Which majors do TikTok users find most attractive?
Analyzing comments from a TikTok video
My friend recently created a tiktok asking people which major they found most attractive. She had just overcome a (embarrassing) preference for men in Computer Science and was interested to see what other people thought. As a Statistics graduate, I jumped on the opportunity to analyze the comments and hopefully draw the conclusion that Statistics is the most attractive major. Here’s the tiktok, if you want to participate, like a comment with your preferred major or comment if you don’t see it. If this tiktok blows up after this blog post, I’ll update the analysis.
Ok, now that you’ve watched it, let’s take a closer look at the comments. I used https://exportcomments.com/download-tiktok-comments/ to export the tiktok comments. I didn’t bother with replies to the comments since these were generally people agreeing or disagreeing with the original comment. Some of the comments listed multiple majors, so I decided to count the likes for all the majors. It’s worth noting that based on scrolling through the comments, the majority of commenters were women who probably were describing the most attractive majors for men. Here’s some of the comments, the likes they got, and my attempt to record each major listed:
Once I had manually parsed each comment for the major(s), it was time for analysis. I noticed certain quirks in the data. When gender was specified, it often referred to majors that traditionally skewed the opposite way in gender ratio. For example, it was considered attractive when men were in Education, Nursing, or English, while women were considered attractive if they were in Engineering or Physics.
So, what’s the most attractive major?
Looking at the results, a few things stand out. Law isn’t an undergraduate major. Engineering encompasses many different majors. Computer Science is often in the Engineering school. Finance, Education, and Public Health weren’t even majors at my school.
Looking at the top comments, besides those that subvert gender norms, majors that earn a lot of money also do well in attractiveness. One user bluntly commented, “Doctor, real estate, computer science, engineering basically any degree with hella money😂😂🤷🏽♀️” which garnered a lot of likes. Let’s see how the most attractive majors compare with mid-career median salary. I excluded Law since it’s not an undergraduate major.
If we look at the top 10 most attractive majors, there is a relatively high R² of 0.61 meaning that approximately 60% of the variation in attractiveness can be explained by salary. We can’t say definitively say that a higher salary causes a major to be more attractive based on this data. But we might suspect that to be the case based on several comments about money and millennia of historical precedent.
Lastly, how does attractiveness of major compare with the popularity of people studying that major?
There doesn’t appear to be much here.
Final thoughts, I found it bewildering that Statistics wasn’t the most attractive major. This whole exercise has been a huge waste of time.
