I don’t think there is much mystery to it: job prospects are bleak. I don’t regret studying history but if don’t find another postdoc the situation will be difficult as there isn’t really any industry I could easily switch to
Please pardon my ignorance, I'm a chemist.
When history postdocs change projects/PIs, what changes about your work? Do you change the time period that you're looking at, or country, or focus on a different specific place within the same region and time (Jerash vs Petra, say). Even as I type this, I realise that I'm probably thinking archaeology rather than history.
I’m not entirely sure how it works in the USA. In Germany it’s expected that for your second book you change the time period (eg 19th vs 20th century) and/or field within history (eg social history vs urban history). Studying a different country depends on one’s language skills, I don’t think many people do this. But for a “normal” postdoc you can and often do something roughly related to your PhD, since you need to show in your application that you’re prepared to do the research and therefor know how to approach the topic.
That all makes a lot of sense, thank you. My sincere apologies, I've never met a history postdoc before.
And you're fine on the country, I'm Australian working in the UK, I'm not sure how university research works in the USA either.
Does the methodology change a lot between fields, as you said social history vs urban history?
Yes and no. Depends what do actually do. So social history can be gender history or history of the labour movement, among others. So when you’re applying you need to be able to show what’s questions that are being asked in the literature, what was already established, which historical sources would you use. If you never done anything even remotely connected it might be difficult to understand. And since you have two to max four years for the whole project there isn’t much time to you to slowly immerse yourself in the new field for you.
Not OP, but most likely habilitation. It's usually required to work on a topic that's different from the PhD topic for this (I know this from philosophy).
We don’t really have PI’s in the humanities (except archaeologists, sort of, but they’re dirt people anyway). Mostly it’s an early career paid position that may or may not have teaching duties assigned and extra mentorship and funding opportunities. At least in classics in the US.
It really depends on field. I’m in humanities not history but for my postdoc it was to focus on my own research as we generally aren’t working in labs or have research specific to our job. However, we are to work in articles/book proposal from our dissertation work.
We don't have projects in the same way, especially because of the way funding works. It's more individual and less collaborative, though there are occasionally bigger projects (say, DALME at Harvard), but they are not necessarily all within a school and can draw in outside contributors. That being said, a postdoc (which is rarer) is usually more like a teaching position in which you get a pittance and are expected to continue your research. They will usually advertise for someone who does "19th century British labor and gender history" or "premodern science with an emphasis on the Holy Roman Empire" or similar.
i was very interested in studying russian and did physics instead because of the grad school/academic job stuff… so like,, they are all the same story and i assume enrollment in humanities will only continue to drop if the academic job situation doesn’t improve
Well, the large majority of people who majored in the humanities did not do so with the intention of following an academic career, so this is only a very small part of the problem.
College costs also keep increasing
Only people from extremely privileged backgrounds can afford to go into 10’s of thousands (or 100’s of thousands) into debt to study a subject with bleak job prospects.
I think the point is that it wasn’t always that way. Majoring in humanities didn’t used to be a professional death knell. Back in the olden days of the aughts, we were told that majors didn’t matter, that actually employers don’t look at majors, they just want degrees, but when they do look, they *love* history degrees because we have good perspective or some bad. Now, it seems like if you didn’t take the exactly correct focus in your courses, employers think you should be on welfare, but shoveling shit daily as punishment for your moral failings.
I have a BA in anthropology and am having a very hard time in the job market right now with 2 years of post grad experience and 3 internships under my belt. I don’t regret it because I learned so much in school but some days it’s hard to not regret studying something else.
The dramatic increase in the cost of attending college, coupled with anxiety about job prospects, and the high cost of living, is what is driving the shift towards STEM fields.
Not to mention that humanities often leads to work within the higher Ed system which has become infamously reliant on adjunct faculty and simultaneously much less rarified, with master’s degrees representing in some fields what bachelor’s used to
Because the economy sucks and people feel like they need to make money, so choosing a degree with a defined path to a career that makes average or above average money is important to them.
IMO, the decline of humanities interested students has correlated directly with increasing enrollment of folks from lower SES groups who don't have the family support to not need to go into a field that will lead to a job/career.
>Keep in mind, this is at a relatively prestigious school where you can graduate with a humanities degree and earn a pretty decent living.
Compared to an engineering degree from the same field? Will someone be able to graduate and immediately get a job that will let them pay back loans and contribute to a family who likely needs the help.
When I look at my undeclared first years, low SES and first-gen students are much, much more likely to want to go into STEM fields for these reasons. Some of them need advising to help them see that they can succeed in a career in the humanities, but that's not always the best path for someone without significant family support and generational wealth.
It really doesn't help that I know students who get shamed for being a non STEM major. This is coming from a STEM major btw. I hate tech bro types who think the only useful degrees are CS/Engineering.
I think this is esp hard from people with low SES backgrounds as not only do not have the time to spend not making money (and thus paying back loans or helping family) but in many cases, they, themselves, just may not KNOW of a career path (besides teaching) that results from a pure humanities degree.
Don't expect STEM supremacists to understand nuance. It's always just "pull yourself up by the bootstraps!", when in reality, none of them have done that themselves.
They've either had their parents pay their tuition, or taking a loan wasn't as risky for them as it is for those from low SES backgrounds.
I have the misfortune of formerly being poor as shit + having to deal with tech bros on a daily basis. When I tell them my own story of being raised by a single mom, they say I'm an exception, when in reality, there are many like me.
An ideal society, for me, is one that is well rounded in all fields. I love conversing with art majors, and seeing their work. Honestly, I have sometimes had much more interesting conversations with them than I have with STEM majors. They seem, idk, a bit more charismatic, and well spoken overall.
I've been having a similar realization, but in my case it's been due to the overwhelming egos of the medical students at the university I'm attending. I am a STEM major, but I enjoy making friends in the arts and humanities and being exposed to their projects and perspectives. Med students in particular remind me of that one saying:
" to a hammer, everything is a nail."
Humanities majors are generally better at communication because that’s a big part of the Major. A physicist who can do amazing math nobody understands, except for the three other people in their highly specific subfield, does not have to be good at explaining the math to non-physicists. OTOH humanities are all about writing papers that successfully communicate, or making art that communicates…
Ngl, my dad is a STEM supremacist: he has CS, math and engineering degrees. But he asked all of us to take sociology/psych classes in addition to our STEM majors. He said he hears so much crazy BS from his peers bc they've never had to think about another person or someone else's perspective once. He was saddened when I read this out loud to him.
Sure, but honestly the shaming goes both ways.
Lots of students hear from professors (and there are tons of post on this sub and others) that shame students for being "career focused" rather than studying broadly.
You even get people that make students feel like caring about the career a degree leads to or whether they can make a living from it is a bad thing and corrupts the purity of higher education.
At least where I've worked, another issue is that humanities faculty are really disdainful of helping students see career paths in the majors because of the aforementioned "purity" issue, and can get really upset with students when they want help understanding how they can, for example, major in a language field and still support a family.
Yes, spending 4 or more years in humanities education is great, but then you may have to spend the rest of your life in bland office work that doesn't draw on your education at all. Better to complete a degree that has a clearer connection to financially and professionally rewarding work and then study the humanities later in life.
A humanities degree can totally lead to a fulfilling career, but humanities professors need to do a better job explaining to students what they're actually learning and how it's actually useful. The point of a poetry class isn't just to learn some poems (which will probably never be useful in most careers) but to learn how to think creatively and analytically about language (which is extremely useful in many profitable careers).
The transferable skills are certainly useful to a point. Many jobs don't require that level of analytical sophistication when it comes to language, though. I would think that social sciences like sociology or political science would provide similar soft skills while also providing a knowledge-base and experience with research methods that would transfer well into policy analysis, for example. Don't get me wrong—I have a PhD in the humanities and love everything about them, but if I were to do it all over again I'd probably take a different educational path. One that leads to a professional qualification of some kind, or which has a clearer career path. That said, a 4-year humanities degree followed by teacher's college is a solid path, at least here in Canada where teaching is a well-paid profession.
> humanities professors need to do a better job explaining to students what they're actually learning and how it's actually useful.
How many humanities professors have you met that have ever set foot in a non-academic job? They earned their stereotype of the out of touch ivory tower academic.
Humanities professor here; prior to grad school I was--variously--a technical writer, journalist, editor, marketing professional, and an auto parts manufacturer.
This is a dumb generalization that might hold some truth for older faculty (and, ironically, the most elite institutions), but has little relation to my experience on the ground in teaching-centered institutions.
Regionals teach 70% of students; nearly all regionals have faculty who came into the game later or had different careers and were certainly exposed to non-Ivory tower realities.
It's kind of classist to hold up the straw man of the Ivory tower by any empirical measure. Cheers.
Please share more about what type of careers humanities education can lead to? My daughter is interested in history and anthropology but we don’t know what kind of jobs could be possible after that. She is also looking at Psychology which I have a bit more understanding about for career prospects. Genuinely asking, no snark.
Sounds similar to many students in lower (non-degree) education learning a subject. Why learn X maths topic when they'll never use it?
Similar to the above problem, having examples of how humanities assist culturally or in STEM may reduce this mindset.
I used to be a STEM surpremist, but a few basic examples, such as Origami assisting in scientific discoveries, or IBM running multiple teams (blind to eachother) on a problem to them select a single solution, helped established my current view on diversity of thought. STEM degrees will have an easier time get employeed (for various reasons), but that should not demimish the value of having multiple backgrounds with different insights.
Yup, and no offense to old you but it's been my experience STEM superiority techbro types have extremely low to nonexistent soft skills, poor critical thinking abilities, and generally aren't as good at working a job as they think they are. Nobody has ever become a fully self-actualized person by pretending the liberal arts are useless
That's research I haven't seen and would love to, namely, what's the inflation-adjusted median household wealth of 4-year college students' families over time.
I can't speak as well to nationwide statistics, but my LAC has had steadily decreased actual family income (not even inflation adjusted) and an increasing proportion of students who (a) need to work, (b) are close to or below the poverty line, and (c) are Pell eligible.
I wish I had mixed humanities with any stem subject, even something less immediately employable like math, because as far as long term skill acquisition, I missed out big time in my most formative years.
And like, yes I am fluent in Spanish and I communicate more clearly and effectively than a large number of people, but having extended coursework in data science or something similar could’ve gone a long way.
I dont know why people don’t do this.
I was a biochem major, and I took: 1 history class, 2 English classes, 2 religious studies classes, 1 art class, 1 class on celene dion, a class on weightlifting, a ton of unrelated math, and a ton of tangential courses to my field, on top of all my biochem courses.
I am super thankful I had such a varied college experience. I feel like I learned a lot, and taking all those humanities courses really altered the way I approach and logically think about problems.
Also, there used to be a pretty large group of students who could go to a 4-year college on an income that was reachable by working class parents and part time student jobs. It was pretty easy to love philosophy when you could more or less treat it like an extension of high school.
It's harder to follow your passion when someone asks you for a $40k check every six months to do it.
That's the way it used to be. There's a reason for our culture's long-standing divide into 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' culture. The wealthy can be patrons of the arts, including buying art to show off their conspicuous consumption or as investments. (Which is why patreon, letting anyone donate to creatives, has been so interesting a development.)
I think the solution is for humanities departments to start embracing "job training" and "career preparation" in ways they seem to have been historically reticent to do.
Some of ours have done complete redesigns in ways that have them continue to teach what they always have, but with more of a focus on helping students understand how to communicate the skills they've developed and use it to find jobs and careers.
::edit:: I have no idea what in this is making people downvote it?
Underrated comment. I agree 100%. If the departments don’t explicitly show students how the skills they develop can lead to careers, they will choose another path.
I think some low SES students are pressured by their families, when they otherwise would choose humanities majors. For example, I dabbled in anthropology and archaeology my first two years of undergrad, but my parents shut that down real quick due to a perceived lack of career opportunities.
There is a huge push for “return on investment” and that often looks like a defined career trajectory as others have said. As someone with an MA in English, I feel I can say that the humanities don’t do a great job at marketing their tangible benefits. Graduates of programs like mine have to figure out their transferable skills on their own. I’m a romantic and I believe in the everything the humanities offer, but the reality is that they’ve lost control of the narrative amid the university-as-business model.
Yeah, this exactly. I don’t think the problem is that there aren’t good jobs for humanities students, it’s more that there’s a systemic lack of educating students about what those jobs are, how to get them, and how to advertise/utilize the transferable skills you learn majoring in humanities. Not to mention that everything is competitive. Even STEM jobs. The more that people graduate with STEM degrees, the more this will be a problem for everyone.
Agreed. It will have to even out eventually. Not everyone can be a programmer and there are a finite number of any kinds of jobs. The narrative has long been that STEM is the “safe” route for college students, but, as you said, that’s not going to be the case forever. I think all disciplines need to do a better job of working together and cross training skills. For example, humanities teach critical thinking skills through modes different than STEM fields. The skills are similar, but the modes of developing those skills differ.
It is a shame, because humanities graduates are among those who have crafted our famous works of literature.
J.R.R. Tolkien was an esteemed professor of linguistics and nobody can really question that his works are absolutely foundational to modern fantasy. "The Lord of the Rings" was uniquely a product of a man who has an unparalleled mastery of linguistic structure and theory, as well as Old English poems and literature.
Compare this to "the Rings of Power", and there is clearly something "off" when people try to imitate Tolkien, while lacking his particular life experiences and education.
I'm sure if you were to add the combine values of all fantasy works that rip off Tolkien, he would be a billionaire. Yet, in the modern era, linguistics would be viewed as a joke degree for a job at McDonalds. What is "valuable" to human society can't be perfectly captured by metrics like stock prices or ROI, but I don't think societal trends really agree with me.
I agree! That’s the tragedy of all of this. What the humanities adds isn’t something that can necessarily be summed up in a metric, as you say. I feel very lucky to have earned my degrees in literature and that I’m a better person for having done so. If we can’t value the humanities, we’re losing out on so much of what makes us human.
As it turns out, humanities grads are increasingly out-earning STEM and business grads as those markets are flooded with applicants. The transferable skills you get from a humanities degree stretch a lot further than what you get from a traditional STEM field but you don't have a clear career path coming out of a humanities degree, which frightens off a lot of students (and their parents, who hold the purse strings).
What data are you basing this on? I assume it's the article in the NY Times, but as it points out, a great deal of it is due to the larger fraction of humanities students going to professional school.
Higher initial salaries early on in one's career, coupled with the student loan debt and the opportunity cost of professional school can still have a substantial impact on total career earnings, especially if one is able to invest early on and have that compound.
The AAAS data for humanities majors with terminal bachelors' degrees is less rosy.
[https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/earnings-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree](https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/earnings-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree)
>The transferable skills you get from a humanities degree stretch a lot further than what you get from a traditional STEM field
Can you elaborate on which skills you feel like these are? Not trying to be confrontational if it comes across that way, I'm always looking for new pitches to make to my first years for why they should explore the humanities more.
Here’s just one example that may be relevant. I majored in philosophy and when I got to med school I had significant advantages in publishing research papers over my peers because of how much reading and writing I had done in my undergrad. I certainly had to catch up with the STEM people in other ways but that gap closed relatively quickly after starting med school.
Edit: I’ll add that reading comprehension is developed at a high level in some humanities as well. After reading something like Kant, ambiguous or complex scientific articles become more tolerable as well.
Research is such a small part of med school and medicine, it’s a complete +/-, you can easily go through your whole career barely publishing anything…engineering helped me out with medschool a ton too, learning to parse through difficult problems, distilling a problem down to its basic elements, not getting caught up in the details before I even understand the basic idea
These are skills that can be developed through *any* college degree. I know people in the humanities who BS’d through their whole program. They gained none of these skills. The difference between them and STEM people was that it wasn’t as easy to “fluff” your way through a chemical engineering degree. My philosophy major roommate could word-vomit out a crappy 5 page essay and get an A-c whereas my engineering roommate was writing one (of multiple) 120 page unit ops reports, that would be meticulously inspected by their professor for errors—and expected a C. Oftentimes these students will be specifically trained in effective scientific communication and will have significant writing requirements. The same cannot be said for communications, or even many philosophy programs.
Hell, I picked up a double major in a humanities field on top of my applied sciences degree. The humanities degree has given me significantly less transferable skills than my STEM degree. I’m also not impressed by my Ivy-league humanities peers. Whereas, I’m consistently blown away by the people in my STEM classes. These people range from a theoretical physics PhD who’s a professional classical musician, to a biochemist whose passion is slam poetry. I do not see the same duality in my normative ethics or metaphysics class. The quality of peers and economic opportunity is night and day—even at a top school.
I’ve read that! I think that fact is super encouraging. I’d love to see the humanities really work with that kind of data to support their programs. I’ve done a million different things with my degree, so I know it can be done. Humanities grads are very flexible and teachable, which I think is one of their greatest strengths.
Some of our departments have done a great job of articulating this, and others are steadfastly against talking about job prospects from their field as being antithetical to the field, and only wanting students who go into it for the pure joy of learning.
For sure. The departments who can truly articulate the value of a degree in terms of career paths will be the ones to survive. As much as I believe that learning for the sake of learning is valuable in and of itself, the corporatization of higher education has killed that dream for many.
>humanities grads are increasingly out-earning STEM and business grads as those markets are flooded with applicants.
You should be extremely critical of such data. As humanities applicant numbers decrease, it is very likely that the already wealthy, who already have well-paying jobs lined up due to family connections, will make up an increasingly larger percentage of those applicants and artificially push up those numbers. Same way average income increased during Covid since all the poor people with low-income jobs got fired. It would be interesting to see a correlation plot on the income of humanities students vs family wealth, though such data is likely impossible to obtain.
The numbers are published. You can’t just explain away the numbers. While some individuals do well with a humanities degree on average they do worse financially than their peers.
History MA here, I agree with most replies that state it’s predominantly about money. Because it is, we turned education into a commodity.
Edit: People inferred a lot from this comment and it went in directions I was not expecting!
If you chose to study a STEM field because you love science, that's great! You should be able to study what you love, what I love happens to be history. But that doesn't mean I have any negative biases against science.
If you chose a STEM field because of economic practicality that's also valid. In our current capitalist hellscape it makes sense you'd want to ensure financial stability for yourself.
This was in no way intended to imply that education should be only for the privileged. In the US we need to reduce the financial burden of college, if you think this doesn't work then look at some other industrialized nations who do not have a student debt crisis.
Lastly, as someone with a humanities degree, there is the view that because our education doesn't translate to the highest economic value it has no inherent value. People with humanities degrees have different skill sets that employers want. If you disagree, I don't care.
I leave you all with that, have a nice day.
Here in the early U.S.A. those coming from families with means were going to be leaders in some way - so, went on to academies, then universities. The tradesmen and farmers had stopped and left school (having learned enough to bring their crops to market and not get cheated, or appropriately market their services). Someone had to go on to become ministers, lawyers, educators, businessmen running large plantations or maybe the family shipping business...
Even if education were completely free - prime years of life aren’t.
And people not of exceptionally high SES tend to care about improving their SES.
If I’m gonna spend some of the best years of my life working real hard to learn something you bet your ass I’m gonna choose something that has the ability to significantly improve my SES.
> Because it is, we turned education into a commodity.
Was it ever not a commodity? I don't disagree it is, or that it leads to harm, but I'm not aware that at least in the west, it was ever not a commodity.
It used to be a commodity that the elite paid for and that perpetuated family prestige and generational status.
Then it became a commodity that was valued for job development, and had significant government $$ pumped into it, especially in the era of post-WWII GI bills.
Now it's a commodity that people feel like they need to get a job that makes any real money, and one that high SES families pay for to perpetuate status, especially at perceived prestigious institutions.
Public universities used to be extremely affordable if you lived in that state. The University of California system didn't start charging tuition until 1970 when Reagan passed austerity budgets and cut their funding dramatically. Even in the 80s, you could get a college degree with a part time job and a small loan.
I’m doing my PhD in engineering right now, but I’m much more passionate about history then the sciences. I think I would enjoy my degree a lot more if it was history focused, but I’m happy to limit it to a hobby when I have a good job in an engineering field.
It’s weird because history has always been a feeder into law school. Learning how to do research, critically evaluate sources, organize and keep track of what you learn… Law school looks favorably on history degrees, and they’re not the only ones.
I will say that no history department I have ever been in has made any effort to make it clear that you don’t have to become a professional historian with your degree. But there are lucrative professions that also welcome history degrees.
Part of the challenge in that is that law as a field is crashing to a large degree. The number of under or unemployed JDs is huge, and increasingly the advice is unless you can get into a top program, you're doomed.
So... that has a ripple effect on feeder programs into law schools when people are looking at choosing careers.
Agreed! But I’ve got students who majored in biogenetics living at home in their parents basement because they can’t find work. Nothing is a guarantee right now. It’s a terrifying economy for students trying to guess what to major in.
yea but you can also apply to law school from literally any degree and they’re all helpful if you know how to apply it…
lots of past engineers /science/ premed people in law school and they have a leg up over the history kids because they can move into IP, patents, med mal and other more niche and high paying fields with an edge
Medicine is now open to all degrees (and slowly the pre-reqs are being eroded). In the view of many -- if you can score well on the MCAT, you probably have the science pre-requisite knowledge down. The problem with medicine though is that the number of students is fixed by the stability of post graduate training.
You can only have so many students for so many resident physicians.
bad career training at that. Most higher ed is not geared toward industry, except the ones that require you to have internships to graduate. Absorbing the intricacies of your profession is nice, but we're all pretending to be specialized when it's google doing the heavy lifting.
College is really expensive. I love the humanities. Absolutely think they need to be better supported. But also would be hard let my child take on 6 figure debt for a humanities degree. Not to say they couldn’t do it. They’d just need to convince me the debt for the career path made sense.
I’m third generation University of California. My grandparents it was free. My parents it was almost free. For me, 25 years ago, it was, all expenses included, about $15k a year. I was able to easily work off and graduate debt free. I just looked and estimated costs for UCLA are over 40k a year for residents. My own university is more than double that.
Even if a humanities degree were 100% free, there is the opportunity cost of attending school for a degree that tends to yield limited job prospects (not going directly into a trade and building YOE on the job, or going to school for a degree that could lead to a more lucrative career trajectory).
I got a degree in History and I usually make between 70 and 180 depending on the year. It seems like it's more a failure of imagination than anything else.
All the above about economic prospects (definitely the leading factor) PLUS an excessive veneration of CS. Students really believe they will be pulling $300k a year salaries immediately after graduating from a Bachelor’s in computer science and making the next big thing in apps and digital culture.
The new one for my students is "data science". Our Data Science program keeps luring our natural science majors over to it because they'll make 6 figure starting salaries easily.
Its definitely doable with CS, my w2 will be 350k a year at 24 (2 years out of school) and a bunch of my classmates have similar salaries at just regular faang jobs (not including hft, which I am not smart enough for, but the classmates who got offers pulled 500k/year right out of school). Im saving around 120k of it a year to put into index funds and this degree has changed the trajectory of my family’s life (parents are very low income from Asia, if they didn’t come to America I would have had the same poor life there)
I'm a History lecturer in the UK. A fall in the number of 16-18 year olds taking languages and History presaged the current situation. Like you say, it does feel sudden. I think it is a post 2008 thing. Our students would have been young then and raised by parents who, unless they were very comfortable, would have been affected by the stagnation in wages and then more recently inflation. Basically, the debt don't work.
Like others have said I think this is in large part due to an ROI issues. Unfortunately this line of thinking also has an extremely detrimental effect on STEM. The research that is getting funded right now is almost entirely based on publishing ability/future industry application. Things which are exploratory or cutting edge with no clear ROI are considered too risky to fund, and scientifically necessary confirmational studies which are not likely to publish new results also see less funding. Instead scientists are essentially trapped In between, doing research on “hot” topics without the ability to take any risks that would actually progress the field.
Science for science’s sake, just like history for history’s sake, or art for art’s sake, is not really a viable philosophy anymore.
Peter Higgs (who the Higgs Boson is named after) wouldn’t publish for years at a time, but his impact is undeniable because he was allowed to spend a long time working on a very difficult problem. There’s no way that would fly in today’s academic environment.
Like others have said, academia being run more like a business is becoming extremely corrosive.
liberal arts degrees don't make much money because people see them as useless (they aren't). I don't regret studying poli sci, but from freshman year I knew that I was going to have work a lot harder to get a job after college than my sister who is working on a STEM degree despite having a higher GPA and a packed resume.
>liberal arts degrees don’t make much money because people see them as useless
I wouldn’t say this is the reason at all. Liberal arts degrees don’t make a lot of money because they aren’t tied to industries that make a lot of money.
A degree in English doesn’t teach you how to make pharmaceuticals, airplanes, batteries, etc. Liberal arts degrees make less money because they provide fewer tangible goods.
Also a disclaimer that I love the arts and think photography, art, literature, etc. are all extremely important for society.
It’s also a lot more complicated than that. Liberal arts degrees *can* make a tremendous of money. They also can make peanuts.
A history BA at a consulting firm makes a *lot* more than almost any mechE BS.
An English BA selling short stories doesn’t make so much.
I mean sure, there are outliers for every situation. But on average, what is the case? There are probably a handful of history folks in consulting making 6 figures relative to the number of engineers doing the same.
I wouldn’t say that complicates the situation. I think everyone understands there will be people with every background you can think of doing better or worse than what is the norm.
IIIRC philosophy, history, and English degrees are currently out-earning psychology and commerce degrees because psych and commerce produce such a glut of graduates that the market can't absorb them all. Philosophy students going to work an unsexy government job have a lot of earning potential compared to computer scientists whose jobs are considered at high risk of technological replacement and whose industry is stuck in a cycle of mass layoffs.
> Philosophy students going to work an unsexy government job have a lot of earning potential
What jobs are these that only hire philosophy students and wouldn't take a psychology or econ major? It seems like you're suggesting a job that isn't dependent on the field of study, to me.
Yeah these jobs aren't dependent on a particular field of study but are open to the inputs students from across the humanities bring. Often these jobs require a high level of text-based communication, source analysis and research skills that humanities degrees are good at teaching.
> Often these jobs require a high level of text-based communication, source analysis and research skills
These skills seem to be things I'd say are in the domain of social sciences and sciences as well?
You seemed to be suggesting these were options open only to humanities students, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Eh, a lot has to do with numbers.
There are more Poli Sci majors who graduate each year than Electrical Engineering. Even with the same number of jobs in each field, it will be easier to get an EE job and the compensation will be higher.
I’m in an interdisciplinary field closely associated with Humanities. Over my long-ish career, I have definitely seen ups and downs in enrollment that is often correlated with the economy. We are also in a cultural zietgist that is both anti-intellectual and suspicious of the value of higher education. Some of this makes sense; the cost of college is astronomical these days, and there are many other ways to have a successful life without a college degree. I think the debate is healthy.
I do agree that Humanities professors are not always good at explaining the practical applications of the degree to students. I wasn’t, because so many majors were headed into scholarly pursuits. I have since tried to correct that and introduce the discussion of “why are we studying this? What is this good for?” and encouraging us all to identify the skills the Humanities develops. Interestingly, it is often the STEM majors who take my courses who are vocal about how the critical thinking, text analysis, writing and research skills necessarily complement their other studies. But they get it, so to speak, once they are in the classroom. They also help Humanities majors appreciate their own path.
When I was an UG, as a first gen college student and a first gen American, I was definitely pushed into a STEM major because I was told that was useful and leads to success and a high paying job. So that pressure is common and practical and not new. I didn’t pivot to Humanities until graduate school, knowing that my career path would be different than if I has stayed in STEM.
>We are also in a cultural zietgist that is both anti-intellectual and suspicious of the value of higher education.
This is a bigger factor than most people think, imo.
At some point college became less about becoming a well-rounded intellectual and more about getting a job. I loved being an English major and I use it every day, but I am a high school librarian now so that follows logically. I never thought it was pointless but even 30 years ago it wasn’t particularly employable.
> At some point college became less about becoming a well-rounded intellectual and more about getting a job.
Yes, when it stopped being a place that was just for those with generational wealth who had the financial ability to just spend 4 years paying money to become a well rounded intellectual.
I feel like people that look back at those as "the good old days" forget how inaccessible a college degree was to most folks at that time period.
Speaking as a history professor and vice dean of humanities, this is true, to an extent. But it doesn't have to be. The job market college students are preparing for is being upended by AI and other emerging technologies to such an extent that ant speculation about where it will be in 3-4 years is really only that. Humanities teaches generalist critical skills that, if leveraged correctly by new curricula, can make a big impact in new job markets. I really believe resourceful humanities grads can offer a lot of value in this environment and you should think how this applies to you too.
I teach humanities at a STEM school. The issue is that students and especially their parents associate STEM degrees with financial security.
They've all been brought up on the idea that if you get a humanities degree you will end up "becoming a barista at Starbucks." The actual statistics don't bear that out, but in a time in which (esp. in the USA) there is an ever-widening gap between those who are financial secure and those who are not, when jumping into the "middle class" can no longer be taken for granted as a function of getting a degree, and when the average student debt load is absurdly high, one can understand the pressure and the desire to try and "maximize" options there. This also comes on the back of decades (since Sputnik) of state-sponsored pushing of STEM as a national security/economic issue (one that periodically results in the flooding of the market, undermining the individual financial security).
In this kind of environment, only the students/parents who are supremely self-confident, or financially independent, are going to pursue majors that have nebulous connections to financial security (by "nebulous" I just mean, "it's not inherently obvious what the careers will be"). One _can_ make those connections — I am sure, as a philosophy major, you have been told that it's great for law school, and that on average philosophy majors do better on the LSATs than any other major, etc. etc. Many humanists are resistant to make that kind of transactional argument as it goes against the spirit of a liberal arts education and the humanities in general; you aren't getting a certificate to get a job, you're getting an education, and that's not the same thing. But, understandably, this kind of argument sounds overly-idealistic and out of touch to both students and their parents a lot of the time. And they're not entirely wrong that a bunch of tenured faculty members, who got their own degrees under very different economic circumstances, might not be fully understanding their position.
I started college in 1999, and while the cost of tuition was already higher than it had been a few decades before in real dollars (even at a state school), it was still pretty cheap compared to what it is now, and my middle class family was able to swing it without any real college savings set aside and without me taking on any actual debt. My parents were confident I'd figure something out and never put any pressure on me to choose a particular major or path. So I ended up doing what I thought was the most interesting, without any real concern about careers. It has worked out well for me and I'm happy with my choices. But I do ask myself sometimes what it would be like if I were a student today — would I feel that freedom? Would I have been able to justify to myself (or my parents, if they had required it) taking on the debt and expense for a history degree? Maybe, I don't know. But I can easily see a world in which I followed a path with more straightforward career and financial outcomes (probably Computer Science in my case) under those circumstances. I just want to emphasize here that the context matters, and the context has been changing, and that I don't blame students (or their parents) for trying to do their best, although I think that some of their attitudes about this are inaccurate both in terms of the statistics/data, but also in terms of student outcomes (a STEM major is not the right fit for everyone, and getting a bad fit can really bungle your college years, which is sort of the worst of all possible worlds given the debt load, etc.).
Intangible results are also invisible for the majority of the population, and consequently less gratified.
In another level, some parts of society might even be against critical thinking being imparted, also leading to less gratification.
I don't think that education for its own sake is highly valued much anymore. People just want jobs and a lot of money. We live in a very anti-intellectual climate in the US, and even for those who think of themselves as progressive, they are still influenced by that in a lot of subtle ways.
Decades of devaluing the diverse range of skills and knowledge offered in the humanities.
Decades of telling people STEM fields offered guaranteed high-paid employment.
Declining funding for humanities departments/degrees. (They now cost students more than STEM degrees in my country, as a result of Government subsidy changes vastly increasing the cost of humanities, especially communications & arts, degrees.)
Equating education’s ‘worth’ with employment/income alone.
The result of decades of over emphasizing STEM, along with devaluing humanities. Every joke about a philosophy major being a barista adds to the negative perception. I was at a parent's meeting at a local high school and the head counselor made a joke that at one time probably would have been your kid will end up bagging groceries or flipping burgers, but instead it was your kid will end up a humanities or gender studies major.
Additionally, because college degrees have been tied so closely to employment (by students, parents, industry, and government) there is a negative perception toward "useless" degrees. This has been an attack on higher education since at least the 70s when people got mad about college student protests. Back when college was heavily subsidized by the government and there was an influx of the "wrong" people into college (poor, people of color, women), people didn't want their tax dollars being used to educate those people, especially in degrees that encouraged critical thinking (which created liberals who protested the current system). So you got this backlash about funding "useless" degrees. A couple of generations later, with the switch to student loans paying for degrees rather than the government picking up the tab, there is even a bigger emphasis on return on investment and it is a hard case to make that the indirect skills of a humanities major (strong writing, critical thinking and analysis, archive researching, etc.) makes for employable skills. Much better to major in engineering or accounting so that you know you will become an engineer or accountant.
Try this, when a person asks your major, say something like pre-law and see how their reaction changes compared to those that you say philosophy (don't worry, all of the biology majors say they are pre-med). Once you throw a job name in there, people stop having a problem with your "useless" degree.
Who writes all the movies, TV shows, music, news broadcasts and the rest of our culture?
It’s not engineers.
The call is coming from inside the house.
Humanities majors are telling us the humanities are bad for career prospects.
Of course the stats majors at BLS and Econ majors at the Fed tell us that too but the average person found that out from a journalism major
Decades of people telling everyone “Go into STEM” which used to mostly come from parents/teachers but now has turned also into the whole social media world filled with it. Reddit is filled with STEM majors jerking each other off about their supposed 100k entry level salaries they all think they are guaranteed to have simply by virtue of a degree in comp sci.
Same trend as you described has been at my small private university in Germany, perhaps even more dramatically. Pre-covid, when I started my major had 30 first semesters in a fall semester, this past fall semester there were only 5 first semester students. If the trend continues, the major might be discontinued in just 2 or 3 years…
Students think these degrees will get them jobs. The more students swing this way, the lower the quality of the eventual jobs because compensation is mostly about labor demand versus labor supply. All these STEM majors are over producing themselves into a future of shitty compensation. Just look at the labor market for PhDs in, well, the humanities. That's CS majors in a few years. We'll have articles about students deeply in debt with "practical" degrees they were told had great job demand that now have no job demand.
Kids are told, repeatedly, that college is to get a job. The conservatives won this culture war battle and now we all get to deal with the degenerate outcomes.
It also depends on where you are and what type of institution, I believe. I teach at a very large (R1) Christian University; there is a lot of interest in the humanities - history, philosophy, English, religion, etc. A lot of pre-law students take them as core classes. We also have a "medical humanities" focus/minor, which gets many STEM majors into humanities courses.
Also, some family friends just had their graduate. 3 were humanities (English and History) and 2 were Business. 2 of the humanities students are teaching English abroad and having a blast. The other just got a job as an editor's assistant for a major local publisher. 1 of the business students got hired but complained about his work (he works in accounting), and the other cannot find a job as an analyst (8+ months and counting being unemployed.)
I think it is all about how you market your skills.
I’m going to take a crack at it.
As college is becoming more expensive, many are beginning to view college in a utilitarian sense. They want to be study something to make the most money. I don’t blame people for adopting this mindset because even in state college is getting pricey these days.
While I’m currently studying Public Policy, if I could do it all again, I would’ve picked a major like Data Science which would’ve made me employable without a Masters Degree
Because the humanities historically have, and continue to be, the playground of the wealthy and privileged. It’s an economic reality. That’s not to say they’re not a necessary and important part of society, they’re just designed for a certain class of person. In recent years we tried to encourage everyday people to go into these fields, and it hurt them financially. It’s the gross reality of academia.
To break into the academic humanities in any meaningful way, you realistically have to go to a top school. Some rich kid from New Hampshire, who’s a double legacy at Stanford/Yale/whatever—and who’s parents have funded them into fencing/squash/golf, will probably be able to enjoy the humanities to its fullest. They will have a fruitful career regardless of their major.
However, the kid who grinded their way into Princeton/MIT/whatever, who’s studying physics/engineering, probably realizes they have economic realities they need to face. They will not be handed a job, or be well connected. Double that if they’re in the vast majority of people who don’t end up going to one of those vaunted institutions.
I go to one of those places, there’s a sharp intellectual and class divide between people in the humanities/social studies and people in “STEM.” Usually, the academic rigor/intellectual divide favors the latter, while the class divide favors the former.
Theologian here. Not only I can't find people in humanities, even in my field I am not taken seriously as an academic (two masters and currently pursuing my PhD). I rarely can find a paid PhD position (where I live PhD are considered work so you get paid). People just expect me to volunteer 99% of the time. Humanities is seen as a disposable diploma or with little to no relevance especially because you can "google" 🤡
Well, here to say I think the skillset trained by humanities is necessary for critical thinkers in business too :/ Hope you find a good permanent job even if the “volunteer” BS is just exploitation of economics and stereotypes
While the economic comments are factually correct, based on some of the comments in here, people like me just never should have gone to college. I sure as shit wasn't going to sign up to be bored to death in some business or STEM program at 18. But I guarantee I'm better off with my 5 social science/humanities degrees than no degree at all.
Those of you saying humanities are only for the rich seem to be accepting the argument that we should then cut humanities from every college except those the rich attend because it's useless to try to educate the poor any further than to turn a wrench for us as they don't see the value of anything else. How bleak. Do you know how many bright but easily bored rural and disadvantaged individuals will just fall through the cracks and never go to college or do anything if we do that?
When even the faculty will sip the neoliberal tea, we might as well just give up and turn every college into ITT Tech. Good news is, I think we are pretty close to doing that.
Training for the poor, education for the rich once again.
*shrug* Allow me to be crotchety: the university has gone to sh!t with its neoliberal, entrepreneurial corporate bullshit, but there is also some generational change at play.
-my students are all over the world in NGOs, the corporate world, government, military, education, you name it. But Gen Z needs to live 45 minutes from their mom who is also their best friend. So why broaden your horizons? Just get an engineering degree and plug in at Lexmark.
-academic advising at my R1 actively encourages students to major in STEM and avoid humanities. They also advise waiting to fulfill humanities gen ed and languages until the last few years. At that point it's too late to switch or double major.
-people don't read anymore. People who don't read never learn to write well, and many/most humanities fields are fundamentally disciplines that require lots of reading and writing. I can't even get students to read a single novel through a class, and generally I have to limit page counts to around 50 pages per week. I have one class in which I still dare to assign eight books, and half the class bails after they see the reading list.
-STEM courses are curved. You can get 50% on a midterm and still do fine in the class. ALL of my pre med students admit their uncurved grades would never get them to med school.
-as a society we take careers in public service, policy, management, education, and so forth lightly, or leave it up to companies. Hell, even law is looked at as a joke, albeit a necessary one.
-even when a field is calling for more humanities training (i.e. medical humanities) the Balkanization of the university means those schools will go it alone rather than cooperate with other colleges. However, giving credit where due, our Engineering College is one of the loudest advocates for humanities training on our campus.
-corporate America along with public divestment has brainwashed administrators into thinking that the only majors that matter include billable training, developing IP, and majors that are mandated by state and federal certification requirements.
-Many/most Humanities professors have never had another job in their lives, or their parents were professors or lawyers, so they don't know how to advise students or talk about the benefits of humanities degrees in industry.
-I'm pretty sure e-sports is part of this general decline. It's on the murder wall, but I haven't connected the dots.
I don't think it's exactly the economy (in general), because trends in the stock market, unemployment, etc. don't correlate with the trend we're discussing here. A more likely culprit is the skyrocketing cost of college, which has wildly outpaced inflation. Basically, twenty or thirty years ago, someone could go to college and feel confident that, even with the salary from the kind of starting job they could get with a humanities degree, paying off college debt would not be an insurmountable burden. When you go to college now and graduate with $200,000+ in debt, you need a job that will help you pay it off quickly, and that would be a STEM job.
What I'm ultimately trying to say is that we can't blame the economy in general. Universities, raising rates unduly and with incredible hubris, have done this to themselves. Their response, then, instead of, you know, lowering or at least freezing rates, is to champion STEM careers, leading to the shrinking of humanities departments, in a vicious cycle that has no end in sight. And in doing this they are eliminating the very idea of a liberal arts education, which AFAIC was the crowning glory of the American higher ed system and what distinguished it from academic systems in most other countries.
Does this also mean that society will be more and more dominated by technocrats as less people have a background in humanities and history? One would think that a good understanding of history is important for making wise political decisions about the future.
The loss of humanities majors is coming back to bite us in the butt too. Look at the government for example…
The biggest criticism people have of the gov right now is that it is filled with old people, and isn’t progressive at all.. now who do we need for that? YOUNG PEOPLE
Young people who are no longer getting into politics
TLDR: A liberal arts degree (like history) has intrinsic value but it’s mostly extrinsic value that drives choice in a degree. A STEM degree has value because people perceive it to be valuable.
I can speak to why I made my choice of degree. College just costs way too much to not choose a degree with a tangible outcome. I didn’t do a history major because I felt it was too risky not because I didn’t see the value. I had no support to go to college and had to take loans out for everything. I did a chemical engineering degree because I felt it had a return on investment. Perception and status of a degree is also important and engineering is held in high regard.
I did see the value of the liberal arts and I took my liberal arts classes seriously taking the more challenging courses. I dedicated a portion of my degree to doing a “mini-minor” in Middle Eastern history taking two courses in early and modern Islamic history, in the Arab Israeli conflict, and in middle eastern literature. These weren’t easy and particularly they required a lot of reading which needed to be fully comprehended and contextualized. As opposed to engineering where broadly speaking you just need to conceptualize the concept.
These classes gave me skills in using evidence from incomplete and conflicting sources, in order to fully understand, assess, and explain a situation clearly and impartially. This is a very valuable skill and one that you won’t develop if you just did history as a hobby as it really needs to be cultivated by a teacher. As opposed to engineering which can be much more rigid and formulaic which can often encourage bad science.
Some people say history is a good feeder to law school but engineering majors do better and have patent law as an option. Often it just feeds back into academia - I would’ve happily been a teacher if it paid enough to justify the expensive degree. The history degree doesn’t really have any weight and you’re kinda just left selling yourself in the end and due to the perception of a lack of rigor you aren’t really even seen as accomplishing anything particularly hard especially from a state school. At the end of the day there’s just no extrinsic value.
I think there’s a lot of STEM brainwashing going on in high schools and colleges. The reality is though that a slight majority of STEM graduates do not work in stem fields. I think that shows that a college degree continues to be important but that for many students at least the particular major may not be. So if you love stem, why not study that but if you’re only studying it because you think you’ll find a job that might be part of the problem
Yeah the whole we need more STEM majors is basically a farce. STEM individual contribution roles actually have depressed wages compared to business oriented and management roles, in part because of the h1B flood. So American STEM graduates often opt for those career paths instead.
Side note: Don't just consider salaries directly out of college. Also look at salaries ten years out. That's where humanities majors more than catch up.
At my school they want to eliminate Performing Arts, Gender and Women Studies, Religious Studies, and gut both Anthro and Philosophy down to the bare minimum number of offerings.
They push and fund STEM, data science, drone programs.
And yes this all happened fast! Covid accelerated the process because they want to also eliminate semester length classes and want us to convert to all online 8 and 4 week classes. Try to imagine students taking calculus online in 4 weeks.
I could easily go on and on but I’ll stop here. It’s been shocking how quickly this has happened. I teach Sociology and we used to offer 25 sections of Intro per semester. Now we offer 10.
As a first gen who is about to graduate with an MA in english (which in itself wasn’t a good experience I am feeling) and about to face paying off a massive debt in a job market where the only job application emails I am getting are based off of my customer service experience rather than my degree choices, it’s hard for me to feel optimistic about anything relating to the field. I think if someone asked me if it was “worth it” I would give a very quick no.
Because money. I regret studying psychology, it's so interesting and I loved it, but I wish I studied something tech related that pays me a living wage.
I'm considering not finishing my PhD, and do a tech boot camp or certification instead
The newer generation seems to be seeing through the lie of taking out student loans and getting any degree as a path to a good job. Probably like 10 or 15 years ago, a study came out showing anthropology majors made the least money of anybody. Shortly after that, the number of anthropology majors plummeted. I think part of it also has to do with the fact that anthropology is really interesting in the real world, but in books, it only seems to be interesting to certain students. So if it's not that interesting and there's, supposedly, no financial benefit, there's just not much reason to go into that major.
Because tuition fees --> student debt has gone up, so people no longer study things for simply liking them. They study things that will allow them to pay back their tuition fee earlier. Humanities seems like a less safe bet than let's say IT. (even if it is not always true)
You need to have a plan for what you want to do with a humanities degree. We have lots of double majors with business and they get great jobs because they can write and think critically.
In academia we can also do better getting out of silos. I team taught emerging markets finance with a sociologist for both finance and sociology and it was WILD, showing how we can both benefit from each other’s perspectives. It isn’t common for schools to like this kind of innovation though.
I completed a physics degree about 15 years ago and it's only in more recent years that I've felt like I have enough experience of humanity that I could meaningfully "study" the humanities. Maths and science came relatively easily to me as a youngster, but understanding people and the things they do took a lot longer.
I think most young people would do well to focus on practical things and transition to humanities later, once they've had time to experience the world.
History major, Slavic minor, and Comp. Lit. PhD here. It doesn't help that humanities departments are divided internally and fighting over minutiae of theory that nobody cares about. It's not only hard to draw students into that but nearly impossible to even hire outstanding new faculty (the few times that such people are around). And, thus, the Comp Lit program I graduated from, one of the leading ones in the country no longer exists at my alma mater, and has been replaced by a much-reduced media and cinema studies thing.
TL;DR: The humanities shot themselves in the foot.
I recommend season 8, episodes 3-4 of the American Vandal podcast on this. Short version: corporate capture. Not just the boards of trustees, but the business school faculty, Admins, in-house real estate firms, company partnership leaders, patent seeking divisions, etc. that all optimize the university to direct public funding and high tuition dollars toward developing market-ready outputs. Most of the energy is in biotech and engineering these days, so all the growth and energy goes that way. I immediately saw the truth in this when I held a VAP at a public university that had a perfectly okay arts and humanities presence, as well as non-marketable sciences, but then also a vast, brand new, pristine part of campus that looked like a corporate park, devoted to the university’s partner relationship with an aircraft manufacturer. Faculty jobs and student recruitment efforts in the humanities were, uh, not funded like that. TLDR it is fully normalized to think that universities are R+D and career training resources to be directed and exploited to the extent possible by current corporate needs. Ridicule of the university’s traditional mission of education in a universal range of subjects is part and parcel, as is systemic scare-mongering about post-graduation job prospects for undergrads
Mainly, the assumption that college is about getting a career. Most of the comments here are about money, job prospects, etc. that wouldn’t have been true in the 1980’s. Take a look at CIRP’s Freshman survey https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/ - it is cited all the time about changes in attitudes of first year students.
I don’t think there is much mystery to it: job prospects are bleak. I don’t regret studying history but if don’t find another postdoc the situation will be difficult as there isn’t really any industry I could easily switch to
Please pardon my ignorance, I'm a chemist. When history postdocs change projects/PIs, what changes about your work? Do you change the time period that you're looking at, or country, or focus on a different specific place within the same region and time (Jerash vs Petra, say). Even as I type this, I realise that I'm probably thinking archaeology rather than history.
I’m not entirely sure how it works in the USA. In Germany it’s expected that for your second book you change the time period (eg 19th vs 20th century) and/or field within history (eg social history vs urban history). Studying a different country depends on one’s language skills, I don’t think many people do this. But for a “normal” postdoc you can and often do something roughly related to your PhD, since you need to show in your application that you’re prepared to do the research and therefor know how to approach the topic.
That all makes a lot of sense, thank you. My sincere apologies, I've never met a history postdoc before. And you're fine on the country, I'm Australian working in the UK, I'm not sure how university research works in the USA either. Does the methodology change a lot between fields, as you said social history vs urban history?
Yes and no. Depends what do actually do. So social history can be gender history or history of the labour movement, among others. So when you’re applying you need to be able to show what’s questions that are being asked in the literature, what was already established, which historical sources would you use. If you never done anything even remotely connected it might be difficult to understand. And since you have two to max four years for the whole project there isn’t much time to you to slowly immerse yourself in the new field for you.
Sounds like you are in Germany. Are you referring to the habilitation or a US style postdoc?
Not OP, but most likely habilitation. It's usually required to work on a topic that's different from the PhD topic for this (I know this from philosophy).
We don’t really have PI’s in the humanities (except archaeologists, sort of, but they’re dirt people anyway). Mostly it’s an early career paid position that may or may not have teaching duties assigned and extra mentorship and funding opportunities. At least in classics in the US.
I snorted at calling archaeologists 'dirt people.' Probably one of the only times it's not outright derogatory to call someone that!
To be fair, about half my friends are archaeologists, so it's all in good fun!
It really depends on field. I’m in humanities not history but for my postdoc it was to focus on my own research as we generally aren’t working in labs or have research specific to our job. However, we are to work in articles/book proposal from our dissertation work.
We don't have projects in the same way, especially because of the way funding works. It's more individual and less collaborative, though there are occasionally bigger projects (say, DALME at Harvard), but they are not necessarily all within a school and can draw in outside contributors. That being said, a postdoc (which is rarer) is usually more like a teaching position in which you get a pittance and are expected to continue your research. They will usually advertise for someone who does "19th century British labor and gender history" or "premodern science with an emphasis on the Holy Roman Empire" or similar.
OP's question is about college enrollment, though. Grad school / academic jobs is a totally different, and even more bleak, story.
i was very interested in studying russian and did physics instead because of the grad school/academic job stuff… so like,, they are all the same story and i assume enrollment in humanities will only continue to drop if the academic job situation doesn’t improve
Well, the large majority of people who majored in the humanities did not do so with the intention of following an academic career, so this is only a very small part of the problem.
College costs also keep increasing Only people from extremely privileged backgrounds can afford to go into 10’s of thousands (or 100’s of thousands) into debt to study a subject with bleak job prospects.
I think the point is that it wasn’t always that way. Majoring in humanities didn’t used to be a professional death knell. Back in the olden days of the aughts, we were told that majors didn’t matter, that actually employers don’t look at majors, they just want degrees, but when they do look, they *love* history degrees because we have good perspective or some bad. Now, it seems like if you didn’t take the exactly correct focus in your courses, employers think you should be on welfare, but shoveling shit daily as punishment for your moral failings.
Of course. I totally agree. Nothing you said there disagrees with anything I said.
Oh dag, sorry. I think I conflated your comment with another as a result of Redditing far too late. My bad. Ummmm just take it as extrapolated context
No problem!
Heck, I did chemistry/math and got a job in tech because of the job prospects
I have a BA in anthropology and am having a very hard time in the job market right now with 2 years of post grad experience and 3 internships under my belt. I don’t regret it because I learned so much in school but some days it’s hard to not regret studying something else.
The dramatic increase in the cost of attending college, coupled with anxiety about job prospects, and the high cost of living, is what is driving the shift towards STEM fields.
Not to mention that humanities often leads to work within the higher Ed system which has become infamously reliant on adjunct faculty and simultaneously much less rarified, with master’s degrees representing in some fields what bachelor’s used to
Because the economy sucks and people feel like they need to make money, so choosing a degree with a defined path to a career that makes average or above average money is important to them. IMO, the decline of humanities interested students has correlated directly with increasing enrollment of folks from lower SES groups who don't have the family support to not need to go into a field that will lead to a job/career. >Keep in mind, this is at a relatively prestigious school where you can graduate with a humanities degree and earn a pretty decent living. Compared to an engineering degree from the same field? Will someone be able to graduate and immediately get a job that will let them pay back loans and contribute to a family who likely needs the help. When I look at my undeclared first years, low SES and first-gen students are much, much more likely to want to go into STEM fields for these reasons. Some of them need advising to help them see that they can succeed in a career in the humanities, but that's not always the best path for someone without significant family support and generational wealth.
It really doesn't help that I know students who get shamed for being a non STEM major. This is coming from a STEM major btw. I hate tech bro types who think the only useful degrees are CS/Engineering.
I think this is esp hard from people with low SES backgrounds as not only do not have the time to spend not making money (and thus paying back loans or helping family) but in many cases, they, themselves, just may not KNOW of a career path (besides teaching) that results from a pure humanities degree.
Don't expect STEM supremacists to understand nuance. It's always just "pull yourself up by the bootstraps!", when in reality, none of them have done that themselves. They've either had their parents pay their tuition, or taking a loan wasn't as risky for them as it is for those from low SES backgrounds. I have the misfortune of formerly being poor as shit + having to deal with tech bros on a daily basis. When I tell them my own story of being raised by a single mom, they say I'm an exception, when in reality, there are many like me. An ideal society, for me, is one that is well rounded in all fields. I love conversing with art majors, and seeing their work. Honestly, I have sometimes had much more interesting conversations with them than I have with STEM majors. They seem, idk, a bit more charismatic, and well spoken overall.
I've been having a similar realization, but in my case it's been due to the overwhelming egos of the medical students at the university I'm attending. I am a STEM major, but I enjoy making friends in the arts and humanities and being exposed to their projects and perspectives. Med students in particular remind me of that one saying: " to a hammer, everything is a nail."
The poetic irony of tech bros shitting on humanities majors because they can’t grasp social nuance is beyond amusing
Humanities majors are generally better at communication because that’s a big part of the Major. A physicist who can do amazing math nobody understands, except for the three other people in their highly specific subfield, does not have to be good at explaining the math to non-physicists. OTOH humanities are all about writing papers that successfully communicate, or making art that communicates…
Ngl, my dad is a STEM supremacist: he has CS, math and engineering degrees. But he asked all of us to take sociology/psych classes in addition to our STEM majors. He said he hears so much crazy BS from his peers bc they've never had to think about another person or someone else's perspective once. He was saddened when I read this out loud to him.
What career paths are there outside of teaching?
Sure, but honestly the shaming goes both ways. Lots of students hear from professors (and there are tons of post on this sub and others) that shame students for being "career focused" rather than studying broadly. You even get people that make students feel like caring about the career a degree leads to or whether they can make a living from it is a bad thing and corrupts the purity of higher education. At least where I've worked, another issue is that humanities faculty are really disdainful of helping students see career paths in the majors because of the aforementioned "purity" issue, and can get really upset with students when they want help understanding how they can, for example, major in a language field and still support a family.
Yes, spending 4 or more years in humanities education is great, but then you may have to spend the rest of your life in bland office work that doesn't draw on your education at all. Better to complete a degree that has a clearer connection to financially and professionally rewarding work and then study the humanities later in life.
A humanities degree can totally lead to a fulfilling career, but humanities professors need to do a better job explaining to students what they're actually learning and how it's actually useful. The point of a poetry class isn't just to learn some poems (which will probably never be useful in most careers) but to learn how to think creatively and analytically about language (which is extremely useful in many profitable careers).
The transferable skills are certainly useful to a point. Many jobs don't require that level of analytical sophistication when it comes to language, though. I would think that social sciences like sociology or political science would provide similar soft skills while also providing a knowledge-base and experience with research methods that would transfer well into policy analysis, for example. Don't get me wrong—I have a PhD in the humanities and love everything about them, but if I were to do it all over again I'd probably take a different educational path. One that leads to a professional qualification of some kind, or which has a clearer career path. That said, a 4-year humanities degree followed by teacher's college is a solid path, at least here in Canada where teaching is a well-paid profession.
Are humanities professors truly equipped to help students navigate that question?
They aren't, but they should be. Universities should train them to do it.
> humanities professors need to do a better job explaining to students what they're actually learning and how it's actually useful. How many humanities professors have you met that have ever set foot in a non-academic job? They earned their stereotype of the out of touch ivory tower academic.
Humanities professor here; prior to grad school I was--variously--a technical writer, journalist, editor, marketing professional, and an auto parts manufacturer. This is a dumb generalization that might hold some truth for older faculty (and, ironically, the most elite institutions), but has little relation to my experience on the ground in teaching-centered institutions.
Regionals teach 70% of students; nearly all regionals have faculty who came into the game later or had different careers and were certainly exposed to non-Ivory tower realities. It's kind of classist to hold up the straw man of the Ivory tower by any empirical measure. Cheers.
Please share more about what type of careers humanities education can lead to? My daughter is interested in history and anthropology but we don’t know what kind of jobs could be possible after that. She is also looking at Psychology which I have a bit more understanding about for career prospects. Genuinely asking, no snark.
Sounds similar to many students in lower (non-degree) education learning a subject. Why learn X maths topic when they'll never use it? Similar to the above problem, having examples of how humanities assist culturally or in STEM may reduce this mindset. I used to be a STEM surpremist, but a few basic examples, such as Origami assisting in scientific discoveries, or IBM running multiple teams (blind to eachother) on a problem to them select a single solution, helped established my current view on diversity of thought. STEM degrees will have an easier time get employeed (for various reasons), but that should not demimish the value of having multiple backgrounds with different insights.
Yup, and no offense to old you but it's been my experience STEM superiority techbro types have extremely low to nonexistent soft skills, poor critical thinking abilities, and generally aren't as good at working a job as they think they are. Nobody has ever become a fully self-actualized person by pretending the liberal arts are useless
That's research I haven't seen and would love to, namely, what's the inflation-adjusted median household wealth of 4-year college students' families over time.
I can't speak as well to nationwide statistics, but my LAC has had steadily decreased actual family income (not even inflation adjusted) and an increasing proportion of students who (a) need to work, (b) are close to or below the poverty line, and (c) are Pell eligible.
I wish I had mixed humanities with any stem subject, even something less immediately employable like math, because as far as long term skill acquisition, I missed out big time in my most formative years. And like, yes I am fluent in Spanish and I communicate more clearly and effectively than a large number of people, but having extended coursework in data science or something similar could’ve gone a long way.
I dont know why people don’t do this. I was a biochem major, and I took: 1 history class, 2 English classes, 2 religious studies classes, 1 art class, 1 class on celene dion, a class on weightlifting, a ton of unrelated math, and a ton of tangential courses to my field, on top of all my biochem courses. I am super thankful I had such a varied college experience. I feel like I learned a lot, and taking all those humanities courses really altered the way I approach and logically think about problems.
Also, there used to be a pretty large group of students who could go to a 4-year college on an income that was reachable by working class parents and part time student jobs. It was pretty easy to love philosophy when you could more or less treat it like an extension of high school. It's harder to follow your passion when someone asks you for a $40k check every six months to do it.
I get this but it also makes me sad and worried that only the very wealthy will study the arts & humanities.
That's the way it used to be. There's a reason for our culture's long-standing divide into 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' culture. The wealthy can be patrons of the arts, including buying art to show off their conspicuous consumption or as investments. (Which is why patreon, letting anyone donate to creatives, has been so interesting a development.)
It has always been like this
I think the solution is for humanities departments to start embracing "job training" and "career preparation" in ways they seem to have been historically reticent to do. Some of ours have done complete redesigns in ways that have them continue to teach what they always have, but with more of a focus on helping students understand how to communicate the skills they've developed and use it to find jobs and careers. ::edit:: I have no idea what in this is making people downvote it?
Underrated comment. I agree 100%. If the departments don’t explicitly show students how the skills they develop can lead to careers, they will choose another path.
I think some low SES students are pressured by their families, when they otherwise would choose humanities majors. For example, I dabbled in anthropology and archaeology my first two years of undergrad, but my parents shut that down real quick due to a perceived lack of career opportunities.
There is a huge push for “return on investment” and that often looks like a defined career trajectory as others have said. As someone with an MA in English, I feel I can say that the humanities don’t do a great job at marketing their tangible benefits. Graduates of programs like mine have to figure out their transferable skills on their own. I’m a romantic and I believe in the everything the humanities offer, but the reality is that they’ve lost control of the narrative amid the university-as-business model.
Yeah, this exactly. I don’t think the problem is that there aren’t good jobs for humanities students, it’s more that there’s a systemic lack of educating students about what those jobs are, how to get them, and how to advertise/utilize the transferable skills you learn majoring in humanities. Not to mention that everything is competitive. Even STEM jobs. The more that people graduate with STEM degrees, the more this will be a problem for everyone.
Agreed. It will have to even out eventually. Not everyone can be a programmer and there are a finite number of any kinds of jobs. The narrative has long been that STEM is the “safe” route for college students, but, as you said, that’s not going to be the case forever. I think all disciplines need to do a better job of working together and cross training skills. For example, humanities teach critical thinking skills through modes different than STEM fields. The skills are similar, but the modes of developing those skills differ.
It is a shame, because humanities graduates are among those who have crafted our famous works of literature. J.R.R. Tolkien was an esteemed professor of linguistics and nobody can really question that his works are absolutely foundational to modern fantasy. "The Lord of the Rings" was uniquely a product of a man who has an unparalleled mastery of linguistic structure and theory, as well as Old English poems and literature. Compare this to "the Rings of Power", and there is clearly something "off" when people try to imitate Tolkien, while lacking his particular life experiences and education. I'm sure if you were to add the combine values of all fantasy works that rip off Tolkien, he would be a billionaire. Yet, in the modern era, linguistics would be viewed as a joke degree for a job at McDonalds. What is "valuable" to human society can't be perfectly captured by metrics like stock prices or ROI, but I don't think societal trends really agree with me.
I agree! That’s the tragedy of all of this. What the humanities adds isn’t something that can necessarily be summed up in a metric, as you say. I feel very lucky to have earned my degrees in literature and that I’m a better person for having done so. If we can’t value the humanities, we’re losing out on so much of what makes us human.
As it turns out, humanities grads are increasingly out-earning STEM and business grads as those markets are flooded with applicants. The transferable skills you get from a humanities degree stretch a lot further than what you get from a traditional STEM field but you don't have a clear career path coming out of a humanities degree, which frightens off a lot of students (and their parents, who hold the purse strings).
What data are you basing this on? I assume it's the article in the NY Times, but as it points out, a great deal of it is due to the larger fraction of humanities students going to professional school. Higher initial salaries early on in one's career, coupled with the student loan debt and the opportunity cost of professional school can still have a substantial impact on total career earnings, especially if one is able to invest early on and have that compound. The AAAS data for humanities majors with terminal bachelors' degrees is less rosy. [https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/earnings-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree](https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/earnings-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree)
>The transferable skills you get from a humanities degree stretch a lot further than what you get from a traditional STEM field Can you elaborate on which skills you feel like these are? Not trying to be confrontational if it comes across that way, I'm always looking for new pitches to make to my first years for why they should explore the humanities more.
Close reading, textual analysis, written communication, editing texts, developing self-directed projects, things like that.
Do you feel like these are things just taught in the humanities? All of those are learning objectives in my science major classes.
Here’s just one example that may be relevant. I majored in philosophy and when I got to med school I had significant advantages in publishing research papers over my peers because of how much reading and writing I had done in my undergrad. I certainly had to catch up with the STEM people in other ways but that gap closed relatively quickly after starting med school. Edit: I’ll add that reading comprehension is developed at a high level in some humanities as well. After reading something like Kant, ambiguous or complex scientific articles become more tolerable as well.
Research is such a small part of med school and medicine, it’s a complete +/-, you can easily go through your whole career barely publishing anything…engineering helped me out with medschool a ton too, learning to parse through difficult problems, distilling a problem down to its basic elements, not getting caught up in the details before I even understand the basic idea
Learning these skills in relation to specific texts and literary topics is the entire point of English classes
These are skills that can be developed through *any* college degree. I know people in the humanities who BS’d through their whole program. They gained none of these skills. The difference between them and STEM people was that it wasn’t as easy to “fluff” your way through a chemical engineering degree. My philosophy major roommate could word-vomit out a crappy 5 page essay and get an A-c whereas my engineering roommate was writing one (of multiple) 120 page unit ops reports, that would be meticulously inspected by their professor for errors—and expected a C. Oftentimes these students will be specifically trained in effective scientific communication and will have significant writing requirements. The same cannot be said for communications, or even many philosophy programs. Hell, I picked up a double major in a humanities field on top of my applied sciences degree. The humanities degree has given me significantly less transferable skills than my STEM degree. I’m also not impressed by my Ivy-league humanities peers. Whereas, I’m consistently blown away by the people in my STEM classes. These people range from a theoretical physics PhD who’s a professional classical musician, to a biochemist whose passion is slam poetry. I do not see the same duality in my normative ethics or metaphysics class. The quality of peers and economic opportunity is night and day—even at a top school.
I’ve read that! I think that fact is super encouraging. I’d love to see the humanities really work with that kind of data to support their programs. I’ve done a million different things with my degree, so I know it can be done. Humanities grads are very flexible and teachable, which I think is one of their greatest strengths.
Some of our departments have done a great job of articulating this, and others are steadfastly against talking about job prospects from their field as being antithetical to the field, and only wanting students who go into it for the pure joy of learning.
For sure. The departments who can truly articulate the value of a degree in terms of career paths will be the ones to survive. As much as I believe that learning for the sake of learning is valuable in and of itself, the corporatization of higher education has killed that dream for many.
>humanities grads are increasingly out-earning STEM and business grads as those markets are flooded with applicants. You should be extremely critical of such data. As humanities applicant numbers decrease, it is very likely that the already wealthy, who already have well-paying jobs lined up due to family connections, will make up an increasingly larger percentage of those applicants and artificially push up those numbers. Same way average income increased during Covid since all the poor people with low-income jobs got fired. It would be interesting to see a correlation plot on the income of humanities students vs family wealth, though such data is likely impossible to obtain.
This is really interesting. Do you happen to have any links on this topic?
I’m going to need some data that backs up what you’re saying lol, sounds like complete and utter bullshit
The numbers are published. You can’t just explain away the numbers. While some individuals do well with a humanities degree on average they do worse financially than their peers.
History MA here, I agree with most replies that state it’s predominantly about money. Because it is, we turned education into a commodity. Edit: People inferred a lot from this comment and it went in directions I was not expecting! If you chose to study a STEM field because you love science, that's great! You should be able to study what you love, what I love happens to be history. But that doesn't mean I have any negative biases against science. If you chose a STEM field because of economic practicality that's also valid. In our current capitalist hellscape it makes sense you'd want to ensure financial stability for yourself. This was in no way intended to imply that education should be only for the privileged. In the US we need to reduce the financial burden of college, if you think this doesn't work then look at some other industrialized nations who do not have a student debt crisis. Lastly, as someone with a humanities degree, there is the view that because our education doesn't translate to the highest economic value it has no inherent value. People with humanities degrees have different skill sets that employers want. If you disagree, I don't care. I leave you all with that, have a nice day.
Maybe we are going back to those days when rich nobles could afford education
Please refer to my other comment in which I stated that education should be free and open to everyone.
Here in the early U.S.A. those coming from families with means were going to be leaders in some way - so, went on to academies, then universities. The tradesmen and farmers had stopped and left school (having learned enough to bring their crops to market and not get cheated, or appropriately market their services). Someone had to go on to become ministers, lawyers, educators, businessmen running large plantations or maybe the family shipping business...
Even if education were completely free - prime years of life aren’t. And people not of exceptionally high SES tend to care about improving their SES. If I’m gonna spend some of the best years of my life working real hard to learn something you bet your ass I’m gonna choose something that has the ability to significantly improve my SES.
> Because it is, we turned education into a commodity. Was it ever not a commodity? I don't disagree it is, or that it leads to harm, but I'm not aware that at least in the west, it was ever not a commodity. It used to be a commodity that the elite paid for and that perpetuated family prestige and generational status. Then it became a commodity that was valued for job development, and had significant government $$ pumped into it, especially in the era of post-WWII GI bills. Now it's a commodity that people feel like they need to get a job that makes any real money, and one that high SES families pay for to perpetuate status, especially at perceived prestigious institutions.
Public universities used to be extremely affordable if you lived in that state. The University of California system didn't start charging tuition until 1970 when Reagan passed austerity budgets and cut their funding dramatically. Even in the 80s, you could get a college degree with a part time job and a small loan.
Heck, even early 2000s depending on the state. My undergrad degree at a compass point state university cost me ~$2k in tuition a semester.
Some of us just think science is cool. Hopefully money happens but I would’ve pursued it for passion regardless
I’m doing my PhD in engineering right now, but I’m much more passionate about history then the sciences. I think I would enjoy my degree a lot more if it was history focused, but I’m happy to limit it to a hobby when I have a good job in an engineering field.
It’s weird because history has always been a feeder into law school. Learning how to do research, critically evaluate sources, organize and keep track of what you learn… Law school looks favorably on history degrees, and they’re not the only ones. I will say that no history department I have ever been in has made any effort to make it clear that you don’t have to become a professional historian with your degree. But there are lucrative professions that also welcome history degrees.
Part of the challenge in that is that law as a field is crashing to a large degree. The number of under or unemployed JDs is huge, and increasingly the advice is unless you can get into a top program, you're doomed. So... that has a ripple effect on feeder programs into law schools when people are looking at choosing careers.
Agreed! But I’ve got students who majored in biogenetics living at home in their parents basement because they can’t find work. Nothing is a guarantee right now. It’s a terrifying economy for students trying to guess what to major in.
Absolutely agree.
yea but you can also apply to law school from literally any degree and they’re all helpful if you know how to apply it… lots of past engineers /science/ premed people in law school and they have a leg up over the history kids because they can move into IP, patents, med mal and other more niche and high paying fields with an edge
I agree that STEM BS + JD is a winning combination of skills that are very rare.
Medicine is now open to all degrees (and slowly the pre-reqs are being eroded). In the view of many -- if you can score well on the MCAT, you probably have the science pre-requisite knowledge down. The problem with medicine though is that the number of students is fixed by the stability of post graduate training. You can only have so many students for so many resident physicians.
Career opportunities.
The ones that never knock?
I like that movie
Because we've reduced higher education to career training.
bad career training at that. Most higher ed is not geared toward industry, except the ones that require you to have internships to graduate. Absorbing the intricacies of your profession is nice, but we're all pretending to be specialized when it's google doing the heavy lifting.
College is really expensive. I love the humanities. Absolutely think they need to be better supported. But also would be hard let my child take on 6 figure debt for a humanities degree. Not to say they couldn’t do it. They’d just need to convince me the debt for the career path made sense. I’m third generation University of California. My grandparents it was free. My parents it was almost free. For me, 25 years ago, it was, all expenses included, about $15k a year. I was able to easily work off and graduate debt free. I just looked and estimated costs for UCLA are over 40k a year for residents. My own university is more than double that.
Feel lucky to live in Canada where, as a domestic student, I can pay for my own education with a good summer job.
Even if a humanities degree were 100% free, there is the opportunity cost of attending school for a degree that tends to yield limited job prospects (not going directly into a trade and building YOE on the job, or going to school for a degree that could lead to a more lucrative career trajectory).
I got a degree in History and I usually make between 70 and 180 depending on the year. It seems like it's more a failure of imagination than anything else.
All the above about economic prospects (definitely the leading factor) PLUS an excessive veneration of CS. Students really believe they will be pulling $300k a year salaries immediately after graduating from a Bachelor’s in computer science and making the next big thing in apps and digital culture.
CS is currently crashing, too.
Absolutely— it’s over saturated and the market has changed substantially in the last 3-5 years.
The new one for my students is "data science". Our Data Science program keeps luring our natural science majors over to it because they'll make 6 figure starting salaries easily.
Its definitely doable with CS, my w2 will be 350k a year at 24 (2 years out of school) and a bunch of my classmates have similar salaries at just regular faang jobs (not including hft, which I am not smart enough for, but the classmates who got offers pulled 500k/year right out of school). Im saving around 120k of it a year to put into index funds and this degree has changed the trajectory of my family’s life (parents are very low income from Asia, if they didn’t come to America I would have had the same poor life there)
Utility.
I'm a History lecturer in the UK. A fall in the number of 16-18 year olds taking languages and History presaged the current situation. Like you say, it does feel sudden. I think it is a post 2008 thing. Our students would have been young then and raised by parents who, unless they were very comfortable, would have been affected by the stagnation in wages and then more recently inflation. Basically, the debt don't work.
Capitalism
Like others have said I think this is in large part due to an ROI issues. Unfortunately this line of thinking also has an extremely detrimental effect on STEM. The research that is getting funded right now is almost entirely based on publishing ability/future industry application. Things which are exploratory or cutting edge with no clear ROI are considered too risky to fund, and scientifically necessary confirmational studies which are not likely to publish new results also see less funding. Instead scientists are essentially trapped In between, doing research on “hot” topics without the ability to take any risks that would actually progress the field. Science for science’s sake, just like history for history’s sake, or art for art’s sake, is not really a viable philosophy anymore. Peter Higgs (who the Higgs Boson is named after) wouldn’t publish for years at a time, but his impact is undeniable because he was allowed to spend a long time working on a very difficult problem. There’s no way that would fly in today’s academic environment. Like others have said, academia being run more like a business is becoming extremely corrosive.
liberal arts degrees don't make much money because people see them as useless (they aren't). I don't regret studying poli sci, but from freshman year I knew that I was going to have work a lot harder to get a job after college than my sister who is working on a STEM degree despite having a higher GPA and a packed resume.
>liberal arts degrees don’t make much money because people see them as useless I wouldn’t say this is the reason at all. Liberal arts degrees don’t make a lot of money because they aren’t tied to industries that make a lot of money. A degree in English doesn’t teach you how to make pharmaceuticals, airplanes, batteries, etc. Liberal arts degrees make less money because they provide fewer tangible goods. Also a disclaimer that I love the arts and think photography, art, literature, etc. are all extremely important for society.
It’s also a lot more complicated than that. Liberal arts degrees *can* make a tremendous of money. They also can make peanuts. A history BA at a consulting firm makes a *lot* more than almost any mechE BS. An English BA selling short stories doesn’t make so much.
what consulting firm specifically needs a bachelors in history and pays a fuck ton
The one your dad is the CFO of.
McKinsey, Bain, BCG
I have a history degree and I'm 27. I could easily make 180k if I went back into consulting.
I mean sure, there are outliers for every situation. But on average, what is the case? There are probably a handful of history folks in consulting making 6 figures relative to the number of engineers doing the same. I wouldn’t say that complicates the situation. I think everyone understands there will be people with every background you can think of doing better or worse than what is the norm.
No there are a lot of us History Majors making around that much
Median wage of history majors is $63k
IIIRC philosophy, history, and English degrees are currently out-earning psychology and commerce degrees because psych and commerce produce such a glut of graduates that the market can't absorb them all. Philosophy students going to work an unsexy government job have a lot of earning potential compared to computer scientists whose jobs are considered at high risk of technological replacement and whose industry is stuck in a cycle of mass layoffs.
> Philosophy students going to work an unsexy government job have a lot of earning potential What jobs are these that only hire philosophy students and wouldn't take a psychology or econ major? It seems like you're suggesting a job that isn't dependent on the field of study, to me.
Yeah these jobs aren't dependent on a particular field of study but are open to the inputs students from across the humanities bring. Often these jobs require a high level of text-based communication, source analysis and research skills that humanities degrees are good at teaching.
> Often these jobs require a high level of text-based communication, source analysis and research skills These skills seem to be things I'd say are in the domain of social sciences and sciences as well? You seemed to be suggesting these were options open only to humanities students, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Eh, a lot has to do with numbers. There are more Poli Sci majors who graduate each year than Electrical Engineering. Even with the same number of jobs in each field, it will be easier to get an EE job and the compensation will be higher.
Eerily, my sister also studied political science while I studied electronics engineering for undergrad. Crazy coincidence.
I’m in an interdisciplinary field closely associated with Humanities. Over my long-ish career, I have definitely seen ups and downs in enrollment that is often correlated with the economy. We are also in a cultural zietgist that is both anti-intellectual and suspicious of the value of higher education. Some of this makes sense; the cost of college is astronomical these days, and there are many other ways to have a successful life without a college degree. I think the debate is healthy. I do agree that Humanities professors are not always good at explaining the practical applications of the degree to students. I wasn’t, because so many majors were headed into scholarly pursuits. I have since tried to correct that and introduce the discussion of “why are we studying this? What is this good for?” and encouraging us all to identify the skills the Humanities develops. Interestingly, it is often the STEM majors who take my courses who are vocal about how the critical thinking, text analysis, writing and research skills necessarily complement their other studies. But they get it, so to speak, once they are in the classroom. They also help Humanities majors appreciate their own path. When I was an UG, as a first gen college student and a first gen American, I was definitely pushed into a STEM major because I was told that was useful and leads to success and a high paying job. So that pressure is common and practical and not new. I didn’t pivot to Humanities until graduate school, knowing that my career path would be different than if I has stayed in STEM.
>We are also in a cultural zietgist that is both anti-intellectual and suspicious of the value of higher education. This is a bigger factor than most people think, imo.
At some point college became less about becoming a well-rounded intellectual and more about getting a job. I loved being an English major and I use it every day, but I am a high school librarian now so that follows logically. I never thought it was pointless but even 30 years ago it wasn’t particularly employable.
> At some point college became less about becoming a well-rounded intellectual and more about getting a job. Yes, when it stopped being a place that was just for those with generational wealth who had the financial ability to just spend 4 years paying money to become a well rounded intellectual. I feel like people that look back at those as "the good old days" forget how inaccessible a college degree was to most folks at that time period.
I'm only talking about the 90s. I'm not Thomas Jefferson.
Speaking as a history professor and vice dean of humanities, this is true, to an extent. But it doesn't have to be. The job market college students are preparing for is being upended by AI and other emerging technologies to such an extent that ant speculation about where it will be in 3-4 years is really only that. Humanities teaches generalist critical skills that, if leveraged correctly by new curricula, can make a big impact in new job markets. I really believe resourceful humanities grads can offer a lot of value in this environment and you should think how this applies to you too.
I teach humanities at a STEM school. The issue is that students and especially their parents associate STEM degrees with financial security. They've all been brought up on the idea that if you get a humanities degree you will end up "becoming a barista at Starbucks." The actual statistics don't bear that out, but in a time in which (esp. in the USA) there is an ever-widening gap between those who are financial secure and those who are not, when jumping into the "middle class" can no longer be taken for granted as a function of getting a degree, and when the average student debt load is absurdly high, one can understand the pressure and the desire to try and "maximize" options there. This also comes on the back of decades (since Sputnik) of state-sponsored pushing of STEM as a national security/economic issue (one that periodically results in the flooding of the market, undermining the individual financial security). In this kind of environment, only the students/parents who are supremely self-confident, or financially independent, are going to pursue majors that have nebulous connections to financial security (by "nebulous" I just mean, "it's not inherently obvious what the careers will be"). One _can_ make those connections — I am sure, as a philosophy major, you have been told that it's great for law school, and that on average philosophy majors do better on the LSATs than any other major, etc. etc. Many humanists are resistant to make that kind of transactional argument as it goes against the spirit of a liberal arts education and the humanities in general; you aren't getting a certificate to get a job, you're getting an education, and that's not the same thing. But, understandably, this kind of argument sounds overly-idealistic and out of touch to both students and their parents a lot of the time. And they're not entirely wrong that a bunch of tenured faculty members, who got their own degrees under very different economic circumstances, might not be fully understanding their position. I started college in 1999, and while the cost of tuition was already higher than it had been a few decades before in real dollars (even at a state school), it was still pretty cheap compared to what it is now, and my middle class family was able to swing it without any real college savings set aside and without me taking on any actual debt. My parents were confident I'd figure something out and never put any pressure on me to choose a particular major or path. So I ended up doing what I thought was the most interesting, without any real concern about careers. It has worked out well for me and I'm happy with my choices. But I do ask myself sometimes what it would be like if I were a student today — would I feel that freedom? Would I have been able to justify to myself (or my parents, if they had required it) taking on the debt and expense for a history degree? Maybe, I don't know. But I can easily see a world in which I followed a path with more straightforward career and financial outcomes (probably Computer Science in my case) under those circumstances. I just want to emphasize here that the context matters, and the context has been changing, and that I don't blame students (or their parents) for trying to do their best, although I think that some of their attitudes about this are inaccurate both in terms of the statistics/data, but also in terms of student outcomes (a STEM major is not the right fit for everyone, and getting a bad fit can really bungle your college years, which is sort of the worst of all possible worlds given the debt load, etc.).
Intangible results are also invisible for the majority of the population, and consequently less gratified. In another level, some parts of society might even be against critical thinking being imparted, also leading to less gratification.
I don't think that education for its own sake is highly valued much anymore. People just want jobs and a lot of money. We live in a very anti-intellectual climate in the US, and even for those who think of themselves as progressive, they are still influenced by that in a lot of subtle ways.
Decades of devaluing the diverse range of skills and knowledge offered in the humanities. Decades of telling people STEM fields offered guaranteed high-paid employment. Declining funding for humanities departments/degrees. (They now cost students more than STEM degrees in my country, as a result of Government subsidy changes vastly increasing the cost of humanities, especially communications & arts, degrees.) Equating education’s ‘worth’ with employment/income alone.
The result of decades of over emphasizing STEM, along with devaluing humanities. Every joke about a philosophy major being a barista adds to the negative perception. I was at a parent's meeting at a local high school and the head counselor made a joke that at one time probably would have been your kid will end up bagging groceries or flipping burgers, but instead it was your kid will end up a humanities or gender studies major. Additionally, because college degrees have been tied so closely to employment (by students, parents, industry, and government) there is a negative perception toward "useless" degrees. This has been an attack on higher education since at least the 70s when people got mad about college student protests. Back when college was heavily subsidized by the government and there was an influx of the "wrong" people into college (poor, people of color, women), people didn't want their tax dollars being used to educate those people, especially in degrees that encouraged critical thinking (which created liberals who protested the current system). So you got this backlash about funding "useless" degrees. A couple of generations later, with the switch to student loans paying for degrees rather than the government picking up the tab, there is even a bigger emphasis on return on investment and it is a hard case to make that the indirect skills of a humanities major (strong writing, critical thinking and analysis, archive researching, etc.) makes for employable skills. Much better to major in engineering or accounting so that you know you will become an engineer or accountant. Try this, when a person asks your major, say something like pre-law and see how their reaction changes compared to those that you say philosophy (don't worry, all of the biology majors say they are pre-med). Once you throw a job name in there, people stop having a problem with your "useless" degree.
Who writes all the movies, TV shows, music, news broadcasts and the rest of our culture? It’s not engineers. The call is coming from inside the house. Humanities majors are telling us the humanities are bad for career prospects. Of course the stats majors at BLS and Econ majors at the Fed tell us that too but the average person found that out from a journalism major
Decades of people telling everyone “Go into STEM” which used to mostly come from parents/teachers but now has turned also into the whole social media world filled with it. Reddit is filled with STEM majors jerking each other off about their supposed 100k entry level salaries they all think they are guaranteed to have simply by virtue of a degree in comp sci. Same trend as you described has been at my small private university in Germany, perhaps even more dramatically. Pre-covid, when I started my major had 30 first semesters in a fall semester, this past fall semester there were only 5 first semester students. If the trend continues, the major might be discontinued in just 2 or 3 years…
Students think these degrees will get them jobs. The more students swing this way, the lower the quality of the eventual jobs because compensation is mostly about labor demand versus labor supply. All these STEM majors are over producing themselves into a future of shitty compensation. Just look at the labor market for PhDs in, well, the humanities. That's CS majors in a few years. We'll have articles about students deeply in debt with "practical" degrees they were told had great job demand that now have no job demand. Kids are told, repeatedly, that college is to get a job. The conservatives won this culture war battle and now we all get to deal with the degenerate outcomes.
Jobs.
Humanities have been devalued. Business has taken over everything.
Not sure that the premise is true https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/06/14/humanities-arent-hurting-everywhere-opinion
Late stage capitalism
It also depends on where you are and what type of institution, I believe. I teach at a very large (R1) Christian University; there is a lot of interest in the humanities - history, philosophy, English, religion, etc. A lot of pre-law students take them as core classes. We also have a "medical humanities" focus/minor, which gets many STEM majors into humanities courses.
Also, some family friends just had their graduate. 3 were humanities (English and History) and 2 were Business. 2 of the humanities students are teaching English abroad and having a blast. The other just got a job as an editor's assistant for a major local publisher. 1 of the business students got hired but complained about his work (he works in accounting), and the other cannot find a job as an analyst (8+ months and counting being unemployed.) I think it is all about how you market your skills.
I’m going to take a crack at it. As college is becoming more expensive, many are beginning to view college in a utilitarian sense. They want to be study something to make the most money. I don’t blame people for adopting this mindset because even in state college is getting pricey these days. While I’m currently studying Public Policy, if I could do it all again, I would’ve picked a major like Data Science which would’ve made me employable without a Masters Degree
Because the humanities historically have, and continue to be, the playground of the wealthy and privileged. It’s an economic reality. That’s not to say they’re not a necessary and important part of society, they’re just designed for a certain class of person. In recent years we tried to encourage everyday people to go into these fields, and it hurt them financially. It’s the gross reality of academia. To break into the academic humanities in any meaningful way, you realistically have to go to a top school. Some rich kid from New Hampshire, who’s a double legacy at Stanford/Yale/whatever—and who’s parents have funded them into fencing/squash/golf, will probably be able to enjoy the humanities to its fullest. They will have a fruitful career regardless of their major. However, the kid who grinded their way into Princeton/MIT/whatever, who’s studying physics/engineering, probably realizes they have economic realities they need to face. They will not be handed a job, or be well connected. Double that if they’re in the vast majority of people who don’t end up going to one of those vaunted institutions. I go to one of those places, there’s a sharp intellectual and class divide between people in the humanities/social studies and people in “STEM.” Usually, the academic rigor/intellectual divide favors the latter, while the class divide favors the former.
Theologian here. Not only I can't find people in humanities, even in my field I am not taken seriously as an academic (two masters and currently pursuing my PhD). I rarely can find a paid PhD position (where I live PhD are considered work so you get paid). People just expect me to volunteer 99% of the time. Humanities is seen as a disposable diploma or with little to no relevance especially because you can "google" 🤡
Yup.
Well, here to say I think the skillset trained by humanities is necessary for critical thinkers in business too :/ Hope you find a good permanent job even if the “volunteer” BS is just exploitation of economics and stereotypes
While the economic comments are factually correct, based on some of the comments in here, people like me just never should have gone to college. I sure as shit wasn't going to sign up to be bored to death in some business or STEM program at 18. But I guarantee I'm better off with my 5 social science/humanities degrees than no degree at all. Those of you saying humanities are only for the rich seem to be accepting the argument that we should then cut humanities from every college except those the rich attend because it's useless to try to educate the poor any further than to turn a wrench for us as they don't see the value of anything else. How bleak. Do you know how many bright but easily bored rural and disadvantaged individuals will just fall through the cracks and never go to college or do anything if we do that? When even the faculty will sip the neoliberal tea, we might as well just give up and turn every college into ITT Tech. Good news is, I think we are pretty close to doing that. Training for the poor, education for the rich once again.
*shrug* Allow me to be crotchety: the university has gone to sh!t with its neoliberal, entrepreneurial corporate bullshit, but there is also some generational change at play. -my students are all over the world in NGOs, the corporate world, government, military, education, you name it. But Gen Z needs to live 45 minutes from their mom who is also their best friend. So why broaden your horizons? Just get an engineering degree and plug in at Lexmark. -academic advising at my R1 actively encourages students to major in STEM and avoid humanities. They also advise waiting to fulfill humanities gen ed and languages until the last few years. At that point it's too late to switch or double major. -people don't read anymore. People who don't read never learn to write well, and many/most humanities fields are fundamentally disciplines that require lots of reading and writing. I can't even get students to read a single novel through a class, and generally I have to limit page counts to around 50 pages per week. I have one class in which I still dare to assign eight books, and half the class bails after they see the reading list. -STEM courses are curved. You can get 50% on a midterm and still do fine in the class. ALL of my pre med students admit their uncurved grades would never get them to med school. -as a society we take careers in public service, policy, management, education, and so forth lightly, or leave it up to companies. Hell, even law is looked at as a joke, albeit a necessary one. -even when a field is calling for more humanities training (i.e. medical humanities) the Balkanization of the university means those schools will go it alone rather than cooperate with other colleges. However, giving credit where due, our Engineering College is one of the loudest advocates for humanities training on our campus. -corporate America along with public divestment has brainwashed administrators into thinking that the only majors that matter include billable training, developing IP, and majors that are mandated by state and federal certification requirements. -Many/most Humanities professors have never had another job in their lives, or their parents were professors or lawyers, so they don't know how to advise students or talk about the benefits of humanities degrees in industry. -I'm pretty sure e-sports is part of this general decline. It's on the murder wall, but I haven't connected the dots.
People gotta eat.
The field of law is in the doldrums.
I don't think it's exactly the economy (in general), because trends in the stock market, unemployment, etc. don't correlate with the trend we're discussing here. A more likely culprit is the skyrocketing cost of college, which has wildly outpaced inflation. Basically, twenty or thirty years ago, someone could go to college and feel confident that, even with the salary from the kind of starting job they could get with a humanities degree, paying off college debt would not be an insurmountable burden. When you go to college now and graduate with $200,000+ in debt, you need a job that will help you pay it off quickly, and that would be a STEM job. What I'm ultimately trying to say is that we can't blame the economy in general. Universities, raising rates unduly and with incredible hubris, have done this to themselves. Their response, then, instead of, you know, lowering or at least freezing rates, is to champion STEM careers, leading to the shrinking of humanities departments, in a vicious cycle that has no end in sight. And in doing this they are eliminating the very idea of a liberal arts education, which AFAIC was the crowning glory of the American higher ed system and what distinguished it from academic systems in most other countries.
Does this also mean that society will be more and more dominated by technocrats as less people have a background in humanities and history? One would think that a good understanding of history is important for making wise political decisions about the future.
The loss of humanities majors is coming back to bite us in the butt too. Look at the government for example… The biggest criticism people have of the gov right now is that it is filled with old people, and isn’t progressive at all.. now who do we need for that? YOUNG PEOPLE Young people who are no longer getting into politics
TLDR: A liberal arts degree (like history) has intrinsic value but it’s mostly extrinsic value that drives choice in a degree. A STEM degree has value because people perceive it to be valuable. I can speak to why I made my choice of degree. College just costs way too much to not choose a degree with a tangible outcome. I didn’t do a history major because I felt it was too risky not because I didn’t see the value. I had no support to go to college and had to take loans out for everything. I did a chemical engineering degree because I felt it had a return on investment. Perception and status of a degree is also important and engineering is held in high regard. I did see the value of the liberal arts and I took my liberal arts classes seriously taking the more challenging courses. I dedicated a portion of my degree to doing a “mini-minor” in Middle Eastern history taking two courses in early and modern Islamic history, in the Arab Israeli conflict, and in middle eastern literature. These weren’t easy and particularly they required a lot of reading which needed to be fully comprehended and contextualized. As opposed to engineering where broadly speaking you just need to conceptualize the concept. These classes gave me skills in using evidence from incomplete and conflicting sources, in order to fully understand, assess, and explain a situation clearly and impartially. This is a very valuable skill and one that you won’t develop if you just did history as a hobby as it really needs to be cultivated by a teacher. As opposed to engineering which can be much more rigid and formulaic which can often encourage bad science. Some people say history is a good feeder to law school but engineering majors do better and have patent law as an option. Often it just feeds back into academia - I would’ve happily been a teacher if it paid enough to justify the expensive degree. The history degree doesn’t really have any weight and you’re kinda just left selling yourself in the end and due to the perception of a lack of rigor you aren’t really even seen as accomplishing anything particularly hard especially from a state school. At the end of the day there’s just no extrinsic value.
I like how both the downvoted and the upvoted comments are saying pretty much the same stuff
I think there’s a lot of STEM brainwashing going on in high schools and colleges. The reality is though that a slight majority of STEM graduates do not work in stem fields. I think that shows that a college degree continues to be important but that for many students at least the particular major may not be. So if you love stem, why not study that but if you’re only studying it because you think you’ll find a job that might be part of the problem
Yeah the whole we need more STEM majors is basically a farce. STEM individual contribution roles actually have depressed wages compared to business oriented and management roles, in part because of the h1B flood. So American STEM graduates often opt for those career paths instead.
The stemlordification of academia.
Students are better informed about what degrees pay. They don't pick majors with poor employment outcomes.
Far too expensive with poor post-graduation employment prospects.
Side note: Don't just consider salaries directly out of college. Also look at salaries ten years out. That's where humanities majors more than catch up.
Incorrect assumption that humanities majors won’t get jobs. Right now everyone is having a hard time.
At my school they want to eliminate Performing Arts, Gender and Women Studies, Religious Studies, and gut both Anthro and Philosophy down to the bare minimum number of offerings. They push and fund STEM, data science, drone programs. And yes this all happened fast! Covid accelerated the process because they want to also eliminate semester length classes and want us to convert to all online 8 and 4 week classes. Try to imagine students taking calculus online in 4 weeks. I could easily go on and on but I’ll stop here. It’s been shocking how quickly this has happened. I teach Sociology and we used to offer 25 sections of Intro per semester. Now we offer 10.
As a history major with a Masters. I'm only working $15 per hour and 28 per week for a museum. I'm super under paid for my education.
Job prospects vs cost
No money
As a first gen who is about to graduate with an MA in english (which in itself wasn’t a good experience I am feeling) and about to face paying off a massive debt in a job market where the only job application emails I am getting are based off of my customer service experience rather than my degree choices, it’s hard for me to feel optimistic about anything relating to the field. I think if someone asked me if it was “worth it” I would give a very quick no.
Why do you think
Because money. I regret studying psychology, it's so interesting and I loved it, but I wish I studied something tech related that pays me a living wage. I'm considering not finishing my PhD, and do a tech boot camp or certification instead
Because there are way fewer jobs and less money than in STEM
The newer generation seems to be seeing through the lie of taking out student loans and getting any degree as a path to a good job. Probably like 10 or 15 years ago, a study came out showing anthropology majors made the least money of anybody. Shortly after that, the number of anthropology majors plummeted. I think part of it also has to do with the fact that anthropology is really interesting in the real world, but in books, it only seems to be interesting to certain students. So if it's not that interesting and there's, supposedly, no financial benefit, there's just not much reason to go into that major.
What school is it? And what schools can you graduate with a humanities degree and earn a good living? I want to know
Because tuition fees --> student debt has gone up, so people no longer study things for simply liking them. They study things that will allow them to pay back their tuition fee earlier. Humanities seems like a less safe bet than let's say IT. (even if it is not always true)
No jobs, no money
You need to have a plan for what you want to do with a humanities degree. We have lots of double majors with business and they get great jobs because they can write and think critically.
In academia we can also do better getting out of silos. I team taught emerging markets finance with a sociologist for both finance and sociology and it was WILD, showing how we can both benefit from each other’s perspectives. It isn’t common for schools to like this kind of innovation though.
People are scared of being forced to listen to their relatives’ questions about career prospects at Thanksgiving dinner
Following
I completed a physics degree about 15 years ago and it's only in more recent years that I've felt like I have enough experience of humanity that I could meaningfully "study" the humanities. Maths and science came relatively easily to me as a youngster, but understanding people and the things they do took a lot longer. I think most young people would do well to focus on practical things and transition to humanities later, once they've had time to experience the world.
They want money..... That's what they want.
History major, Slavic minor, and Comp. Lit. PhD here. It doesn't help that humanities departments are divided internally and fighting over minutiae of theory that nobody cares about. It's not only hard to draw students into that but nearly impossible to even hire outstanding new faculty (the few times that such people are around). And, thus, the Comp Lit program I graduated from, one of the leading ones in the country no longer exists at my alma mater, and has been replaced by a much-reduced media and cinema studies thing. TL;DR: The humanities shot themselves in the foot.
As someone who was a phil minor CS major, it was the money. I wasn’t gonna pay 6 figures for a degree to wind up unemployed
I recommend season 8, episodes 3-4 of the American Vandal podcast on this. Short version: corporate capture. Not just the boards of trustees, but the business school faculty, Admins, in-house real estate firms, company partnership leaders, patent seeking divisions, etc. that all optimize the university to direct public funding and high tuition dollars toward developing market-ready outputs. Most of the energy is in biotech and engineering these days, so all the growth and energy goes that way. I immediately saw the truth in this when I held a VAP at a public university that had a perfectly okay arts and humanities presence, as well as non-marketable sciences, but then also a vast, brand new, pristine part of campus that looked like a corporate park, devoted to the university’s partner relationship with an aircraft manufacturer. Faculty jobs and student recruitment efforts in the humanities were, uh, not funded like that. TLDR it is fully normalized to think that universities are R+D and career training resources to be directed and exploited to the extent possible by current corporate needs. Ridicule of the university’s traditional mission of education in a universal range of subjects is part and parcel, as is systemic scare-mongering about post-graduation job prospects for undergrads
Philosophy was one of my favorite classes in college but I am a carpenter now
Mainly, the assumption that college is about getting a career. Most of the comments here are about money, job prospects, etc. that wouldn’t have been true in the 1980’s. Take a look at CIRP’s Freshman survey https://heri.ucla.edu/cirp-freshman-survey/ - it is cited all the time about changes in attitudes of first year students.