The humanities payoff: finding good work with humanities degrees. From the latest survey:

Prior to the pandemic (the most recent data are for 2018), almost everyone with a bachelor’s degree who wanted a job had one. Among college graduates without an advanced degree, the unemployment rate was 2.9 percent. Even among graduates from fields that tend to have slightly higher rates of unemployment (such as the arts and the humanities), just 3.6 percent were unemployed. The lowest rates of unemployment (at 2 percent) were associated with fields aligned with specific vocational occupations (such as education and the health and medical sciences).

That difference between college graduates from vocational fields and those from the liberal arts and sciences extends to their distributions across the various occupations. While most college graduates work in management, professional, or related occupations, graduates from disciplines with specific occupational connections tend to be clustered in the associated vocation. For example, more than 60 percent of graduates from the health and medical sciences had a job in their area of study, and almost half of education graduates were working in the education field.

In comparison, graduates from academic disciplines such as the humanities and the life, physical, and social sciences are more widely dispersed among the occupations. More than 10 percent of graduates from those disciplines were employed in management positions, around a third were working in a variety of sales, service, or other office and administrative jobs, and around 10 percent were employed in positions in K–12 education.

Having a more obvious occupa­tional destination does not guar­an­tee substantial earnings, however. Among college graduates with only a bachelor’s degree, engineering majors had the highest median earnings ($88,139); education majors had the lowest ($45,589). In comparison, graduates from the liberal arts and sciences fell modestly below the median for all college graduates in this category (almost $63,000). For instance, graduates from the humanities and the life, behavioral, and social sciences had median earnings of between $55,000 and $59,000.

Politicians and the media often compare average earnings among college graduates from various fields, dwelling particularly on the substantial gap in earnings for engineers compared to humanities majors. It is important, however, to keep in mind that earning any college degree provides a substantial financial and employment advantage. Median earnings for workers with only a high school diploma were substantially lower (around $35,000) than those of college graduates from every field. And the unemployment rate for those who completed high school but did not attend college was 5.3 percent.

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h/t Rob Townsend (@rbthisted)