Matthias Stom, “Young Man Reading by Candlelight”
Friday
Clickbait for a nerd like me is a headline announcing that it makes more sense to major in English than in business. Why else would I have turned to an article on the CBS MoneyWatch website?
It so happens the article’s headline is misleading: no significant statistical difference exists between underemployed English majors (29%) and underemployed business, marketing, and management majors (31%)—or for that matter, between English majors and social science majors (28%) As the article’s author sees it, the real news is that English is in the running at all.
When I read the article, however, what most caught my attention was the high rates of underemployment amongst college graduates. After all, aren’t these economic boom times, what with an unemployment rate of 3.7%? Combine underemployment with student loans amounting to tens of thousands of dollars and things appear less rosy.
But putting aside the unsettling financial situation, I will second the article’s contention that employers prefer English majors, which I would expand to include all humanities majors. That’s because they want “communication and critical thinking skills” and find that those with vocational majors often lack “writing and reasoning abilities.”
If there’s one thing we humanities professors do unceasingly, it is push our students to make clear and coherent arguments, calling them out on logic flaws and tangled prose. After four years of intensive coaching—sometimes described as pounding—our students operate at a far higher level than they did when they entered. Because we in English are in love with beautiful prose, we may put more emphasis on the finer points of writing than philosophers, who put a premium on nuances of thought. History faculty, meanwhile, demand more research. But there’s a lot of overlap and we all teach skills that employers want.
We don’t just teach transferrable skills, as my own early job experiences make clear. Content is also important, as my own pre-college professor employment history shows. True, I was underemployed. Because of my college degree, I started off earning ten cents over the minimum wage working for an advertising shopper, and the money wasn’t much better when I was a cub reporter at the Pine City (Minnesota) Pioneer and then the Winchester (Tennessee) Herald-Chronicle. By MoneyWatch’s criteria, my college degree wasn’t pulling its weight. We lived more on Julia’s teacher salary than my own.
Because I had been a history major and an English minor, however, I grasped the larger systems at work. I contextualized situations as I encountered them, and my experience with literary characters helped me understand better my employers and fellow workers. My understanding of different story arcs made me a better reporter, and my sensitivity to stylistics made it easier for me to shift from academic to newspaper style. While there was much about journalism I didn’t know, college had taught me to learn on the fly, and I made the necessary adjustments.
In short, while I may have been underemployed at the time, my liberal arts education opened up future possibilities that would have been tough with vocational training. Now I watch my English Ph.D son Toby in his current year-to-year position and know that, even if he doesn’t land a tenure track job, he has what is needed to flourish in other professions. Meanwhile my entrepreneur son Darien, with his theater major, dazzles in every job that he takes.
Darien told me a story from a past job that makes my point. The advertising agency for which he was working wanted to hire an assistant for him and, against his wishes, hired a business major from a large state university rather than an English major from a liberal arts college. He got someone who could follow directions but not someone who could take initiative or imagine larger possibilities for the company.
To be sure, not all English majors prove more successful than vocational majors. But they are usually more flexible when the world changes and unexpected challenges arise. In that way, a humanities major is the most practical of all degrees.