Preparing Humanities Degrees for the Job Market
A college education used to be synonymous with ‘liberal arts’, back in a time when only the very upper echelons of society would (or could) pursue a degree at university. Philosophy, linguistics, history, and literature would prepare the young men (and they were almost always men) to be engaged and thoughtful members of society. A college education, in other words, was rarely a springboard into a specific vocation—a student could study the classics all he wanted and not worry about getting a job in that field. Today’s job market not only often demands a college education but also requires technical or professional degrees for an ever-increasing proportion of careers. However, universities across America are still attracting large numbers of students seeking to study the humanities. The merits of such a degree have been heavily debated, and there are certainly quite a few arguments that the skills these students gain are incredibly applicable to a wide array of jobs. But knowing that you can apply these skills is a far cry from knowing how to apply them. Are universities helping students think about how they can both market their humanities degrees to employers and widen their understandings of who those employers might be?
Everyone knows that employers look out for employees with strong ‘soft skills’, such as those with good interpersonal relations and who can communicate effectively. In fact, since 1980, jobs in the United States that require strong social skills have been the source of almost all job growth, while those that need lots of technical reasoning but entail low social interaction have not been rewarded by the job market.[1] And while it’s certainly true that a humanities degree is not the only way to acquire these soft skills, few courses of study in STEM have the sort of general education requirements that push students to learn how to critique and persuade beyond a freshmen year rhetoric course with 50 other students.
To students fresh out of the gate who are trying to enter the labour market, having these broadly applicable strengths can at times feel like a hindrance rather than a blessing. The lack of a clear path forward that doesn’t involve the surety of law school can be overwhelming, because, unlike STEM majors, those in the humanities are rarely seeking (or able to seek) a job within their field of study. Anthropology, literature, and gender studies are fascinating in their own right, but job openings in those fields are not growing. So for the students persuaded to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on one of these degrees, how are universities preparing them for what happens next?
Career planning is far from a new path for most colleges and universities to take, and rare is a campus without an entire building dedicated to advising, or alumni who try to impart wisdom or opportunities for current students. But the Great Recession in ’08 and the catastrophic effects of the Covid-19 era are causing students to seriously evaluate their majors and potential future employment. For humanities programs themselves, this only makes investment in humanities-specific career planning that much more important. The University of Illinois recently opened a Humanities Professional Resource Center and is offering a class to support students on the job search.[2] Exposure to the experiences and current professions of alumni can widen students’ perspectives and can help give them direction. The National Endowment for the Humanities is even offering large grants to universities who will “seek to address the disparities between graduate student expectations for a career in academia and eventual career outcomes and to promote greater integration of the humanities in the public sphere.”[3]
But humanities departments themselves are also trying to help students by reshaping aspects of their curriculum. Oberlin College has created a concentration in the business major that combines core curricular learning with the student’s field of concentration.[4] This approach, which forces students to connect their humanities knowledge with other fields of study, is compelling and similar to what Wesleyan tries to accomplish with the Linked Majors. Also on the rise, certificates allow students to study and demonstrate their interest in a particular issue by approaching it from many disciplines. These interdisciplinary solutions help students get excited about how they can apply their passion in the humanities to different fields.
It is also worth pointing out the gap between the perception of how successful humanities degrees are in the job market and their actual earnings and unemployment rates. In the US in 2015, those with a humanities degree had an unemployment rate of just above 4%, compared to STEM degrees with a rate of around 3% (the national average was 5% that year).[5] Earnings do tend to be fewer for those who stayed away from business, tech, or law, but there is an interesting gender dimension to these statistics that cannot just be explained by the degree. The majority of humanities majors are women, and on average women with a humanities degree make $12,000 less per year than their male counterparts with a humanities degree.[6] That, coupled with the proven fact that as more women enter a field the average earnings in it tend to drop, seems to point towards a gender-wage gap that may explain part of the overall disparity between humanities and STEM jobs.[7]
Citations
[1] https://www.nber.org/digest/nov15/growing-importance-social-skills-labor-market
[3] https://www.neh.gov/divisions/challenge/featured-project/next-generation-humanities-phd
[5] https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/employment-status-humanities-majors
[6] https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/workforce/earnings-humanities-majors-terminal-bachelors-degree
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html