'The Great Shame of Our Profession' How the humanities survive on exploitation

[ucbalumnus]

@LoveTheBard

Given that one of the criteria used for gauging school success is looking at the “return on investment” in the years immediately after completion of undergraduate studies, humanities and liberal arts majors often don’t have salaries that are as high as their counterparts that have obtained “pre-professional” and “professional” degrees such as engineering, computer science, business, etc. While the latter group might fare better on these ROI measures than those that have majored in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences, if one looks at both groups’ respective salaries 15 or 20 years down the line, humanities majors do just fine, thank you very much.

There was this page that shows surveyed mid career pay percentiles by college major, though it has obvious limitations by the nature of the survey (though better than random anecdotes of “X got a BA/BS in ___ and later became a CEO” or “Y got a BA/BS in ___ and never was able to get a career track job”): http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html .

For pretty much all college majors, the top end (90th percentile) ended up being paid well. But some majors are relatively flatter, with the lower percentiles do reasonably well (e.g. nursing, physician assistant), while others are very unequal, with the lower percentiles doing poorly (e.g. music, art history, anthropology, philosophy), implying that graduates are more likely to be in winner-take-all job markets. These do not seem to be all that surprising.