What can you do with an aerospace engineering degree?
Where aerospace engineering graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 6,842 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Aerospace engineering is a degree where fewer than one in five graduates end up in the job its name suggests. About 17. 5 in 100 people with an aerospace engineering bachelor's degree work as aerospace engineers. The next largest group, about 8 in 100, are software developers, and about 5 in 100 are aircraft pilots and flight engineers, which we score with our airline pilot page. Smaller groups work as civil engineers and mechanical engineers, at about 3.
6 in 100 each, and as architectural and engineering managers, at about 2. 6 in 100.
A large share sits outside the jobs we score. About 7 in 100 are other engineers and about 6.5 in 100 are managers in other roles. Chief executives and postsecondary teachers are about 1.7 and 1.6 in 100. This page covers about 63% of aerospace graduates. The figures come from Census data on 6,842 people with an aerospace engineering degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site. For neighbouring degrees, compare mechanical engineering and electrical engineering.
How exposed are aerospace engineering jobs to AI?
Aerospace graduates split almost evenly across jobs we rate differently, so we do not give the degree one overall verdict. The largest group, aerospace engineers, is rated AI-resistant despite the paperwork with medium confidence: the job's structural exposure is high (88 out of 100), but FAA aircraft certification rules require people to run the required inspections and tests and to approve the engineering data.
Software developers, the next largest group, are rated At risk, airline pilots are rated Safe, civil engineers are rated AI-resistant despite the paperwork and mechanical engineers are rated At risk. Of the graduates we can score, about 43 in 100 work in AI-resistant jobs, about 43 in 100 in At risk jobs and about 14 in 100 in Safe jobs. Coverage is 63%. Our confidence is insufficient because the evidence points both ways.
These figures cover the 63% of aerospace engineering graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 37% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Other Engineers; Other Managers; Chief Executives and Legislators). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where aerospace engineering graduates actually work
These 10 occupations account for 58% of aerospace engineering graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to aerospace engineering, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and aerospace engineering graduates
Aerospace engineering sits in the most exposed tenth of majors in the Census Bureau working paper (September 2026, appendix Table A3). For this field the paper reports that employment fell 3. 2 percentage points more between 2022 and 2024 than the average major's, and earnings fell about 9% more, based on about 7,400 graduates from 2018 to 2022. The exposure measure comes from the occupations young graduates work in, so it cannot show why the gap appeared.
The paper's authors read the pattern as an early effect of generative AI on exposed graduates, though they say their results do not identify a single mechanism, while the NBER paper finds no spike in recent-graduate unemployment in summer 2026.
The Dallas Fed, NBER and Employ America pages do not report results for aerospace engineering by name. The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI, and our verdict scores the jobs, not these outcomes.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
Degrees whose graduates work in similar jobs
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Aerospace Engineering" (code 2401), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. The survey records the most recent occupation of people who were not working when surveyed (unemployed or out of the labor force), and they are counted in it: across the degrees on this site that is about 9 in 100 graduates, between 6 and 13 in 100 depending on the degree, so "work as" on this page means "work or last worked as". Sources: www2.census.gov, www2.census.gov, www.dallasfed.org, www.nber.org, employamerica.org, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.