Let’s look at the data behind these claims, which was drawn from actual program markets and margins. Gray ran analytics to see which market factors best-predicted program margins. In regression analysis, R-squared measures the degree to which one number helps to estimate another. It varies between 0 and 1, the higher, the better.
Student demand explains 39.5 percent of the variation in margins. In contrast, the R-squared for employment is just 8.4 percent, a little behind competition at 8.8 percent.
Roughly speaking, that means student demand is four times better than employment at predicting program margins. As a practical example, Psychology has fewer jobs per graduate than 92 percent of academic programs. But, there was more student demand for Psychology than 99 percent of all other college majors, and it is still growing–Google searches for Psychology increased 19 percent in 2020. And Psych students do get jobs, but usually not in psychology.