I wish I could agree. I hold a Doctorate in Philosophy and teach introductory courses online after retiring from a career in financial services. I enjoy my work with students, especially helping them grow their critical thinking and improve their reading comprehension and university-level writing skills. This is the state of affairs in non-elite universities. At the top of enrollment for online degrees, this university closed its Phil Dept some time ago for “financial” reasons – the university did not have sufficient numbers of majors and minors to warrant the expense. The good news is that 4/5th of my students got more from the course than they bargained for and said so. The experience of doing philosophy far exceeds their expectations or the reputation of non-STEM programs in their peer groups. Yes, it’s a bit of a holiday from their future career-based studies and far from any ambition to pursue a liberal arts education.

My anecdotal two cents is the cost of university education is so burdensome that the luxury of developing one’s mind for students from working-class families is out of the question. My own doctorate is from Binghamton U at a time when Regent Scholarships paid tuition, and the cost of living was less than half of what it is today. I come from a modest economic background, and the luxury of developing my mind was affordable if less than prudent in the eyes of my elders.

Your questions are fair ones. But to be fair to the author, they cannot write a book in a blog post. We, however, did write that book and so here’s what I can tell you about those numbers.

1. You compare unemployment rates between humanities grads and high school grads.

Here are some numbers comparing humanities degrees to other disciplines. These numbers are pre-Covid because our book was published in 2020, but the data that the author cites (as well as other recent studies) makes it clear that even after Covid, these numbers are pretty much the same. And to be honest, I was afraid to look at that data post-Covid for fear that employers would fall back the most common degrees, like business, and not give humanities students a chance. But much to my surprise, that did not happen. The numbers are still good. This is a just a sample. If you want more comparisons, you can find that data pretty easily with a little research.

According the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, earning $53,000 in 2015, the much-maligned English major averages only $1000 less than a molecular biology major or history majors, $4,000 more than a psychology or fine arts major, and $5,000 more than a neuroscience major. This is pretty much the case for all degrees in the humanities. Unsurprisingly, the highest salary projections are in STEM fields. But note that the humanities average is $56,688, which is nearly equal to business. In addition, while students to graduate with engineering degrees start up about $10,000 more than humanities students, the salaries for engineers tend to stall out after about 10 years because technology changes and new students coming out of college are better suited for those new opportunities in engineering. So, if an engineer does not go into upper management, their salary typically stalls after only 10 years. That is not the case for students in humanities, however. Their salaries do not stall generally and they increase significantly with additional education, such as law or graduate school.

2. You don’t control for age groups.

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce (2015) also has data for this concern. They analyzed the median annual earnings for four areas for college graduates directly out of college and in peak earning years.

Median annual earnings for new college graduates with a degree in a humanities or social science field are slightly higher than those with a physical or natural sciences or mathematics degree and only slightly lower than those with a baccalaureate degree in a professional or pre-professional field. In addition, humanities majors tend to start out earning less money than graduates in a number of other areas, but those numbers even out with time and/or with additional education. In fact, the median annual earnings for those between the ages of 56 and 60 with a baccalaureate degree in humanities or social sciences is $2,000 higher per year than those in a professional or pre-professional field. And though it’s fair to recognize that the years when humanities students are making a little less perhaps cannot be recouped by everyone, humanities students are still a far cry from living in poverty, regardless of whether we’re talking about salaries right after college or salaries in their peak earning years.

3. You don’t look at actual income nor do you look at ROI on a humanities degree.

With the data I’ve given you above, the math is easy. The ROI on a humanities degree is just as strong as any other degree because salaries are pretty much the same, and in many cases higher, than students in things like math or molecular biology. The big myths is that everyone needs to be a STEM major in order to get a great ROI. But you will be hard-pressed to find any actual scholarly data that shows there has ever been a STEM crisis. In fact, one of the top workforce analyst at Harvard, Michael Teitelbaum, has written extensively on this issue and if you Google him you can find a good number of YouTube videos where he is talking about the data.. The fake “STEM crisis” was a creation of industry in order to increase supply so that wages would go down. As a result, not only do 50% of STEM graduates not actually work in STEM fields, their salaries started declining or staying the same years ago. The other reason why industry tried to convince everyone, that there is a STEM crisis is so that they could hire more H1B visa’s, who are people from other countries that they can pay for less money and over whom they can have extreme power because if an employee causes any issues or complains, they can just send them home. Google “Disney engineers 2015 fired” and you will learn that Disney replaced 250 computer engineers with foreign workers only after they had the United States workers train those new employees. That’s a major reason why industry pushed the ridiculous and patently untrue narrative that there was a general STEM crisis in our country. They wanted to lower wages and they were successful. They wanted to bring in more H1B visa holders so that they hire fewer US college graduates and they were successful. The sad thing is that everyone from the President of the United States to pretty much every college administrators believed that narrative without ever bothering to look at data that wasn’t created by industry lobbying groups. You will be hard-pressed to find any actual scholarly data by workforce analysts that tells you there is a general STEM crisis (there are shortages in very, very few STEM fields) or that there ever has been. So while the perception is the ROI of a STEM degree is fantastic, that is simply not the case. It is not much better, if any better at all, than a humanities degree. And when you see huge engineering salaries compared to an English salary of $53,000, check which engineering degree they are talking about. That rhetoric usually compares the highest paying engineering degrees, such as petroleum engineering, rather than using aggregate salary data for all engineers. Most students don’t have the STEM skills to be petroleum engineers. It’s pure rhetoric without any data to support it, it was designed to hurt US workers in STEM, and it worked.

4. You focus on professionals who have a higher terminal degree than their humanities degree.

The data I gave you above shows that it doesn’t really matter if they don’t have a higher terminal degree, humanity students do just fine in terms of salary. That said, most people who do extremely well in their fields do have additional education. Business students who want to move up higher typically get an MBA. STEM majors who want to earn more typically get an M.S. or Ph.D. 33% of world leaders are humanities or social sciences majors as undergraduates. And at the time we wrote the book (and when I checked again a year or so ago) some of the most recognizable companies have CEOs or founders with a humanities background, including American Express, Overstock.com, Whole Foods, Campbell’s Soup, Chipotle, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Merck. What that tells us is that humanities degrees prepare students to go into some of the highest paying fields and they are prepared to do so because of the mind training that happens in the humanities. We do not train students for specific jobs. We train students to do whatever it is they want to do, save certain professional fields like medicine. Even accounting firms in financial industries are hiring humanities graduates because humanities graduates are typically much better in interpersonal and written communication skills. We have a story in our book about a financial office in Chicago who prefers to hire humanities students because anyone can be trained to use computer systems to do the math of financial training and accounting, but not everyone can be an excellent communicator and build relationships. That’s the new important currency in this job market, the ability to form relationships and build wealth for a company through your interpersonal and public and writing communications skills. We also have a lot of stories in our book about humanities majors who have gone on to do amazing things and technology. The way that humanity students are trying to think helps them solve problems better than most other people and also helps them see problems sooner than folks with different degrees. They are also trained to think critically and analytically and holistically. The truth is that humanity students can do pretty much whatever they want and they can do even more if they go into additional education. But as I said before, most students from most majors don’t move into the highest paying positions without additional education, so it’s not the case that only humanity students need additional education to move into higher levels of business.

In the book we cite a good number of economists who talk about what students are going to need in the modern and future economies. Those folks say that the modern and future economy is going to need agile and flexible thinkers and actors, not people who are trained in one specific discipline or to do one specific job. Indeed, here’s what a few folks you might have heard of say about degrees in liberal arts/humanities.

At the unveiling of Apple’s iPad 2 in 2011, Apple founder Steve Jobs proclaimed, “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” When I give presentations about our book I note that the reason Apple is a lifestyle and Microsoft is something we all have to try to survive every day is because Steve Jobs understood the value of art and humanities to technology. Steve Jobs’ successor, Tim Cook, struck a pro-humanities theme similar to Jobs’ comments, in his 2017 MIT commencement address where he said, “If science is a search in the darkness, then the humanities are a candle that shows us where we have been, and the danger that lies ahead.” And finally, billionaire investor and businessman Mark Cuban predicts that there’s going to be a greater demand for liberal arts majors in the future of increasing automation because “when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data,” one that a “freer thinker” from the liberal arts can deliver. It’s unfortunate that the captains of industry and Titans of technology understand these things but the people that actually hire often do not. But in spite of that fact, humanity students make their way in technology, stem, healthcare, and business and they do quite well. They must, of course, work hard in college and after college in order to succeed, but that is not something faculty and the humanities can control for. When students do the work they need to do and then they go out into the world and continue with a solid work ethic, humanity students do quite well.