“Many college degrees are now useless,” a 2025 Forbes headline announces; the article underneath goes on to list “five degrees that no longer hold up.” Liberal arts degrees like philosophy, history, and English are at the very top of that list.
This is not incredibly surprising to me. As someone with a master’s degree in English lit, I’ve heard all the jokes. The most common one I've received goes something like this: “Literature, huh? So you’re going to be a barista?” Very funny. Very original. Definitely not terrifying to hear on a weekly basis as an undergrad student.
In his 2023 New Yorker piece “The End of the English Major,” Nathan Heller examines the economic anxieties leading young people away from humanities degrees. He writes that, over the past decade, “when the economy has looked up, humanities enrollments have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more.” Students seem to associate humanities degrees with debt and economic precarity, rather than stability and success. And, with all those clever barista jokes, who can blame them?
But as Atlantic writer Benjamin Schmidt points out in a 2018 essay, “there’s an extremely important caveat: Students aren’t fleeing degrees with poor job prospects. They’re fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they think they have poor job prospects.” In other words, the ROI on the humanities degree might not actually be as bleak as everyone thinks.
Earlier this month, the New York Times released a sprawling data set detailing which American universities – and which majors – led to the highest salaries, based on median incomes of people who graduated in 2018 and 2019. “Defenders of the liberal arts will find some reassurance in the data,” the authors write.
The data shows that, on average, US-based English majors who graduated in 2018 and 2019 are making between US$45,000 and US$55,000, with graduates from top schools earning around US$85,000. The average history major isn’t doing too much better, but the top earners with history degrees are making north of US$100,000. Meanwhile, the Times reports that “the median income of high school graduates nationwide is US$34,808.”
We don’t have access to similar data in Canada, but we can see the median salaries for grads in different fields in 2020. That year, the median salary for English lit grads between 25 and 29 years old with full-time jobs was around C$48,800. For history grads of the same age, that number was C$50,400. In contrast, the median income in Canada for full-time workers in the same age bracket without degrees sat around C$42,800.
The Canadian data also gives us access to later-career salaries. English lit grads between the ages of 45 and 54 with full-time jobs were making a median salary of C$82,000, whereas those with high school diplomas in the same age bracket were making a median salary of C$58,000.
All this suggests that humanities degrees might not pay off the way that compsci degrees do, but they do pay off. What’s more, an American study from 2018 found that around 70% of humanities grads are “deeply interested” in their work – a similar rate to graduates of arts, business, social sciences, and engineering. And, while only around 40% of humanities grads reported feeling like they had “enough money” for everything they wanted to pursue, that figure varied only slightly across disciplines – engineers were most likely to report having “enough money,” at just over 50%.
It's true that, if a university degree’s ROI is measured in purely financial terms, engineering is a better choice than art history. But if overall job satisfaction is the goal (or even, I don’t know, the joy and fulfillment of the learning itself), it’s not evident that humanities grads are particularly disadvantaged compared to other graduates – no matter what you might read in Forbes.
Have there ever been so many unique ways for a humanities grad to sell out?
Increasingly, however, it seems to be the case that humanities majors actually can rake in huge salaries if they want to. In 2024, Blackrock COO Robert Goldstein discussed the company’s new approach to hiring: “We need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.” Microsoft exec Jaime Teevan tells her kids that the liberal arts matter more than ever because they help to develop metacognitive skills like critical thinking. And currently, major AI firms are hiring philosophy grads to sort out what kinds of ethical frameworks to encode in emerging AI models. Have there ever been so many unique ways for a humanities grad to sell out?
Now that AI systems can code and crunch numbers, tech and finance giants are starting to look for a different kind of intelligence: the thoughtful, critical, intellectually curious perspectives that humanities degrees foster. These skills might be less quantifiable, but they are perennially valuable. And they might be a safer bet than in-demand technical skills, which, by the time students finish their degrees, could already be on their way out.
As of 2024 in the United States, computer science graduates faced a 7% unemployment rate; it was even higher for computer engineering grads, at 7.8%. To put this into perspective, the unemployment rate that year for communications grads was 3.9%; for history grads, it was 4.3%; for the oft-maligned English major, it was 6.1%. Compsci grads, at 7%, fared as well as performing arts grads did (also 7%). And computer engineering grads had the second-highest unemployment rate of all – sandwiched between fine arts (7.7%) and anthropology (7.9%). (The most recent Canadian data detailing unemployment by major is from 2022, before AI upended the tech job market; at this point, humanities grads faced an 8.9% unemployment rate, compared to engineering’s 6.8%.)
To be fair, the New York Times’ ten highest-earning school-and-major combinations are all compsci degrees – for those who do land jobs in the industry, there is a lot of money to be made. But the full force of AI’s effect on the job market is still mostly unknown. Things can change, and faster than you think.
As someone with two English degrees, it’s still hard for me to frame the 'value' of humanities in terms of future salary and employability. Studying literature taught me to appreciate beauty, to feel moved by the experiences of others, to envision new possibilities for the world we live in. These are qualities that I value fundamentally, not because they’d be useful lines on my resume. My humanities education made me feel more in touch with my own humanity; how could I possibly quantify that ROI?
At the same time, it’s worth mentioning that, despite my best efforts to study literature for its own sake, I've found success in the job market. I have the privilege of a full-time job that I am “deeply interested” in, and there’s no question in my mind that my literary education helped me get here. To be clear, I don’t think anyone wanted to hire me because they were blown away by my master’s dissertation on Charlotte Brontë’s least popular novel; if there’s one thing an English degree won’t get you, it’s external validation. But, if you’re willing to embrace the humanities on their own terms, you will emerge as someone who can read widely, think deeply, learn quickly, and approach the world creatively.
Not just that, but humanities degrees train thoughtful generalists, who can apply their abilities in a variety of contexts. Forbes tells us that humanities degrees often produce “directionless” grads, who lack “digital fluency and job-specific training,” including typical workplace tools like Microsoft Excel and project management platforms. But the flip side of “directionless” is “flexible” – a critical quality to possess in a volatile job market.
There may not be an obvious path to a specific career with an English degree, but it does arm you with close reading and critical analysis skills, which are valued across sectors, and will almost certainly grow in demand as AI's influence expands. After all, Microsoft Excel is much easier to learn on the job than creativity, and Claude will come for spreadsheets long before it comes for critical thinking.
