The return of the humanities: employers look for their creativity in the UK. From the article:

At a time when the UK is facing the loss of around 400,000 jobs in the creative industries as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, are postgraduate degrees in the arts and humanities still popular? More importantly, are they really worth it?

“Yes,” says Manuel Souto-Otero, professor in social sciences at Cardiff University. “They’re really popular. The area of creative arts and design is actually booming.”….

Although science subject areas have become more popular in the past five years, non-science degrees still make up the majority of postgraduate studies and numbers are increasing. Dublin City University, for instance, says registrations for master’s programmes in the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences have almost doubled in the past 10 years.

According to Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy, the most popular humanities subjects at postgraduate level are English, media studies, journalism, librarianship and information management, and history. For the creative arts, it is design, music, drama, art, film and creative writing….

“The arts and humanities provide critical thinking skills and this matters to employers,” he [Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute]  says. “The creative, empathetic side of human nature is harder to replicate with machines.”

Take the tech sector, for example. Like many industries, the tech sector’s expansion is fuelled by growth in high-skilled, non-technical, interpersonal roles, such as project management, marketing and branding, human resources, market research and data analysis. These rely heavily on skills developed in the humanities and social sciences.

“Arts and humanities graduates are flexible and have a wide skill set, including communication skills, collaboration and teamwork, research and analysis, independence and creativity, not to mention, in many cases, specialist knowledge – all of which are in high demand from employers,” says Shah. “This flexibility and resilience will be a real advantage post-Covid-19.”