The wisdom of seeking a degree in the humanities is often called into question, with administrators perennially seeking to cut majors, state officials targeting them, and professors debating how best to defend their worth. Meanwhile, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities declined nearly 16 percent between 2012 and 2020.
But a new report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences contradicts the narrative that humanities degrees are a waste of money. College graduates in every state who majored in humanities fields like history, philosophy, and English literature outearned people with no degree, according to the academy’s data.
Robert B. Townsend, the academy’s program director for humanities, arts, and culture, said the data were generated in response to administrators’ and faculty members’ requests for information that could be used to show lawmakers that humanities majors have positive career outcomes at the state level — just as the academy found they do nationally.
In general, he said, the questions about the return on investment for humanities degrees seem to move in two directions.
“One is you might as well not even get a degree if you’re going to get a humanities degree, and the other is the comparison to the engineering graduates — who are in a class by themselves as far as earnings,” Townsend said.
However, he said, the new data show that humanities majors aren’t largely unemployed and their earnings are comparable to or better than the salaries of workers who majored in most non-humanities fields.
The academy used five years of pooled data (2017-21) from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to paint a picture of what humanities graduates in every state and the District of Columbia earn, what jobs they hold, and how their rates of unemployment compare with graduates from other fields.
The median income for humanities majors in all but four states — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming — was at least 40-percent higher than that of workers with only a high-school diploma. And in every state, the data show that the median salaries of humanities majors were about the same as or higher than those who earned degrees in the behavioral or social sciences, arts, or education — though their earnings in most states lagged behind those who graduated from engineering, business, and natural-sciences programs.
Although a degree in the humanities is often bemoaned as leading to joblessness, the academy’s data show that the unemployment rate for humanities majors is similar to other college graduates, at about 3 percent — and, on average, about half the unemployment rate for those with no college degree.
Here’s more from the academy’s report:
