I'm just marveling that art history makes more than someone else. Should put that on recruitment posters: "Make more than your BFA classmates!" This does include people 25-64, so we're not looking mostly at recent grads. Maybe it just means that art history and philosophy grads wind up working in the trades? :)
Not to be a complete snark, but a phrase that we used in the Navy was "choose your rate, choose your fate.". Did anyone, back when we were all getting our advanced degrees, consider that an assistant professor in Chemistry would earn well more than a associate professor in the humanities? In our words, didn't the humanities graduate students (and the professors that they have become) not think that the laws of supply and demand would follow them into academia?
Back in the day, even English proffies made a decent salary. In my English department-affiliated Master's Program (c. 1995), the profs were advising new Ph.D.s to not take a position for less than $45K (though many peers took short-term contracts for $35K). My friends who acquired their Ph.D.s in a program that straddles the humanities/social science line were getting positions in 2005 for...$45k.
For me, this means there was no increase for inflation...along with a proliferation of contingent positions for less money. This has been a dramatic shift in the compensation being offered that NO ONE warned us about. It was aided and abetted by outright lies from professors (sometimes based on their own arrogant ignorance of the "job market") and the rise of the business-model takeover by administrators with MBAs, who wanted to cut the budget while simultaneously building more dorms for more students who will pay more tuition.
So, this "supply and demand" rhetoric really is irrelevant when there are socially based authorities who are stacking the deck against their employees. There are PLENTY of job opportunities for humanities profs in academia. The administration has simply CHOSEN to de-fund them and pay their employees a pittance to do one of the (potentially) most important roles during a college student's education. Funny how the same thing has been happening to another liberal arts-based discipline: Mathematics.
I don't think that people who are doing something they enjoy -- artists, musicians, humanities scholars -- use systems like "math" to decide career paths. To the artistic, it seems crass and passionless.
But I also see middle class parents who want their kids to "follow their dreams." My parents certainly never said anything about how stupid this was, they just wanted to be supportive.
Come to think of it, that's how my profs treated it, too. I feel even now like I'm lowering a big surprise when I explain to my students that this is not a very good idea.
Yeah, ChemRocks, who is disingenouously pretending not to want to be snarky, I was LURED INTO the Humanities and away from, say, law or business school, with a big fellowship and promises from a national research organization that there would be an undersupply of humanities profs. It was like Uncle Sam in a tweed coat with suede patches pointing at us: WE NEED YOU.
Surprisingly, there has not been a class action suit against said national research organization. I suppose this is because we did get a free Ph.D. out of the whole mess.
CR, that's impolite. If you want to know how it feels to work just as hard, be just as smart and make much less than other faculty, go hang out with those worthless engineering sons of bitches.
Well, the supply side of the issue should also be considered! There are humanities departments with huge numbers of grad students (history, english, anthropology) that will have a MUCH harder time finding positions because the number of available faculty positions is hopelessly dwarfed by the astounding number of graduates! Like it or not, every recent PhD in my department have gone pretty easily into post doc postions making fairly good money. Do what you love and love what you do, but please don't be surprised if some glutted fields can get by indefinitely with adjunct labor AND not looking at the eventual job market (no bucks, no Buck Rogers!) is poor recommendation. As a freshman, I loved english and history! I also knew that I wanted to be comfortable and not strapped for cash, so I made the choice to be in a field for which I KNEW there would be OK salaries and job stability. All I would say is that the message that I want to pass on to undergrads is that they should, at a very early point in their education, make decisions not JUST based upon the joy of the field (history rocks, sometimes WAY harder than Chemistry!!!) but also upon OTHER factors, like eventual employment and long term happiness with their field. I've had bioscience majors change tracks to nursing because they discovered that they just didn't want to head off to grad school as soon as they were finished with undergrad. I thank the responders to my original post! I like the give and take and I very respectfully disagree on a few of their points. Sorry, Frog and Toad, I really wan't trying to be snarky and I'm sorry if you took it to be so! I was sort of scratching my head when I wrote my reply.
Watch out ChemRocks, I wager you'll be eating your words in a few years. Be careful when you boast about getting postdoc positions. It sounds great the first time, but when you're on your third or fourth, a 'postdoc' just becomes the sciences' word for 'adjunct.
The sciences are under the same pressure to crank out graduate degrees in excess of demand as any other discipline. There is endless rhetoric about the need to compete internationally by training more students, but most of the reports with data show a glut of PhD's in the STEM disciplines. It's worst in the biomedical sciences, but probably affects the other sciences as well. Nature did a whole section on it a few weeks ago.
But your're absolutely right that students should think about what they plan to do with their degree and not just assume that their degree is a ticket to a good job as university marketing departments would have them believe. My uni's engineering faculty is cranking up enrolment to balance their budget, not to fill some market need. Law schools have already done the same and many newly minted lawyers can't find work.
A) Of COURSE we didn't really know what we were getting into-- we were 23-year old 1st generation college grads who were just thrilled to have gone to school in the first place and weren't filling out spreadsheets to carefully determine our future earnings potential but just moving forward into adulthood on autopilot, and when a high verbal GRE resulted in schools tossing handfuls of recruitment cash our way it was a compelling argument-- this was clearly a vocation we were cut out for and we were the anointed ones and would SUCCEED. For certain values of success. B) For some of us 46,000 is still more than our parents ever made (combined)and teaching in the soft squishy humanities remain a very pleasant albeit modest life style. There are much worse fates. It's nice work, if you can get it (which, new grads, you probably can't, but, like us, you won't listen, either. See Points A and C). C) Humanities mantra: LABOR OF LOVE, BABY! LABOR OF LOVE! It takes a firm sense of self to KEEP chanting that after graduation, but remember when it wasn't about the money, it was just what we were REALLY INTERESTED IN? We were going to get by, somehow, and damn the torpedoes, we love Anthony Trollope/Yoruba carving/15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphony/Old Church Slavonic grammar.
Somehow this thread got misdirected on to the question of proffie salaries, which vary an awful lot--especially by institution--and not always in the discipline specific ways that people like Chemrockhead seem to think. Anyway, we've danced the proffie salary dance before in these parts, and I have no desire to revisit that topic.
The article from which the data were clipped were actually about the median entry-level salaries of very recent BA and BS recipients. Most such studies are flawed, but at least this one went for the median instead of the mean salary (there's a famous example of misleading use of the mean by the UVA communications department that appears in several basic stats textbooks). So there's that. But Chemrockhead might want to take a quick look at the larger chart and see that the median Chem major isn't doing spectacularly better than the median history majors on that particular scale.
The main problem I have with this chart is that it doesn't say much about the long-term earnings of these people. If lucre is the object, there are plenty of lucrative career paths open to a 21-year-old humanities major--at least a couple of partners at Goldman Sucks were English majors in college--who wants to make bank, just as there are far more modestly remunerated careers open to science and engineering majors who don't want to do certain kinds of work.
So my main problem here is that kids read this kind of shit, and then they decide that it actually means something, when it is deeply misleading. If you want to be an engineer or a scientist, then sure, you should major in those things. But beyond that, what you major in doesn't really mean that much in terms of your future career trajectory, and it doesn't necessarily mean much in terms of future earnings.
The chart is good for some giggles--I agree with Lemur that Art History majors shouldn't be outearning anyone--but it doesn't really mean much in the end.
"I agree with Lemur that Art History majors shouldn't be outearning anyone. . ." Oh no no, that's not what I said, I just said I'm SURPRISED at it. No hate here. I wish they'd put together a chart like this that includes the trades/ various vocational/tech/trade degrees to provide some stats for the people who are more suited towards the applied side of things than books-academia.
I was joking (mostly). I'm actually not that surprised. Art Historians have some genuine options in a variety of professional fields that are at least tangentially related to things visual. Again, for those who are in it for the lucre, an old, old friend of mine who majored in Art History is now George Soros' personal art buyer. Want to bet his is bigger than yours? I know it is bigger than mine.
And as for the Matt Crawford "shopclass" comparison, I couldn't agree more. Let's put it all up against licensed plumbers or electricians and see how they do. I don't necessarily buy the "suited, not suited" part of it, as I'm a believer in Crawford's argument about the mental engagement required by many trades. But then I have some personal experience in the matter. At any rate, if they are too stupid to make through EMH's remedial algebra course, I really, really don't want them working on my wiring. But leaving that aside, since so many of my undergraduates think they are being highly instrumental in their choice of major, they probably ought to see the whole ugly truth, not just the college grad part of it.
I don't understand why the confusion seemed to creep into the comments. From the link, the first thing you read is:
"The economic value of a bachelor’s degree varies by college major. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that median earnings run from $29,000 for counseling-psychology majors to $120,000 for petroleum-engineering majors. Even when majors are looked at by groups, such as business or health, there is variation in pay depending on the specific major."
Going back off topic: count me in as another humanist who was told there would be a shortage of humanities proffies in the '90s, and actually went to grad school on a competitive, prestigious, etc., etc. fellowship designed to alleviate said shortage. I know a good many other recipients of that fellowship who are doing things other than working in higher ed, and a few others beside myself who are in contingent positions after trying for years to find a TT job. I don't know how carefully I would have investigated the matter if no one had been saying anything about job prospects, but there was certainly no indication that I needed to do so; in fact, we were being told, in no uncertain terms, that we would be needed.
I note that "theology and religious vocations" is at the bottom of the barrel. I actually make less than all of the full-time employees of my church, except for the secretaries, the long-time building superintendent, and the youth director. The secretaries and the building superintendent are underpaid; the youth director's salary will probably be reasonable, given the fact that he's 22 and fresh out of college, once he becomes full-time this summer. Admittedly my denomination is adamant about congregations not hiring people to positions such as pastor, director of Christian Education, organist/choirmaster, etc. (all of which require at least an M.A.) unless they can afford to pay them something that resembles a living wage (one of the things I like about it), but, since church salaries are notoriously low, it does put things in perspective. Perhaps "poor as church mice" needs to become "poor as university mice"? Though, come to think of it, with all the food-court-style dining options, the squirrels on my campus look pretty well-fed. I haven't encountered any mice (wasps living above the ceiling tiles, yes; mice, no).
And yes, definitely, these charts should include plumbers, and electricians, and auto mechanics, all important jobs that require considerable brains (but not necessarily as much brawn as is usually assumed; I'm always cheered by stories of women who'd been squeaking by juggling multiple service and pink-collar-ghetto type jobs, then signed up for training with a local trade union, and found themselves in a position to provide much, much better for themselves and their children, frequently with fewer hours on the job).
Lovely. Anybody else here have a master's and doctorate, yet earn only $5K-$10K more than the median salary of the B.A. students they graduate?
ReplyDeleteAhhh....college misery.
MSc and PhD, and I earn about 20k UNDER the median salary for the students I graduate.
ReplyDeleteLife: I'm doing it wrong.
Can't argue with the "Area Ethnic and Civilization Studies" one....
ReplyDeletethe crushing defeat. So much more education, earning so much less than my undergrads. The pain!!
ReplyDeleteI'm just marveling that art history makes more than someone else. Should put that on recruitment posters: "Make more than your BFA classmates!" This does include people 25-64, so we're not looking mostly at recent grads. Maybe it just means that art history and philosophy grads wind up working in the trades? :)
ReplyDeleteWould you like fries with that, Dr. Lemurpants?
ReplyDelete:o)
Shoulda gotten that degree in Petroleum Engineering, I guess... so much more socially redeeming value to it, too.
ReplyDeleteNot to be a complete snark, but a phrase that we used in the Navy was "choose your rate, choose your fate.". Did anyone, back when we were all getting our advanced degrees, consider that an assistant professor in Chemistry would earn well more than a associate professor in the humanities? In our words, didn't the humanities graduate students (and the professors that they have become) not think that the laws of supply and demand would follow them into academia?
ReplyDeleteUh...Chemistry Rocks,
ReplyDeleteBack in the day, even English proffies made a decent salary. In my English department-affiliated Master's Program (c. 1995), the profs were advising new Ph.D.s to not take a position for less than $45K (though many peers took short-term contracts for $35K). My friends who acquired their Ph.D.s in a program that straddles the humanities/social science line were getting positions in 2005 for...$45k.
For me, this means there was no increase for inflation...along with a proliferation of contingent positions for less money. This has been a dramatic shift in the compensation being offered that NO ONE warned us about. It was aided and abetted by outright lies from professors (sometimes based on their own arrogant ignorance of the "job market") and the rise of the business-model takeover by administrators with MBAs, who wanted to cut the budget while simultaneously building more dorms for more students who will pay more tuition.
So, this "supply and demand" rhetoric really is irrelevant when there are socially based authorities who are stacking the deck against their employees. There are PLENTY of job opportunities for humanities profs in academia. The administration has simply CHOSEN to de-fund them and pay their employees a pittance to do one of the (potentially) most important roles during a college student's education. Funny how the same thing has been happening to another liberal arts-based discipline: Mathematics.
@Chemistry
ReplyDeleteI don't think that people who are doing something they enjoy -- artists, musicians, humanities scholars -- use systems like "math" to decide career paths. To the artistic, it seems crass and passionless.
But I also see middle class parents who want their kids to "follow their dreams." My parents certainly never said anything about how stupid this was, they just wanted to be supportive.
Come to think of it, that's how my profs treated it, too. I feel even now like I'm lowering a big surprise when I explain to my students that this is not a very good idea.
Yeah, ChemRocks, who is disingenouously pretending not to want to be snarky, I was LURED INTO the Humanities and away from, say, law or business school, with a big fellowship and promises from a national research organization that there would be an undersupply of humanities profs. It was like Uncle Sam in a tweed coat with suede patches pointing at us: WE NEED YOU.
ReplyDeleteSurprisingly, there has not been a class action suit against said national research organization. I suppose this is because we did get a free Ph.D. out of the whole mess.
CR, that's impolite. If you want to know how it feels to work just as hard, be just as smart and make much less than other faculty, go hang out with those worthless engineering sons of bitches.
ReplyDeleteWell, the supply side of the issue should also be considered! There are humanities departments with huge numbers of grad students (history, english, anthropology) that will have a MUCH harder time finding positions because the number of available faculty positions is hopelessly dwarfed by the astounding number of graduates! Like it or not, every recent PhD in my department have gone pretty easily into post doc postions making fairly good money.
ReplyDeleteDo what you love and love what you do, but please don't be surprised if some glutted fields can get by indefinitely with adjunct labor AND not looking at the eventual job market (no bucks, no Buck Rogers!) is poor recommendation.
As a freshman, I loved english and history! I also knew that I wanted to be comfortable and not strapped for cash, so I made the choice to be in a field for which I KNEW there would be OK salaries and job stability.
All I would say is that the message that I want to pass on to undergrads is that they should, at a very early point in their education, make decisions not JUST based upon the joy of the field (history rocks, sometimes WAY harder than Chemistry!!!) but also upon OTHER factors, like eventual employment and long term happiness with their field. I've had bioscience majors change tracks to nursing because they discovered that they just didn't want to head off to grad school as soon as they were finished with undergrad.
I thank the responders to my original post! I like the give and take and I very respectfully disagree on a few of their points. Sorry, Frog and Toad, I really wan't trying to be snarky and I'm sorry if you took it to be so! I was sort of scratching my head when I wrote my reply.
Watch out ChemRocks, I wager you'll be eating your words in a few years. Be careful when you boast about getting postdoc positions. It sounds great the first time, but when you're on your third or fourth, a 'postdoc' just becomes the sciences' word for 'adjunct.
ReplyDeleteThe sciences are under the same pressure to crank out graduate degrees in excess of demand as any other discipline. There is endless rhetoric about the need to compete internationally by training more students, but most of the reports with data show a glut of PhD's in the STEM disciplines. It's worst in the biomedical sciences, but probably affects the other sciences as well. Nature did a whole section on it a few weeks ago.
But your're absolutely right that students should think about what they plan to do with their degree and not just assume that their degree is a ticket to a good job as university marketing departments would have them believe. My uni's engineering faculty is cranking up enrolment to balance their budget, not to fill some market need. Law schools have already done the same and many newly minted lawyers can't find work.
Supply and demand, brother, supply and demand.
A) Of COURSE we didn't really know what we were getting into-- we were 23-year old 1st generation college grads who were just thrilled to have gone to school in the first place and weren't filling out spreadsheets to carefully determine our future earnings potential but just moving forward into adulthood on autopilot, and when a high verbal GRE resulted in schools tossing handfuls of recruitment cash our way it was a compelling argument-- this was clearly a vocation we were cut out for and we were the anointed ones and would SUCCEED. For certain values of success.
ReplyDeleteB) For some of us 46,000 is still more than our parents ever made (combined)and teaching in the soft squishy humanities remain a very pleasant albeit modest life style. There are much worse fates. It's nice work, if you can get it (which, new grads, you probably can't, but, like us, you won't listen, either. See Points A and C).
C) Humanities mantra: LABOR OF LOVE, BABY! LABOR OF LOVE! It takes a firm sense of self to KEEP chanting that after graduation, but remember when it wasn't about the money, it was just what we were REALLY INTERESTED IN? We were going to get by, somehow, and damn the torpedoes, we love Anthony Trollope/Yoruba carving/15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphony/Old Church Slavonic grammar.
Somehow this thread got misdirected on to the question of proffie salaries, which vary an awful lot--especially by institution--and not always in the discipline specific ways that people like Chemrockhead seem to think. Anyway, we've danced the proffie salary dance before in these parts, and I have no desire to revisit that topic.
ReplyDeleteThe article from which the data were clipped were actually about the median entry-level salaries of very recent BA and BS recipients. Most such studies are flawed, but at least this one went for the median instead of the mean salary (there's a famous example of misleading use of the mean by the UVA communications department that appears in several basic stats textbooks). So there's that. But Chemrockhead might want to take a quick look at the larger chart and see that the median Chem major isn't doing spectacularly better than the median history majors on that particular scale.
The main problem I have with this chart is that it doesn't say much about the long-term earnings of these people. If lucre is the object, there are plenty of lucrative career paths open to a 21-year-old humanities major--at least a couple of partners at Goldman Sucks were English majors in college--who wants to make bank, just as there are far more modestly remunerated careers open to science and engineering majors who don't want to do certain kinds of work.
So my main problem here is that kids read this kind of shit, and then they decide that it actually means something, when it is deeply misleading. If you want to be an engineer or a scientist, then sure, you should major in those things. But beyond that, what you major in doesn't really mean that much in terms of your future career trajectory, and it doesn't necessarily mean much in terms of future earnings.
The chart is good for some giggles--I agree with Lemur that Art History majors shouldn't be outearning anyone--but it doesn't really mean much in the end.
"I agree with Lemur that Art History majors shouldn't be outearning anyone. . ."
ReplyDeleteOh no no, that's not what I said, I just said I'm SURPRISED at it. No hate here.
I wish they'd put together a chart like this that includes the trades/ various vocational/tech/trade degrees to provide some stats for the people who are more suited towards the applied side of things than books-academia.
I was joking (mostly). I'm actually not that surprised. Art Historians have some genuine options in a variety of professional fields that are at least tangentially related to things visual. Again, for those who are in it for the lucre, an old, old friend of mine who majored in Art History is now George Soros' personal art buyer. Want to bet his is bigger than yours? I know it is bigger than mine.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for the Matt Crawford "shopclass" comparison, I couldn't agree more. Let's put it all up against licensed plumbers or electricians and see how they do. I don't necessarily buy the "suited, not suited" part of it, as I'm a believer in Crawford's argument about the mental engagement required by many trades. But then I have some personal experience in the matter. At any rate, if they are too stupid to make through EMH's remedial algebra course, I really, really don't want them working on my wiring. But leaving that aside, since so many of my undergraduates think they are being highly instrumental in their choice of major, they probably ought to see the whole ugly truth, not just the college grad part of it.
I don't understand why the confusion seemed to creep into the comments. From the link, the first thing you read is:
ReplyDelete"The economic value of a bachelor’s degree varies by college major. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that median earnings run from $29,000 for counseling-psychology majors to $120,000 for petroleum-engineering majors. Even when majors are looked at by groups, such as business or health, there is variation in pay depending on the specific major."
Going back off topic: count me in as another humanist who was told there would be a shortage of humanities proffies in the '90s, and actually went to grad school on a competitive, prestigious, etc., etc. fellowship designed to alleviate said shortage. I know a good many other recipients of that fellowship who are doing things other than working in higher ed, and a few others beside myself who are in contingent positions after trying for years to find a TT job. I don't know how carefully I would have investigated the matter if no one had been saying anything about job prospects, but there was certainly no indication that I needed to do so; in fact, we were being told, in no uncertain terms, that we would be needed.
ReplyDeleteI note that "theology and religious vocations" is at the bottom of the barrel. I actually make less than all of the full-time employees of my church, except for the secretaries, the long-time building superintendent, and the youth director. The secretaries and the building superintendent are underpaid; the youth director's salary will probably be reasonable, given the fact that he's 22 and fresh out of college, once he becomes full-time this summer. Admittedly my denomination is adamant about congregations not hiring people to positions such as pastor, director of Christian Education, organist/choirmaster, etc. (all of which require at least an M.A.) unless they can afford to pay them something that resembles a living wage (one of the things I like about it), but, since church salaries are notoriously low, it does put things in perspective. Perhaps "poor as church mice" needs to become "poor as university mice"? Though, come to think of it, with all the food-court-style dining options, the squirrels on my campus look pretty well-fed. I haven't encountered any mice (wasps living above the ceiling tiles, yes; mice, no).
And yes, definitely, these charts should include plumbers, and electricians, and auto mechanics, all important jobs that require considerable brains (but not necessarily as much brawn as is usually assumed; I'm always cheered by stories of women who'd been squeaking by juggling multiple service and pink-collar-ghetto type jobs, then signed up for training with a local trade union, and found themselves in a position to provide much, much better for themselves and their children, frequently with fewer hours on the job).
ReplyDelete