Oh, the humanities! Sorry.
In January a bill was introduced to the Washington state legislature that would collect data on how much money a particular major at state universities earns, on average. The idea behind H.B. 2443, sponsored by Chad Magendanz, R-Issaquah, was that this information would allow students to predict their income and pick a degree accordingly.
It didn’t pass, exactly, but was approved as a “supplemental budget proviso,” meaning that the item is moving forward as a part of next year’s budget rather than as a full policy bill. And as the legislative session came to a close last week, $46,000 was allocated for the project. The money will be used to fund consultation with school representatives, the collection of earnings and employment data, and eventually the operation of an online data center.
And here is where the humanities come in. News media has been talking for years about the death of the humanities and the imminence of unemployment for students who are currently studying language, history, the arts, and social sciences—with research to back it up.
The Washington Post reported in 2012 the results of a study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. According to the study, 9.4 percent of recent college graduates that had majored in the humanities were unemployed. Lower rates of unemployment were seen with those who had studied health and education, and the students studying business and engineering had the lowest unemployment rates.
Students began to notice these numbers and pick degrees accordingly, often avoiding classes in the humanities, according to a New York Times article last year. The Times reported that only 15 percent of the student population at Stanford University were in the humanities, though 45 percent of the faculty members were working within the subject area. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2013 that humanities majors at Harvard University fell from 36 percent of degrees in 1954 to 20 percent in 2012.
The solution, according to one contributing writer to Forbes Magazine, is to cut university humanities departments completely. In his column in 2012, the contributor said the best way to avoid student debt and unemployment is to not set graduates up for failure early on in their higher education.
Because of these statistics, combined with the conventional wisdom that the arts won’t pay, a bill collecting data on employment and wage potential would seem to only further the hesitant outlooks on humanities degrees.
But that’s not necessarily so. Many educators in the humanities were in favor of the bill.
Statistics might actually help to show the long-term success of a liberal arts degree, said Bonnie Effros, a history professor at the University of Florida (Florida is one of seven states that is currently tracking post-graduate wage potential). Popular perception is hurting the humanities, not hard data, she says.
Effros believes the number of students studying humanities is dropping mostly due to the media’s rhetoric against the field. But the rhetoric does not actually reflect the state of the humanity degree, she says.
“In fact,” she told Seattle Weekly via email, “recent studies show quite the contrary of current rhetoric about the ‘uselessness’ of the humanities … Over time, humanities grads earn similar if not more than their counterparts in STEM fields, even if they do not initially.”
Such a statement is supported by a team of researchers at Duke and Harvard. The research team surveyed 652 U.S.-born CEO positions and leaders at 502 technology companies throughout the early 2000s. According to an article in the Washington Post last year, the researchers found that most of the people in those positions had degrees in the humanities rather than technology or engineering.
“The reason is simple,” wrote Vivek Wadhwa, a columnist for the Washington Post and a member of the Duke and Harvard research team. “Technologists and engineers focus on features and too often get wrapped up in elements that may be cool for geeks but are useless for most people. In contrast, humanities majors can more easily focus on people and how they interact with technology.”
The rub is that graduates need time to find those high-paying job. The program as it now stands would track employment and earnings at 18 months and five years after graduation at public institutions. According to critics, that’s not enough time to show the benefit of a degree in the humanities.
“If a state actually went to the trouble to gather accurate statistics, and not just one year after but ten years after, more students might actually choose to major in the humanities,” says Effros. “They would see that their chances of a good career afterward was actually decent.”
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