Reviled—But Surprisingly in Demand
The liberal arts are in a quiet crisis of their own. The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the liberal arts—generally defined as a broad education offering majors in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and math—fell to a 30-year low in 2024, the latest period for which data are available, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That was 30 percent below the peak in 2012. Students have instead been choosing majors in subjects they consider tied directly to careers, including business, management, and health professions.
Graduates who majored in humanities and social sciences tend to believe they’re at a disadvantage. Fewer than one in five language, philosophy, and social science majors think their educations are directly relevant to their careers, Gallup polling finds, compared to more than one in four majors in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. Nearly half say they would have picked a different major, compared to 40 percent of business and 28 percent of STEM grads.
This skepticism is misguided, people who teach the liberal arts contend. Chairs of humanities departments think their disciplines are undervalued and are being “persecuted,” a new survey by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences finds. They want their universities and colleges and national associations to do a better job of marketing the field. Liberal arts graduates right out of college may not make as much as classmates in some other subjects, say these chairs and other supporters of the liberal arts, but they catch up over time.
What data exist suggest that things aren’t so clear-cut. Liberal arts majors never earn as much as their counterparts who majored in STEM disciplines, Strada finds, and they make slightly less than college graduates in general. Eventually, their incomes do substantially outpace those of workers with only high school diplomas. And about 40 percent go on to get graduate degrees, further increasing their pay (though also their education costs and, for many, their indebtedness). At Brandeis, more than half of degree earners go on to graduate or professional schools.
Many bachelor’s degree graduates in the liberal arts begin their careers underemployed, meaning working in jobs that don’t necessarily require those degrees, Strada has also found by analyzing millions of online work histories. Though many eventually move into degree-level jobs, they’re more likely than classmates with other majors to remain underemployed a decade after graduation. At that point, according to separate research by the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce, the median return on the investment for graduates from liberal arts colleges and universities is about 40 percent lower than for graduates who went to other kinds of schools.
But then their incomes do, in fact, begin to rise. Forty years after they enroll, students who go to liberal arts schools have realized a median lifetime return on the investment of more than $900,000—just below the return for graduates of the highest-level research universities. At the 47 most selective liberal arts institutions, the lifetime earnings payoff is more than $1.1 million.
Liberal arts graduates are in surprising demand in the technology industry, where they actually outnumber graduates from technical programs, a study by the Strada Institute for the Future of Work found. LinkedIn discovered that more liberal arts than computer science and engineering graduates were being hired by tech employers—mostly to work in sales and marketing but also as software developers. And when Google put its analytical proficiency into studying the qualities of its best managers, they turned out to be soft skills often associated with the liberal arts, including solving problems, thinking critically, and communicating. STEM expertise came in last, the tech company learned. It would later reach the same conclusion about its engineering and sales employees.
Many of these findings came in the mid-2010s, after which the research trail largely runs cold. And there remains some skepticism that the durable skills Levine and other say their students learn—critical thinking, communicating, problem-solving, flexibility, resilience, and leadership—can be measured. Still, an analysis released last year of more than 75 million job postings by the labor analytics firm Lightcast found that 76 percent explicitly asked for those skills. And advocates for the liberal arts now argue that the advent of AI makes them more important than ever.
That’s among the reasons liberal arts deans from the nation’s top technology schools met in April in Atlanta to create a network to promote the liberal arts at universities and colleges like theirs. They include Virginia Tech, MIT, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In the age of AI, what students learn from the liberal arts “is future-proof and timeless,” says Amanda Murdie, dean of Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, which hosted the meeting. “You can act as a translator in a rapidly changing AI environment.”
Nearly 90 percent of employers are seeking evidence that job candidates can solve problems, and nearly 80 percent want people good at working in teams, according to a survey last year by the National Association of Colleges and Employers; technical skills come in sixth out of 20 kinds of attributes employers say they want, below a strong work ethic and communication skills.
These things are what innumerable assessments show that liberal graduates are good at. But just because it’s true doesn’t mean consumers are aware of it.
“Advocates for the liberal arts argue that it’s obvious—if you learn to think critically, you learn to think broadly, that’s going to pay off. I agree with the argument, but they haven’t made the case,” says Richard Detweiler, former president of Hartwick College, the Global Liberal Arts Alliance, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association, a consortium of liberal arts schools.
That’s a particular problem at a time when the job market has become so volatile, thanks in part to the rapid evolution of AI. The unemployment rate among new bachelor’s degree recipients at graduation time was 5.4 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, higher than in any spring since 2022, when the economy was still recovering from Covid.
“Right now is kind of a weird time to be a college student. There’s a lot of anxiety,” says Eli Richardson, an economics major who graduated in May from Brandeis. “Finding a job is hard,” says Richardson, who did find one in financial services.
Anya Ionis, a Brandeis freshman business major, says her parents often ask about how practical her academic choices are. She’s thinking about also studying psychology, she says, “and they keep asking me, ‘What are you going to do with psychology?’”
That’s the kind of question universities have to finally answer, says Detweiler, author of The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs.
“Just being able to tell good stories worked for a long time,” he says. “But this is a more skeptical era, and we’ve been driven by the economists’ view of the world that the thing that counts is money earned. That’s never been an argument that the liberal arts have tried to make.”
