of student loan debt. Those concerns have been exacerbated by years of high unemployment for the country overall, and particularly for younger workers.

The unemployment rate for all 20- to 24-year-olds, regardless of education level, was 13.7 percent in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That compares with a general unemployment rate of 7.8 percent that month.

Elliott, the researcher, said she doesn’t think Pew’s findings discount the familiar reports of young college graduates who have had to move back in with their parents after being unable to find a job

But she said the new data shows that overall, many young college grads appear to be doing OK.

“It shows on a national level, with nationally representative and really reputable data, that the trends overall do not find this to be the case,” she said.

Pew used government data from 2003 to 2011 for its analysis. The researchers found that 69 percent of 21- to 24-year-old college grads were employed before the recession hit in December of 2007. That figure fell to 65 percent in the period after the recession ended in June of 2009 and entered a period of weak recovery.

By contrast, just 55 percent of people that age with a high school degree were employed before the recession began, and that figure fell to 47 percent after the recession.

The young people in each group who weren’t employed could have been in school, looking for work or out of the labor market for another reason.

The researchers did not find an increase in the amount of people at any education level who started attending school once the recession hit, so it doesn’t appear the sharper drop in employment among high school grads was the result of more people going to college.

Everyone in their early 20s saw a drop in average wages after the recession hit. But the Pew researchers found that average weekly wages fell by 5 percent for the young college grads, but by 10 percent for the high school grads.

College grads also earned much more, on average, even after the hit they took because of the recession. The average weekly wage for young college grads was $645 after the recession, the Pew researchers found. For high school grads that age, it was $394.

Young people with an associate degree generally fared better than their high school-educated peers but worse than those with a college degree.

“Any amount of education does improve the labor market outcomes for those recent graduates,” Elliott said.

A college degree has always been seen as a key part of achieving the American dream of upward economic mobility. There’s plenty of data to show that college graduates generally earn more money and are more likely to be employed than their less educated counterparts.

The unemployment rate college graduates ages 25 and over was 3.9 percent in December, compared with 8 percent for those with just a high school degree.

But some say that while it’s clear college graduates make more than those without a college degree, that doesn’t mean all college degrees will pay off. That’s because some graduates are so financially hobbled by high student loan debt, which has neared $1 trillion by some estimates, that they end up giving back much of their wage gains.

“The issue is the cost/benefit analysis of what do you have to give up to get that higher salary?” said Laurence Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University who has calculated the relative lifetime benefit of things like choosing a private college over a cheaper public school.

Kotlikoff said people who are heading to college need to take a nuanced look at where they are going to college, what they will be studying and how much it will cost. He also noted that young people starting out their careers must be flexible and willing to adapt to a changing job market. That’s harder if you have tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

“Taking on tons of debt doesn’t give you much flexibility,” he said. “You’re stuck having to pay it off and taking maybe something that comes along, no matter how good it is.” 

U.S. Census Bureau

Your chioce of college major can have major financial implications.

Think carefully about your college major: A bad decision could cost you $1 million.

A new Census Bureau report finds that engineering majors can make over $1 million more in the course of a lifetime than those who major in fields like psychology and education.

The median, or midpoint, of earnings for engineering majors who work full-time, year-round, was $91,611 per year, the report found. Education majors had the lowest median earnings among the degree categories included in the survey, at $50,902 per year.

Business majors fell somewhere in the middle, with median full-time earnings of $66,605.

Men had higher earnings than women in every degree category. Those who worked in the private sector also tended to make more than those who work in government. Many education majors work for the government as public school teachers.

The report is based on 2011 American Community Survey, an annual sample of more than 3 million American households, and looked at people ages 25 and over with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

It comes as many Americans are heading to college – or back to college – in the hopes of improving their job prospects amid a tight job market.

In general, experts say that’s a smart move: A college degree usually puts you on the path to higher earnings and more job security over the course of a lifetime.

Still, in recent years it’s also left many Americans burdened with debt. That’s why experts say it’s more important than ever to make sure you choose a field of study that is likely to lead to a good job.

Of course, not everyone has a passion for, or ability to do, work in the more lucrative fields of science and engineering.

For those with a passion for education, there may be a silver lining. A separate report released this year by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that education majors enjoyed among the strongest job prospects because the unemployment rate is low in the teaching profession.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will join us for a live web chat on Friday, Aug. 24, at 11 a.m. ET to discuss education-related topics, such as student loans and the cost of college. He’ll also answer your general questions about how to finance an education.

(Sign up for an e-mail reminder for the chat here.)

Secretary Duncan is the ninth U.S. secretary of education. He has served in this post since his confirmation by the U.S. Senate on Jan. 20, 2009, following his nomination by President Barack Obama.

Do you have a question for Secretary Duncan?

If you do, you can ask it in advance of the chat here, or you can also also leave a question in the comment section below.