STEM Majors Are Inherently More Valuable Than Humanities Majors

I cannot tell you the number of students who tell my team daily that despite their passion for the humanities, they will most likely be majoring in a STEM field due to concerns about job prospects. I myself have been the recipient of many such pieces of well-intentioned advice earlier in my academic journey. Determined to major in comparative literature, I remember bracing myself as friends and distant family would try to persuade me that there is no career to be had in the humanities. Now that I’ve put my passion for French literature and the Arabic language aside to pursue a full time career in entrepreneurship as the cofounder of Polygence, I can’t help but wonder – how true is this claim today and are there truly no benefits to majoring in the humanities?

It is a widely accepted and cited fact that college degree holders fare better in their careers than workers with less education. The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative within the Brookings insittute, has found that on average, degree holders earn about $600,000 more over their lifetimes than workers who enter the workforce with only a high school education. What is less well understood is the data around post-graduate earnings by graduates of different majors.

Citing the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, The New York times reports that full-time workers who held computer science and engineering bachelor’s degrees between the ages of 23-25 “earned an average of $61,744 in 2017”, which was “37% higher than the average starting salary of $45,032 earned by people who majored in history or the social sciences.” A similar 2017 report by the Hamilton Project also found that lifetime earnings vary significantly by major, stating that “the five highest-earning majors (at the median) are all in engineering fields: aerospace, followed by energy and extraction, chemical and biological, computer, and electrical.” They found that for the median bachelor’s degree graduate, cumulative lifetime earnings for workers across majors range from $770,000 to $2.28 million, with aerospace engineering occupying the highest range and early childhood education majors occupying the lowest range.

However, it may be misleading to look purely at the earning potential of graduates from certain majors, because research has also shown that students from the same major often transition into a surprising variety of occupations, thereby earning very different incomes. To take an example in the field of English literature, 6.4% of graduates who enter the field of law earn a median salary of over $100,000, whereas the 8.3% of graduates who enter the field of early childhood education earn $50,000.

The Hamilton Project has published an illuminating interactive infographic that allows detailed exploration of the career distributions of various major graduates. In fact, researchers have found that in a diverse array of fields, a large majority of graduates do not end up working in the most common occupation in their specific major. Given that students’ post-college career paths are so difficult to predict based on their academic concentrations, it could be argued that looking at earnings by occupation or career track is perhaps more indicative than college major alone.

In addition, The New York Times also finds that any earnings advantage that STEM majors hold over humanities majors fades by age 40. There are two major reasons that contribute to this – first is that technical skills become obsolete quicker as younger graduates enter the workforce. In a recent working paper, Harvard economist David Deming calculated the change in required skills for different jobs over time. He found that “help-wanted ads for jobs like software developer and engineer were more likely to ask for skills that didn’t exist a decade earlier. And the jobs of 10 years ago often required skills that have since become obsolete.” This higher skill turnover in STEM fields is correlated with the relatively slower earnings growth of STEM graduates between graduation and age 40. Let us take the example of the closing gap between computer science majors and history majors. Deming reports that “male computer science or engineering majors roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458”, which is compared to social science and history majors, “who earned $131,154 – an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.”

The second reason for this closing gap is that a liberal arts education fosters soft skills that don’t tend to expire, such as critical thinking, people skills, and problem-solving skills. While much more difficult to quantify and while they do not create immediate pathways to high-paying first jobs, “they have long-run value in a wide variety of careers,” especially in managerial and leadership positions. Liberal arts and humanities majors are also more likely to enter careers where midcareer salaries are the highest – including in upper management and business occupations, as well as careers that require advanced degrees such as law.

Turning to what employers are looking for when they screen candidates, we see even more evidence that the durable skills taught in humanities classes are coveted in the workplace. According to the 2018 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, three attributes stand out when it comes to evaluating college graduates for potential positions: written communication, problem-solving, and teamwork. Other soft skills that made it into the top 10 desired skills include initiative, verbal communication, and leadership. This is echoed by a memo published by the U.S. Department of Labor, which further adds networking to the list of soft skills that are “key to the success of young workers in the 21st century”.

It is my hope that this research gives more students hope that they can and should pursue their authentic intellectual passions – even if they lie in the scary, erroneously deemed “useless” field of the humanities. To take myself as an example, my career ended up being in entrepreneurship – a direction completely different from the intellectual love of my life – comparative literature. Not only do I not regret having majored in the arts, I in fact feel that I owe much of my entrepreneurial success to the skills my major taught me.