5
Can You Have a Good Career with a Degree in the Liberal Arts?
It took just seven words to strike fear into my parents' hearts: “I want to be a history major.” Even though my father majored in English, my mother majored in communications, and both had successful careers as educators, my parents had something different in mind for me (your author, Steve). My father strongly encouraged me to get a degree in business. My mom was never quite as blunt about it, but it was clear she shared my father's anxiety that a liberal arts degree wasn't the most logical step to a successful career and—top of mind for them, I'm sure—a big enough paycheck to keep me from moving back home after graduation.
I was a pretty good student in high school. I liked most of my classes, but my favorite by far was AP American history. I took American history as a senior, and even as many of my classmates were counting the days until graduation, my history class kept me deeply engaged all year. I enjoyed the reading and writing. I loved the discussions in class each day. Intellectually, I had found a passion.
As I was applying to college, my interest in history was never far from my mind. That said, it seemed a bit impractical. I wasn't really sure what I would do with a history degree. Should I teach high school? That was an obvious career path, and in a sense teaching was the family business. My dad taught English for many years before he moved into school administration as a high school assistant principal and then principal. My mom taught first grade for nearly her entire career. They both loved teaching. But perhaps because education was such an obvious path, my parents wanted me to think more broadly about my options.
I had many interests. I loved music. I loved technology. At one point, I wanted to be an architect, going so far as to sketch (to scale) hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space I imagined building some day. So although the thought of myself as a future teacher wasn't far-fetched, it didn't seem like my calling.
With a career as a teacher seeming unlikely and without knowing much else that someone with a history degree might do, I put aside my interest in history. My parents, who were increasingly focused on future economic opportunities for me, seemed to keep coming back to the idea that I should get a degree in business.
Many colleges and universities allow students to apply without choosing a major, but that's not always the case. Cornell University, where I went, comprises seven separate undergraduate colleges. When applying, candidates choose a college, and depending on the college they pick, they may or may not have to choose a major. With my parents' interest in my future business career and my lack of a strong pull in another direction, I applied to Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), which offered a business-friendly degree. The ILR School offered another benefit. ILR is one of three undergraduate colleges at Cornell affiliated with the State University of New York. Because I was a New York State resident at the time, my ILR tuition was roughly one-third what it would have been to study music, architecture, history, or any of the other subjects taught in Cornell's four endowed undergraduate colleges that aren't affiliated with the state university.
It didn't take long for me to realize I had made a mistake. While I fell in love with Cornell and appreciated the quality of the ILR program, it wasn't for me. Of the courses I took in my first two semesters, the ones I enjoyed most focused on American labor history. After a few meetings with an academic advisor, it was clear I needed to have a conversation with my parents. My business career was taking a detour before it even started.
Making the switch from ILR to history at Cornell wasn't easy. Because history was offered through a different undergraduate college, the College of Arts and Sciences, I needed to submit an application to transfer. Fortunately the credits I earned as an ILR student could count toward my degree in history, but there were some additional requirements I'd need to fulfill, which meant I'd need to do at least one summer session to stay on track to graduate in four years. For my parents, who were paying for my undergraduate degree, the switch from ILR to Arts and Sciences meant tuition nearly tripled. The higher cost plus the perceived risk to my future employment made my history degree a tough sell to my dad. In the end, he agreed to the higher cost, thanks in no small part to my mom.
Studying history in college was a transformative experience for me. Finding something that aligned with my interests and my strengths led me to work harder than I ever had before. I developed strong relationships with faculty members who helped me to develop personally and intellectually. I even chose to do an optional thesis as a senior, which combined my interest in history with a latent interest in education to explore the development of vocational education programs in American public schools at the turn of the twentieth century. I had no idea that ten years later, I'd be cofounding an education technology company and that my senior thesis would be relevant to more than my degree.
After earning my history degree, I got a job as an instructional designer for a company that delivered training in computer applications to corporate customers. A few years later, I went back to school, earned an MBA, and then returned to the corporate world as a technology project manager. Some years later, I cofounded Naviance.
My personal story has a happy ending, as it does for many others who pursue a liberal arts degree. But the questions about the practicality and relevance of studying the liberal arts persist. The emphasis on careers in science and technology can even make subjects like language, literature, philosophy, and history seem dated and quaint. But as my own experience has taught me, a degree in the liberal arts can be fulfilling intellectually and satisfying economically.
What Are the Liberal Arts?
Before going further, it's worth taking a moment to define liberal arts. Dating back to medieval times, the term referred to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). These subjects were generally taught to those in the upper classes in society, while the less affluent studied the servile arts, or hands-on skills.
In current use, the term liberal arts is generally applied to the humanities (e.g., literature, history, music), psychology, and mathematics, which provide general knowledge and develop intellectual capacity (e.g., reason, judgment), rather than focusing on specific job-related skills. In this context, the word liberal comes from the Latin word liber, which means free or unrestricted and has nothing to do with the use of the term in politics, where it's seen as the opposite of conservative.
As you can see from this definition, the perceived tension between liberal arts and career training is nothing new. In fact, it dates back hundreds of years. Even in the United States, we have had an ongoing debate about the form schooling should take since 1852, when Massachusetts became the first state to require that all children (then up to the age of fourteen) be enrolled. By the late nineteenth century, compulsory schooling was spreading nationwide and expanding to include older children. In 1892, the National Education Association (NEA) convened the Committee of Ten, a group chaired by Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University, to make recommendations for what students should learn in high school. The Committee's report essentially proposed that all students, regardless of their socioeconomic background or post–high school plans, should receive a liberal arts education.
At the time of the Committee's report in 1893, only about 6 percent of children from the ages of fourteen to sixteen attended school. As compulsory education expanded nationally and as high school enrollments consequently grew ever larger and more diverse, the NEA appointed a new group, the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, which published a report of its work in 1918. By then, more than 30 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were in school, and the Commission's conclusions stood in stark contrast to those reached by the Committee of Ten twenty-six years earlier.
The Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education envisioned a different type of high school—one that would change and adapt to the needs of contemporary society and would place an explicit focus on preparation for work. The Commission's report, “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education,” proposed seven principles:
Health- Command of fundamental processes
- Worthy home membership
- Vocation
- Civic education
- Worthy use of leisure
- Ethical character
In the Commission's view, curricular differentiation was critical. Like the Committee of Ten a generation earlier, it expected that students of all backgrounds would attend the same school. Unlike the Committee, however, the Commission believed that children would have vastly different experiences in school, including some pathways that would be distinctly vocational.
This debate about the form and function of high school echoes the debate about the purpose of a college education. But that debate is built on something of a false premise because there is no inherent conflict between a liberal arts education and preparation for the workforce. That said, liberal arts students need to be prepared to educate their future employers about the applicability of their degrees to various work roles.
Liberal Arts as a Practical Choice
Many of today's hottest majors are in technology and business, and with good reason. Both offer a clear path to employability. What may be less obvious, though, is that the liberal arts can also be a practical, career-friendly choice.
Over the past two decades, the concept of twenty-first-century skills has gotten a lot of attention among educators. The idea is that success in society (including the workplace) now hinges on a few higher-order abilities. Various groups have their own take on which skills make the list, but at the core, most lists of twenty-first-century skills have four key concepts:
- Collaboration and teamwork
- Creativity and imagination
- Critical thinking
- Problem solving
The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) conducts an annual survey of hiring managers to get their input on the skills they value most when they recruit at colleges and graduate schools. These are the ten most common responses on NACE's 2016 survey:
- Ability to work in a team (78.0 percent)
- Problem-solving skills (77.3 percent)
- Communication skills—written (75.0 percent)
- Strong work ethic (72.0 percent)
- Communication skills—verbal (70.5 percent)
- Leadership (68.9 percent)
- Initiative (65.9 percent)
- Analytical and quantitative skills (64.4 percent)
- Flexibility and adaptability (63.6 percent)
- Detail oriented (62.1 percent)
As you'd expect, there's a close linkage between twenty-first-century skills and the results of the NACE survey. What's more interesting is the close linkage between these skills, the hiring profiles employers value most, and the attributes that liberal arts majors develop in their course work.
Some colleges and universities are accelerating their own efforts to help aspiring liberal arts majors understand their career opportunities. A degree in the liberal arts, particularly when combined with complementary course work in specific areas such as business or technology, can be a powerful calling card when starting a career.
Career Pathways for Liberal Arts Majors
Because the liberal arts include a variety of academic disciplines, they offer many different pathways to success. There are liberal arts majors in virtually every line of work: law, government, medicine, education, business, computer science, and more. A solid approach for building a career pathway as a liberal arts major is to focus on a subject that interests you while seeking out other course work or experience in a job-related field. In my case, I had a lifelong interest in technology.
During summer breaks in high school, I helped my father with the computer systems at his school. I also worked as an instructor at a local computer training center. While I didn't know it at the time, those experiences turned out to be extremely helpful as I considered my career options in college. Over time, I was able to combine my passion for history, my interest in education, my experience in technology, and my desire to start a business into a career in education technology. The creativity and critical thinking skills that I honed in college formed a solid foundation for me as I developed new skills in business through experience in the workplace and his MBA course work. Even as a business school student, I continued to seek out opportunities to combine those interests and created a unique path for myself. While many of my classmates pursued traditional MBA roles in consulting or investment banking, I spent the summer between my first and second years of business school working in an engineering laboratory. While there, I learned about some interesting new technologies that we now know as the World Wide Web. That's also where I met my Naviance cofounder and coauthor, who is another liberal arts major with a personal interest in technology.
Opportunity comes in many forms and from many directions, and no two pathways will be identical. Nor will every pathway be a straight line. And that's okay. Because I had been intentional about complementing my history degree with job-related skills, I was able to take advantage of these opportunities. If I hadn't thought about my career until after I finished my degree or if I'd tried to think of my career and my degree in isolation, I might have missed out.
Famous Liberal Arts Majors
Development Dimensions International, a global management consulting firm that focuses on leadership development in business, released a study in 2016, “High-Resolution Leadership,” that found liberal arts majors are especially well equipped to be business leaders. The study looked at data from more than fifteen thousand leaders and identified eight areas of expertise that are important to business leadership:
- Financial acumen
- Business savvy
- Compelling communication
- Driving execution
- Driving for results
- Entrepreneurship
- Influence
- Inspiring excellence
The study looked at how graduates from seven disciplines (business, engineering, law, humanities, information technology, natural sciences, and social sciences) performed in each area. Humanities majors tied business majors with each being rated as strong in five of eight areas. Business majors brought expertise in “financial acumen” and “business savvy,” which humanities majors lacked. But humanities majors scored especially well on “driving for results” and “inspiring excellence.” A humanities major with some formal training in business would excel in all eight areas.
Though many factors play into career choice, and no college degree can guarantee career success, it's not surprising to find many high-profile business leaders who have liberal arts degrees given the strong overlap between skills required in business and those developed through a liberal arts education. Here are a few examples:
- Ken Chenault, CEO of American Express (history)
- Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks (philosophy)
- Richard Plepler, CEO of HBO (government)
- Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard (medieval history and philosophy)
- Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup Company (economics and psychology)
- Steve Ells, chairman and co-CEO of Chipotle (art history)
- Frederick W. Smith, CEO of FedEx (economics)
- Abigail Johnson, president and CEO of Fidelity Investments (art history)
- Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs (history)
- Kenneth Frazier, CEO of Merck & Co. (political science)
- Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook (economics)
If working in business isn't your thing but you still want a degree in the liberal arts, there are lots of options. Other famous liberal arts graduates include talk show host and businesswoman Oprah Winfrey (speech communications and performing arts), comedian Steve Martin (philosophy), Governor Jerry Brown of California (classics), journalist Barbara Walters (English), and former president George W. Bush (history).
If my parents had this list twenty-five years ago they might not have worried as much about whether I would ever get a good job.
Short-Term and Long-Term Salaries and the Impact of Career Choice
We hope this chapter is helping you become more comfortable with the idea that liberal arts majors can be well prepared for career success. That said, it's probably fair to say that if short-term earnings are your teen's highest priority, the liberal arts may not be the best fit.
One of the reasons that technical degrees are popular and get so much attention is that their graduates tend to earn comparatively high starting salaries. According to data provided by job market analytics firm Burning Glass, the average starting salary in 2016 for jobs traditionally open to liberal arts graduates was $42,730. Jobs for graduates with some technical skills were $6,000 higher. Jobs for graduates with data analytics skills were $13,000 higher, and for graduates with computer programming skills, they were nearly $18,000 higher.1
If that were the end of the story and if maximizing starting salary were at the top of your teen's priorities, you might stop there. As we try to convey throughout this book, however, one's ideal career choice is based on many factors, including interests, strengths, and a personal view of what work means. If your teen's interests and strengths align with the liberal arts and she is comfortable with the starting salaries, you may be encouraged to know that over time, liberal arts majors generally catch up to and often surpass those with professional or preprofessional degrees, although those with technical degrees do earn somewhat higher salaries overall.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems studied long-term career and salary data for approximately 3 million U.S. residents with a bachelor's degree, which they group into four categories based on undergraduate major: humanities and social sciences; professional and preprofessional; physical sciences, natural sciences, and mathematics; and engineering. While its recent humanities graduates in their study earned less than those with professional and technical degrees, by midcareer they outearned their professional degree-holding peers and were employed at similar rates. According to the report, How Liberal Arts and Sciences Majors Fare in Employment, “While those with humanities or social science degrees earn nearly $5,000 less than those with professional or pre-professional degrees employed directly out of college, they earn more than $2,000 more at peak ages.”2 Engineering graduates are the highest earners on average—both immediately after graduation and later in their careers.
A key source of the salary differential comes from the career paths that graduates with different majors tend to pursue and, to an extent, the additional education required based on the chosen career. According to the same study, 50 percent of those working in social services fields such as counselors, social workers, and clergy, which tend to have relatively lower salaries than other fields requiring a college degree, hold undergraduate degrees in the humanities or social sciences. It can also be helpful to look at the most popular career paths by major. Teaching at the elementary or middle school level is the most popular profession for humanities and social sciences majors, at an average salary of just under $54,000. Management was the most popular profession for those with engineering degrees, at an average salary of just over $115,000. Among humanities and social sciences majors, four of the top twenty career choices paid an average salary of at least $100,000 compared to three of twenty for professional and preprofessional majors, nine of twenty for natural/physical sciences or mathematics majors, and fifteen of twenty for engineering majors. Looking at the top twenty career choices by major shows that no major has a monopoly on highly paid jobs.
Physicians and surgeons were highest paid among majors, with annual earnings of more than $260,000. Dentists were the second highest paid, with annual earnings of just under $153,000. Both of these career paths were among the top twenty professions for those who majored in natural/physical sciences or mathematics. But an undergraduate degree doesn't qualify anyone to work as a physician, surgeon, or dentist. Each of those careers requires a graduate degree, and in each of the four categories of majors in the study, a graduate degree led to a significant increase in average earnings. Humanities and social sciences majors with an advanced degree realized a gain in annual earnings of almost $20,000 versus those who had obtained a bachelor's degree alone.
When looking across the four categories of majors, average salary appears to align more closely with career than with college major. Despite concentrations of jobs at the higher end of the salary scale among physical/natural science or math majors, they earned salaries comparable to those of humanities and social sciences majors in similar careers. Consider elementary and middle school teachers as an example. Those with undergraduate degrees in humanities or social sciences earned just under $54,000, while those with undergraduate degrees in physical/natural sciences or math earned just under $52,000.
Although they may not earn the highest salaries immediately after graduating from college, liberal arts majors are well positioned for success in a wide array of career fields. With additional training or an advanced degree in business or a technical field, liberal arts majors can differentiate themselves from others with more specialized degrees and can often find themselves at a unique advantage when building their careers. In a separate study, the AACU found support among employers for critical elements of a liberal arts education. According to the study, 93 percent of employers believe that “a candidate's demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major,” and 91 percent of employers agree somewhat or strongly that “all students should have educational experiences that teach them how to solve problems with people whose views are different from their own.”3
Importantly, the choice of undergraduate major doesn't necessarily determine one's career path. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that nearly 40 percent of bachelor's degree holders work in a profession that is not directly related to their undergraduate major. While the choice of undergraduate major may not be a limiting factor in a choice of career, the decision to attend college, and, more important, the commitment to earn a bachelor's degree or higher in any field, can have a massive impact on employment and earnings. Those who earn a bachelor's degree or higher earn nearly twice as much each year as those with a high school diploma or less. Annual earnings are only part of the story. Those with a bachelor's degree or higher turned out to be far less vulnerable to job losses during the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010.
As you and your teen consider the liberal arts and other possible majors as a pathway to a career, find a field of study that aligns with your teen's interests and strengths and provides the foundation needed to be successful. Then identify a few careers that could be appealing. Given the importance of earning a degree to future success, teens need to pick a major that they know they'll want to finish. Picking a major they don't enjoy just because the career prospects look good on paper will make it hard for them to stay engaged in courses and increase the risk for dropping out.
As for me, as soon as I made the switch to history, I knew I had made the right choice. I was excited to see in the course catalogue all of the great options I'd have in the semesters ahead. In the twenty-five years that have passed since, history turned out to be the great foundation that I hoped it could be for both my MBA and my career.
Sample Earnings Outlook
Following is a sample of 2015 median annual earnings for various jobs accessible to liberal arts majors according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
- Elementary/middle school teacher: $54,550/$55,860
- Lawyer: $115,820
- General manager: $97,730
- Professor: $72,470
- Top executive: $102,690
- School principal: $90,410
For wage information on other careers in the field not listed here and for more detailed local wage information or job prospects, we recommend using the online Occupational Outlook Handbook provided free by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/home.htm.
Keep in mind that we are showing median pay, so some people in these roles may earn substantially less and others may earn substantially more. Generally pay is higher in locations where the cost of living is higher and in fields that are growing more rapidly or require more specialization and experience. In addition to using the Occupational Outlook Handbook website, we recommend that your child conduct an Internet search using terms like “future job prospects for [career name]” to get the most current outlook on industry growth potential.