As parents enter this fall’s college application season, they’ve likely been warning their children incessantly that a degree in art history or philosophy won’t pay the bills.
“Study something practical,” they’re muttering, “so that you can get a job.”
But a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York tells a different story. Census data from 2023 on recent college graduates reveal that the unemployment rate of students majoring in art history and philosophy, in fact, resembles those of some STEM majors.
This is welcome news. Studying the humanities — which includes art history and philosophy, but also history, literature, language, religion, and music — isn’t an impractical luxury. Rather, these subjects offer a competitive, if still hidden, advantage and return on investment in the job market.
The humanities prepare students not just to get a job, but to keep it and excel while doing so. And Wall Street seems to be noticing.
Robert Goldstein announced last year at a conference on BlackRock and the future of finance that his company was rethinking which kinds of students to hire.
“We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology,” he said, adding, “It’s that diversity of thinking and diversity of people and diversity of looking at different ways to solve a problem that really fuels innovation.”
Death reports exaggerated
Yes, despite grim headlines about the “death” of the humanities and the end of the English major, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, arguably America’s largest multinational investment company, is now actively seeking college graduates in the humanities.
Why are the humanities, then, continuing to lose ground on college campuses? Partly because their most important financial benefits do not show up immediately upon graduation. But this myopic perspective, which has long devalued the humanities, is now affecting the perception of what has been the most popular major in recent years: computer science.
Only last week, Professors Mary Shaw and Michael Hilton of Carnegie Mellon University wrote in the New York Times a persuasive defense of computer science, whose majors have seen such rapid decline with the rise of generative artificial intelligence that graduates cannot even get a job at Chipotle.
Computer science majors should not panic, however.
“The rise of generative A.I.,” Shaw and Hilton say, “should sharpen, not distract us from, our focus on what truly matters in computer science education: helping students develop the habits of mind that let them question, reason and apply judgment in a rapidly evolving field.”
The humanities tend to produce the kind of skills that can transfer across various jobs.
By the same token, as AI reshapes the world, the content of humanities education is more vital than ever for addressing the ethical and existential questions such change provokes.
The skills cultivated by majoring in the humanities are equally worthy of defense as those of computer science. The wide-ranging studies of the economics of education show that humanities degrees are being underestimated for the job skills they promise students in tomorrow’s workforce.
Specifically, the humanities tend to produce the kind of skills that can transfer across various jobs. They prepare people for roles in leadership or management.
Finally, the critical skills they develop can withstand the rapidly changing technologies that force workers to relearn demanding job tasks. Studying the humanities, then, is akin to investing in academic stock today for long-term professional gain.
One recent study tells us that the “wage-by-major statistics” that parents and students review before declaring a major undervalue how “an education in history increases a student’s labor market value — perhaps through the development of critical reading and writing skills or because reading history texts cultivates a transferable attention to detail — that enables them to earn higher wages when they seek employment after graduation.”
Transferrable skills
The “transferable” nature of skills is a significant educational benefit of the humanities. A 2020 study describes the labor market returns to the specific, or technically specialized, nature of a college major. That “specificity” determines how much the skills inculcated by this major are transferable across different jobs.
In short, the humanities consistently produce some of the most transferable skills across professions.
Another 2020 study looks at earnings dynamics, changing job skills, and careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Studying the humanities can develop the skills that overcome the following conundrum: When a person acquires only “specific skills that are in high demand but also changing rapidly over time,” that person likely will need “to learn many new tasks each year.”
To make a long story short, a humanities education results in one of the slowest measurable rates of counterproductive “skill change.” This means that the skills learned through a humanities degree endure resiliently, even in the face of massive technological changes.
The humanities, of course, have substantive educational benefits. Their themes enable students to learn several critical things about humanity, such as the impact of human intelligence and creativity, the evolution of ideas about humankind, and the vitality of language and culture in how to see and survive in the world.
But the true value of the humanities includes their ability to build the professional skills students need to thrive in the global workforce — especially at a time when colleges may be deciding whether to consolidate or eliminate humanities departments, majors, and courses.
The question, then, that parents and children should ask isn’t, “What can you do with a degree in art history or philosophy?” The better question is, “What can’t you do with it?”
Yes, contrary to what you might think, a degree in the humanities, alongside degrees in computer science and many in between, remains one of the smartest investments students can make.
Gene Andrew Jarrett is Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University