“pity more incoming students don’t seem to realize that there are many routes into many types of jobs.”
Parents deserve a lot of the blame, IMO.
I am the proud mother of a son who plans to major in history.
I believe in the value of a liberal arts education. I am not sending my son to college solely to get a job, although it is certainly true that a college degree is required for probably every job in which he would be successful and happy. College also is about learning, being exposed to important thinking in a variety of disciplines, becoming a stronger reader/writer/thinker, exploring diverse perspectives, engaging in meaningful conversations with your peers as well as professors, finding interests that will shape your future professional and personal life decisions, and gradually gaining independent living skills in this transitional environment between childhood and adult independence.
A history major can lead to just about any career. History majors become lawyers, doctors (with the required basic science courses in the schedule), professors, K-12 teachers, politicians, diplomats, government workers in various local/state/national departments, think tank analysts, journalists, investment bankers, consultants, etc., etc.
Some of these careers require further education beyond the BA, but some do not.
The liberal arts prepare students for every career, not just one career… and to think and adapt to a world in which the nature of many jobs is changing quickly and in which new jobs will exist in ten years that are not yet dreamt of today.
When I look back on my own education, I see that I learned much more, and was more shaped by, my undergraduate years studying the liberal arts than by my subsequent pre-professional training in graduate school.
I think the problem with jobs for history majors is not so much for those going to elite schools. If you go to a very selective university or LAC, you will probably get a job with a history major. The problem comes at the schools further down in the ratings. My son loves history, but he is not at that level - 1220 SAT and 3.2 GPA. Of course he had all A’s in his history courses. He will likely go to a school ranked around 100. My husband and I have had many discussions over whether it makes sense for our son to major in history or political science. Will he get a job? H wants him to major in business as he sees it as being more practical. I wonder if a big part of the overall drop in history majors has to be coming from schools that are not elite.
My D is an architectural historian. It’s a fascinating and diverse field, and there are jobs. I had no idea that such employers as Amtrak, power authorities, and many governmental construction agencies employ their own architectural historians or that there is a lucrative business field of cultural resources management until my D went into the field. She writes and researches for a living and just absolutely loves her job.
My son is a business major with a political science major. His writing skills have earned him some very nice internships. We’ll see how the job market goes when he’s done.
Yes, computer science has seen an explosion of interest and yet only 17% of the grads are women.
Had to laugh at seeing exercise science, although it makes sense. It’s not at all like PE. It’s a real science major and is considered a pathway for DPT programs. Corporate health/wellness is another area where ES grads find employment. And yes, some do become personal trainers.
I don’t think the problem is just “history at an elite college is fine; history at a less elite school is not”.
Rhodes? Earlham? Exceptional history departments. But a kid coming out of those schools is going to have to work harder to get an interview with a big corporate employer who hires all kinds of humanities majors for their rotational management programs. That kid will need some “get up and go” in addition to the resume and transcript. The practical aspects of hunting for a job in insurance, consumer products, banking, hospitality industry, etc. will be more important to that kid then one coming out of Yale.
There was a time, and in some places, still is, when history was a default for kids who’d otherwise have no idea of a major. A decline probably reflects those sorts moving to other pre-professional majors. Not sure I consider that a problem.
D1 was in a history-related major and is working in semi-tech, paid well, could move to another job. Happy. No regrets about her major, still fascinated.
There’s a lot more to getting a good job, based on skills sets honed, than just listing the major.
@zoosermom Small aside. One of my local post offices has a mural painted during WPA, back in the '30s. It is the efforts of the architectural historians that led to it being preserved and treasured. I’m happy, every time I see it.
Is it, for those not planning to do PhD study in economics? A typical undergraduate economics major requires single variable calculus and statistics, to be used in intermediate economics and econometrics. A few colleges’ economics majors do use multivariable calculus (e.g. Chicago and MIT), but others do not require calculus at all (e.g. Penn State and Florida State, which are much larger than Chicago and MIT).
- I was referring to the math intensity of the intermediate and advanced econ courses (like macro, micro and obviously econometrics) and not specifically to requiring higher level math courses per se. I don’t know enough about the colleges you’re referring to, and I admit to being surprised they don’t require calculus at all. Even back in the day we had to do at least one calc course. I wonder if they actually require courses in things like history of economic thought and political economy, though? Anything that actually examines economics in a wider context, basically? I’d be pleasantly surprised to hear that’s the case. Btw I often see job ads referring to economics listed as an option for those jobs looking for people with “quantitative degree backgrounds”. So at least this is a wide perception out there.
Econ at some colleges is a proxy for a general business major (if the school doesn’t offer one for undergrads). Econ to employers signals “I have some pre-professional credentials even though I graduated from a school of Arts and Sciences”. There is a huge variability in the curricula of Econ majors. As UCB points out- at some colleges it’s ALL content and no analysis (a kid who gets a BA in econ without calculus is NOT going to get a job in a quant-heavy discipline).
If you have a kid who loves econ but isn’t a super math whiz, encourage them to focus on behavioral economics. VERY good opportunities in market research, advertising and consumer products, branding and customer experience, pricing strategy, etc. You need a statistics sequence to be credible coming out of undergrad- but the psych/econ combo is very marketable and might appeal to the kid who couldn’t hack it in econometrics or the more analytically complex parts of econ.
Area studies = East Asian studies, African studies, Middle Eastern studies, etc.
I couldn’t agree more. Many kids have their love of history squashed by high school history classes, which are too often taught as a whirlwind of names and dates with a handful of primary sources sprinkled in for seasoning. Survey courses even at the university level often turn students off history; they are almost invariably assigned to overworked and underpaid adjuncts, post-docs, and non-TT lecturers, who cannot always devote as much time to each of their classes as they’d like.
A few months ago College Board shortened its World History course to 1200 CE to present (the new AP Modern World History), and an AP Ancient World History course is in the works if there is sufficient interest – though it may take several years to implement. This is a long overdue division, as virtually all universities divide World History into two semesters.
My daughter hated social studies and history until 10th grade. She absolutely LOVED APUSH, AP Euro, and Gov. There was no date memorization and the classes were all about finding connections and trends. She did great on the AP exams and her writing improved by leaps and bounds. She’s also a wonderful debater now. Seems that based on this thread, it’s very teacher dependent.
I believe a lot of this shift away from majors like history is parent driven. I know many people who refused to let their kids take out any loans for a liberal arts degree and flat out say that they could for a tech degree. For a very short while our daughter was in middle school, she was considering going to conservatory for composition or piano performance. She started composing at age 9, doing music camps, and was (and still is) a very talented musician. We would have supported that decision 100% but I can’t tell you how many friends and other family members told her she would never be able to support herself and would be a waiting tables her whole life. No matter how much we tried to counter that message, I believe all those naysayers influenced her decision to drop the idea of conservatory.
I would think that all the reasons not to get a degree in history would be equally present for a psychology major but there are still a lot of degrees being granted in psychology
Ah, but @user4321 the high school AP Psychology test has the reputation of being the easiest AP, and high school AP Psychology is often a fairly fun class according to the kids I’m familiar with. The perceived utility of a history degree is probably part of the problem, but I’m sure that there’s a pipeline problem with the way the subjects are taught in most high schools too.
Majors go in and out of favor. That’s been the case for decades. When I was an undergrad, English was huge. French was huge. Rhetoric did well (perceived as good law school prep). Anthropology was huge. Now you hear a lot about neuroscience, psychology, international relations. In another decade it will be something else.
I majored in American History at a small, liberal arts school. I absolutely LOVED studying history, and would have gladly have earned a living researching esoteric historical moments, writing books and articles, and lecturing. But I could see that even in the 80s it was difficult to find employment as a college history professor, so I became a lawyer. History, at least as I studied it, was the perfect preparation for law.
Just out of interest, and because I know how to access the data, I looked at the numbers on history BAs at Yale and the University of Chicago over the past decade+ (classes of 2007 - 2017/8).
At Yale, the number of history degrees awarded dropped like a stone from 2007-2014 before bouncing back a little. But it was starting from a huge number: 203 history degrees were awarded in 2007, nearly 15% of all bachelor’s degrees. History was by far the most popular major for 2007 graduates. By 2017, it was down (back up, actually) to a little more than half that, 109 (8%), and the third most popular major, behind Economics and Political Science. From 2014 - 2017 the History major increased 20%, from 91 to 109. According to an article in the Yale Daily News, History may again be the #1 major, or close to it, for the class of 2019.
At Chicago, the numbers bounced around more year-to-year, without such smooth trends, but in a narrower range. (Note that the Chicago absolute numbers are understated, because Chicago reports such things quarter-by-quarter, and I only looked at spring quarter results. Whatever degrees were awarded in the other three quarters are missing.) In 2007, there were 65 History degrees awarded, a little more than 5% of all bachelor’s degrees, and History was the sixth most popular major. In 2018, there were 55 degrees awarded, which was only 3.5% of bachelor’s degrees, because the size of college classes grew 25% over that period. (If you look from 2006 - 2016, the increase was over 50%.) That year, History was basically in a three-way tie for 8th place among majors.The high in the period was 77 degrees in 2010, and the low was 43 two years later, but most years there were somewhere between 50-65 History degrees.
What I take from this is that at these elite colleges, both of the following are true: History is less attractive to students as a major than it was a decade ago. History remains, however, a relatively strong, attractive major at these colleges.
I have a history degree from one of the excellent but lower tier schools mentioned. I have amazing research skills but those skills are generally in declining interest. I don’t work as a personal trainer but in something similar. Within higher-tier professional jobs, there is little emphasis on broad skills. I used to work as a policy analyst and was NEVER asked to call on mt higher-level research and writing skills. Everything is so dumbed down and generalized or employers let other people do the work for them, particularly governmental institutions like RAND. They don’t even want PhDs in academic disciplines as university administrators anymore. It’s not that those critical thinking skills aren’t wonderful, they are just not highly valued right now in any sector. People my age could get into stuff back then but those interesting jobs are on the decline.
And you used to be able to teach but even teaching has started to be a profession more about rigid delivery of facts according to set rubrics and content goals than teaching true analysis.
For comparison, a sampling of state universities in California suggests that history majors make up 0.3% to 3.7% of recent bachelor’s degree graduates. But the 3.7% (at UCLA) looked like an outlier at the high end, since many were closer to 1%.
Perhaps the students at elite colleges are less likely to be under as much financial pressure to find a job immediately after graduation and therefore are more willing to choose a major like history that, while it may involve learning skills that are valuable over the long term of one’s career, may not have as immediately hireable job prospects at graduation. The students at elite colleges may also be more likely to access job opportunities that are elite-school-related (e.g. IB, MC) and therefore less likely to “need” job opportunities that are major-related.