Bottom Line: Studying Humanities Won't Make You Jobless

Bottom Line: Studying Humanities Won’t Make You Jobless

When my students enjoy studying humanities or social sciences in high school, I always encourage them to do so. They get to pursue their interests while improving their college applications. But then their parents get nervous. They should be focusing on math or science. What if they don’t get a job in the future?

While I understand these concerns, I assure parents that their children will naturally try to get the best jobs they can based on what’s available in the job market. Studying humanities in high school doesn’t mean they’re going to become professional novelists.

What happens to strong humanities students after high school? To find out, I talked to five of my former students who had won the top English award in their respective high school classes.

They all chose college majors that led to good jobs.

For these students, studying humanities in high school didn’t stop them from choosing majors that led to good jobs. Among these students, three majored in CS, one majored in economics, and one in linguistics and sociology.

As expected, they considered future job prospects when choosing their majors. Tommy, who studied CS at Rice University, majored in CS over English for job purposes. He said, “There was a clear pipeline to getting a job in CS, but there wasn’t in English.” He’s now a software engineer at a startup in Silicon Valley.

Victor, who studied CS at Georgia Tech, spent his college years trying to become a software engineer. He now works at Google.

Of course, not all of them went the engineering route. Juliana, who studied linguistics and sociology at Stanford University, has published two chapbooks of poetry. But she also realized that the life of a full-time writer was not for her. “I don’t want to spend all of my time marketing myself, which is what I would have to do as a writer,” she explained.

Instead, she has found her passion studying labor and employment law at Harvard Law School, where she is an editor on the Harvard Law Review and pursuing a career as a law professor.

They use their strong oral and written communication skills.

Reading novels may not help you on the job, but studying humanities is about more than just reading novels. Humanities classes teach you how to use language in a logical, concise, and persuasive way, which is useful in any workplace setting.

“Knowing how to write succinctly is helpful in herding opinions towards consensus. Google is design-driven, and I always keep Strunk’s Elements of Style in mind when I write documents,” said Victor, who believes that his humanities skills will become even more useful as he progresses in his career. “It’ll definitely help you once you reach people management and director-level, which relies on data-based storytelling to herd people,” he said.

Similarly, for Jessica*, the skills she developed in her high school humanities classes and Model United Nations helped her get noticed by her economics professors at UC Berkeley. They immediately started grooming her for a career in academia. She now works as a researcher at MIT and will be pursuing a PhD in economics afterwards.

They still enjoy humanities, even if it has nothing to do with their jobs.

Some students continued to take humanities classes in college, even if it had nothing to do with their future jobs. Mark*, who majored in CS at Harvard University, chose to complete a secondary concentration in English. Today, English has little to do with his day job as a quantitative trader on Wall Street, but his love of reading and writing still remain.

Other students have continued to read for fun even after entering the workforce. Tommy tries to read a book every two months. He said, “I like historical fiction, so I enjoy feeling present with the author at that moment in time, being immersed in a different world.”

Why not give humanities a try?

Studying humanities in high school has more benefits than risks. By no means is it the end of one’s career. When students ask me how they can stand out in the college application process, I say, “Why not give humanities or social sciences a try?”

*This name was changed to protect the identity of the individual.