In today’s economy, many college graduates are underemployed. To safeguard their employment outcomes, the popular press, policymakers, and college administrators emphasize the importance of “practical majors” as an avenue to professional success for students. Major Trade-Offs delves into the internship and early employment experiences of students from four majors to investigate the organizational and cultural infrastructure that underlies practical arts majors’ initial labor market advantages over liberal arts graduates. Drawing on almost 200 longitudinal interviews, Corey Moss-Pech shows that students with more “practical” degrees often easily enter the labor market through structured internship programs and they find entry-level jobs that are highly paid. However, these jobs mostly involve mundane clerical tasks not drawing on graduates’ major-specific skills. Those who studied the liberal arts, on the other hand, often don’t have access to such internships, struggle to enter the labor market, and land in jobs that rarely pay a middle-class wage but do meaningfully draw on their major-specific skills. These differences reflect intersectional inequality, as White middle-class men are more likely to occupy lucrative majors than women and men from less privileged backgrounds. Major Trade-Offs demonstrates the key advantages to vocational majors lie not in learning technical skills, but in smooth labor market entry, a finding that undermines how both academics and stakeholders think about the utility of college disciplines and the skills they teach. Moss-Pech lays out a new vision for the college-to-work transition, making valuable contributions to our pressing national conversation about the value of higher education in society.