What each of the 13 UF majors leads to if the student goes straight to work, how hard the first job is to land, how pay grows with experience in Tampa Bay and across Florida, and what a graduate or professional degree changes.
National picture for graduates aged 22 to 27, from the New York Fed's tracker (second quarter of 2026).
Bars show national median pay for bachelor's-only graduates: dark for early career (ages 22 to 27), light for mid-career (ages 35 to 45). The tag rates how easy the first degree-level job is, from unemployment and underemployment combined. Select a major for Florida detail.
The graduate has a job, but one that doesn't usually require a college degree. That's different from unemployed, which means no job at all. The New York Fed checks each graduate's job against the Labor Department's O*NET database. A biology graduate working as a pharmacy technician or medical scribe counts as underemployed; the same graduate working as a lab technologist does not.
Read the two numbers together. Animal Sciences (2.5% unemployed, 53.5% underemployed): jobs are easy to find but often don't use the degree. Computer Engineering (7.8% and 15.8%): the first job is harder to land, but it's usually a real degree-level job.
It isn't always bad. Many pre-health students take scribe, EMT, or vet assistant jobs on purpose to build clinical hours for medical, PA, or vet school. It's also often temporary, and it isn't the same as low pay.
Regions where the occupations behind these majors pay the most or employ the most, from BLS May 2025 metro data.
Most pre-health majors earn modest pay with only a bachelor's. The large jump comes from the next degree, and there are more routes than medical school. Figures are BLS May 2025 unless marked survey, which means BLS does not track the job separately and the number comes from industry salary surveys. Growth is the BLS national 2024 to 2034 projection where available.
| Degree and career | How you get in | Extra school after BS | Florida median | Early-career pay | Best Florida area | National growth | Natural UF majors |
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Nursing route note. Nurse practitioner and nurse anesthetist both require being a registered nurse first. A non-nursing graduate can get there through an accelerated second-degree BSN, typically 12 to 16 months, so these paths stay open after any of the 13 majors, just with an extra step.
For engineering and computing majors the bachelor's is already the working degree. A master's mainly helps for specialized roles (chip design, signal processing, AI research) and is often paid for by employers, so most graduates work first.