As household budgets tighten and tuition costs rise, families and policymakers reasonably ask whether a college degree is worth the investment. Around half of US adults say a four-year degree is less important today for securing a well-paying job than it was 20 years ago, according to 2024 Pew Research Center survey.
Nowhere has this skepticism landed more heavily than on the humanities. Degrees in history, literature, philosophy and related fields are often portrayed as financially unwise compared with more “practical” STEM or business programmes. The message to students is clear: pursue engineering or finance if you want a job, and avoid the underemployed humanities.
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- Arts and humanities scholars can engage with policy, too
But this narrative oversimplifies the question of value and underestimates what humanities degrees offer – not just to students but to universities themselves and to society at large. If higher education institutions are serious about return on investment and future relevance, they must reframe the story of the humanities: that they offer viable career paths, strong institutional benefits and a distinctive contribution to the public good.
Defining the “value” of humanities degrees
Too often, usefulness is reduced to a starting salary. But higher education has never been only about a graduate’s first job. It is about preparing graduates for long careers, fluctuating labour markets and lives that contribute meaningfully to communities.
A University of Oxford 19-year study of more than 9,000 alumni demonstrates that humanities graduates develop broadly applicable skills: critical and strategic thinking, research and analysis, creative problem-solving, persuasive communication. Employers repeatedly rate these human-centred skills as essential. The CEO of Standard Chartered, for example, has said his most valuable preparation did not come from his MBA but from his undergraduate humanities degree, which “taught him how to think”.
At the institutional level, these robust skill sets help universities deliver on promises of employability, lifelong learning and civic engagement.
The earnings realities hiding in plain sight
Financial anxieties are real – but dismissing humanities degrees as a poor investment feeds a persistent earnings myth. For example, Australian data show that within a few years of graduation, humanities degree holders have employment rates equal to or even above those of science and maths graduates. Complementary research in other disciplines confirms the claim that humanities graduates are not locked into low-wage careers.
For university leadership, this matters: maintaining or expanding humanities programmes need not be cost-centred only; they can generate positive outcomes and support institutional metrics on graduate success.
Beyond the paycheque: making sense of the world
Humanities disciplines also provide tools to interpret and navigate contemporary life. Take art history, my own field. We live in a world saturated with visual information – from Instagram to emojis to advertising. As filmmaker Martin Scorsese has warned, young people must learn to critically interpret visual language or risk being overwhelmed by it. Art history cultivates “visual literacy” – the ability to question, decode and analyse images. This knowledge is not a luxury: it gives students strategies for success in a media-saturated society.
For institutions, humanities programmes can strengthen community engagement, public humanities initiatives, and interdisciplinary collaborations, thus enhancing their societal impact and institutional profile.
Interdisciplinarity, not competition
A third misconception is that the STEM-humanities dichotomy is a zero-sum game. But we know that the most powerful educational models are interdisciplinary. For instance, the CIO of Goldman Sachs has urged engineering students to study philosophy to stay ahead of artificial intelligence. I have seen engineering and business majors at Virginia Tech bring extraordinary creativity to art-history courses – and leave saying the humanities made them stronger in their own fields.
Universities that embed humanities into broader curricula – not as an afterthought but as a strategic knowledge base – can produce more innovative graduates, more cross-disciplinary research and stronger institutional resilience in a rapidly shifting higher-education landscape.
What higher education leaders can do
For university leadership who are weighing investment decisions and strategic positioning, here are three actionable steps:
Reframe value beyond salary
- Develop and publish institution-specific alumni-outcome data that tracks humanities graduates across five, 10 and 15 years (not just immediately postgraduate).
- Pair that with qualitative case studies showing how humanities alumni adapt, lead and innovate.
- Communicate these findings through admissions materials, alumni networks and internal dashboards so that stakeholders (students, donors, trustees) see the value humanities bring.
Champion interdisciplinarity as a strategic asset
- Create co-taught or collaborative modules (such as Ethics and AI or Narrative and Data Visualisation) that bring together humanities faculty with STEM, business or professional schools.
- Develop joint programmes or microcredentials that integrate humanities thinking with technical skills (for example, digital humanities and data analytics). Medical students at Yale University, for instance, study art history to hone visual perception skills and develop critical thinking.
- Incentivise faculty (through workload adjustment, seed funding or recognition) who lead cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Communicate humanities’ relevance to contemporary issues
- Launch a series – an example is Humanities in the World at Brown University – that demonstrates how your institution links departmental research to real-time societal challenges (such as AI ethics, misinformation or climate-change communication).
- Partner with external stakeholders (cultural institutions, industry, government, NGOs) to design internships or service-learning projects where humanities graduates contribute directly to emerging fields (through ethics review boards, content moderation or cultural-heritage technology).
- Compile metrics for impact (not simply enrolments), for example: percentage of humanities courses with embedded experiential learning or number of interdisciplinary certificates of external partnerships – and report these transparently to trustees and funders.
By demonstrating the effectiveness of the humanities, university leadership turns these studies from “nice to have” into a strategic, long-term investment. These disciplines enhance institutional reputation, diversify revenue streams (via joint programmes, microcredentials or applied research) and position the university as a leader in equipping graduates for the 21st-century workforce and society.
The real return on a humanities degree is not measured in the first paycheque but through a lifetime of flexible thinking and cultural understanding. As we prepare graduates for an uncertain future – economic, technological and environmental – the skills fostered by the humanities are not optional. They are indispensable.
Michelle Moseley-Christian is associate professor of art history and co-director of the Material Culture and Public Humanities MA programme in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.
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