Rethinking the Unmarketable Major
Inside the fight for the humanities at Michigan
—By Lily Miro
At Michigan, one question trails students from orientation to graduation: “What do you want to do after college?” The need for a confident answer often drives them toward majors that seem to promise one. In that climate, humanities fields don’t quite feel like the “safe” choice. English, history, philosophy, and other core disciplines are quietly shrinking as students flock to majors that seem to offer clearer, faster paths to jobs.
Between 2001 and 2023, humanities majors at the University of Michigan, such as English and French, saw enrollment decline by upwards of 67.7%. Meanwhile, STEM majors, such as Computer Science, increased by over 500%.
This pattern isn’t unique to Michigan. In 2021, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project reported that the total number of humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States had fallen by 25% since 2012. The declines within individual disciplines are even starker: from 2012 to 2022, degrees awarded in English Language and Literature have dropped from 53,207 to 32,893, and degrees in History have dropped from 35,334 to 21,572.
Christina Moreiras-Menor, a professor of Spanish and Women’s Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, has watched that shift unfold up close. “Humanities are still praised in speeches and brochures,” she says, “yet resources tend to flow toward STEM initiatives. In some ways, [humanities] have become the conscience of the university, even when we aren’t given equal support.”
At a top public university like Michigan, where world-class research and the liberal arts are supposed to share the spotlight, what does that imbalance actually look like? And what does it feel like for the students and faculty still devoted to studying subjects that many of their peers now dismiss as impractical?
A campus culture of “practicality”
For many students, the way Michigan’s schools are divided doesn’t just shape academics; it shapes culture. Because business and engineering students are housed in separate buildings, they rarely interact with humanities majors. When they do, it is typically through distribution requirements rather than shared intellectual communities. Over time, that separation can harden into hierarchy.
Mary V. Carnell, a senior studying History and Economics in LSA, points directly to the consequences of this institutional design: “the fact that Michigan has basically taken all of their more vocational majors and removed them from liberal arts and sciences creates a culture like that.”
The message, whether intentional or not, is that LSA represents the “non-professional” path, with the humanities often viewed as the “least professional” of all. Yet beneath that perception lies a misconception: humanities graduates do find meaningful, stable work, and their long-term earnings often rival those of their peers in other fields.
Employment for humanities graduates
According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) report, humanities and social science graduates in their early careers earn approximately $4,900 less than those in professional or pre-professional majors. However, by the ages of 56 to 60, this gap reverses, with humanities and social science majors earning roughly $2,000 more on average.
Additionally, the Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) report finds that 14 of the 19 humanities and arts majors yield median earnings above the 25th percentile of STEM majors, with a range from about $58,000 to $73,000.
While the decline in humanities majors may reflect a capitalist shift toward “profitable” degrees, the shrinking number of students in these fields could actually become a competitive advantage.
According to workforce intelligence data from Revelio Labs, between 2008 and 2024, degrees in History and English (along with other liberal arts disciplines) have experienced the steepest declines. Yet, job opportunities for these same fields have grown 43% faster than the national average, while opportunities for the more popular majors have dropped by 22%.
Although these roles may not give a straightforward path to the highest starting salaries, the changing job market suggests that the value of a humanities degree is evolving. Revelio Labs notes, “as AI takes on more specialized tasks, employers will prize graduates with diverse skill sets and the ability to reason.” Thus, the very skills cultivated through the humanities are becoming increasingly indispensable in an age of technological advancement.
Skills that matter
But beyond salaries, what employers say they value most often aligns closely with the foundation of a humanities education. A national survey by the AAC&U asked executives and hiring managers across industries which skills mattered most in hiring and promotion. The answers were telling: oral and written communication, critical thinking, ethical judgment, teamwork, and the ability to apply knowledge in real-world settings.
These are precisely the skills that humanities majors are built to develop. “Humanities students learn to listen deeply, revise their thinking, and sit with moral complexity,” says Moreiras-Menor. “Those habits are not flashy, but they shape the kind of people others want to work with.”
In practice, those habits translate into adaptability and leadership, traits that employers consistently rank among the most essential in a rapidly changing economy. Whether it’s navigating ethical questions around AI or managing diverse teams, the ability to think critically, communicate clearly, and empathize with others is what keeps workplaces human. Together, these skills form a kind of quiet power; one that’s less about specialization and more about understanding, collaboration, and the capacity to see problems from multiple angles.
James Pinto, an English lecturer at the University of Michigan, describes that broader purpose as “community building.” To him, the humanities matter because they foster “communication, community, empathy.” “The Venn diagram of those things overlaps a lot,” he adds, “and the humanities are at the center of it.”
That sense of community is also reflected in the way these skills are taught. Megan Sweeney, chair of Michigan’s English department, explains that humanities programs train students “to engage with people whose experiences may be vastly different from theirs” and “to communicate with all kinds of different audiences.”
For students like Amanda Jaffe, a senior majoring in economics, the difference is felt most clearly in the classroom. When a required real estate course conflicted with her final English class, she reluctantly dropped her creative writing minor. “One reason why I liked my English classes was that they were 15-person classes and you really got to know the people around you and your professor,” she says. That level of engagement, she adds, is rare in large economics lecture halls.
In these intimate, discussion-based spaces, students aren’t just learning to write essays; they’re learning how to listen, collaborate, and stay curious. And as the workplace evolves, those are precisely the skills that remain in demand.
The pressure to be “marketable”
“One of the biggest barriers to advocating for the humanities is the cultural obsession with return on investment,” says Moreiras-Menor. “People want majors to guarantee jobs, even though education has never worked like that before.”
That mindset has only intensified. A 2022 Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found that 60% of bachelor’s degree students say an important reason they’re pursuing their degree is that “it will help them achieve a higher-paying job.”
For students like Jaffe, that tension feels familiar. “I know at the end of the day, I picked Econ because I thought it would be the most helpful for me eventually going down a career path, and I was decently good at it,” she says.
While it’s true that humanities graduates can and do build successful, well-paying careers, focusing solely on salary may miss the point. English lecturer James Pinto sees that logic as self-defeating. “Fighting the battle on the dollar-sign terrain is a losing battle,” he says. “[Humanities departments] need to make a competent case for something else—for connection, for meaning, for community.”
That case, Pinto argues, begins with redefining value itself. While marketable skills and majors can secure a paycheck, they can’t replace the deeper purpose of education: to teach people how to think, question, and imagine. The challenge for universities now is not just to defend the humanities, but to remind students, as well as the public, why they matter in the first place.
Mentality of scarcity
For students like Carnell, the deeper issue isn’t just about job prospects; it’s about what happens to a society that stops valuing the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Many people view the humanities as an elitist kind of self-indulgence precisely because they struggle to see an immediate, measurable outcome from studying subjects like history or literature.
“Nobody thinks about the fact that knowledge for an individual is knowledge for the world,” Carnell explains. Without that broader perspective, education risks becoming solely a means to an economic end.
That mindset, she argues, stems from a cultural shift in how we define education itself. “People see college as vocational school,” she says. “But there also has to be a place for this rigorous study of the humanities.”
Sweeney echoes this sentiment, pointing out that a collective “mentality of scarcity” has narrowed the perceived value of knowledge itself. “There’s this idea that there’s only one way to be practical,” she explains. “But we need so many different ways of addressing the complexity of human experience.”
For Sweeney, the humanities play an indispensable role in expanding those ways of knowing. She draws on examples from the medical humanities, where the stories people tell can shape who receives care and how scientific discovery unfolds.
One striking example, she notes, comes from gender studies within science. “There was a lot of really interesting gendered analysis of science about 20 or 30 years ago,” she explains, “showing how much discovery was impeded by gender assumptions that literally prevented scientists and medical professionals from seeing what was happening.”
Building on this idea, in the early 2000s, the Yale School of Medicine required all first-year students to take a course titled “The Art of Observation.” Crafted by Irwin Braverman and art educator Linda Friedlaender, the class took students into the Yale Center for British Art museum to carefully analyse British paintings and articulate what they observed, before applying that attentiveness to clinical images of disease.
The result: students improved by nearly 10% in their ability to detect subtle visual details when compared to peers who did not take the course. This illustrates how humanities-based observation training can directly sharpen physicians’ diagnostic awareness rather than serving only as ancillary enrichment.
That, Sweeney argues, is precisely where the humanities make their mark. By questioning the cultural biases embedded in scientific language and practice, they help researchers see what might otherwise remain invisible. In that sense, the humanities don’t compete with science; they complement it. “It’s another angle,” Sweeney says. “We need all of the above.”
Just as identifying a disease-causing cell advances medicine, understanding the cultural narratives that shape illness and care advances humanity’s collective understanding. Together, Carnell and Sweeney argue that when education values only what appears immediately “useful,” it risks impoverishing our shared imagination, limiting not just what we can do, but what we can even see.
Moving forward
If the past few years have revealed anything, from the isolation of Covid-19 to the rapid rise of AI, it’s that community, empathy, and reflection are not luxuries; they’re necessities. In a world increasingly defined by efficiency, automation, and output, the humanities remind us to slow down. They remind us to think, to question, and to connect.
“Humanities are good at developing patience,” Sweeney explains. “It’s a slow practice of insisting on being able to understand what’s in front of you. Learning to take the time to parse challenging ideas and engage across lines of difference will serve you in absolutely everything you do, because you will always be working with people whose experiences are not yours.”
That kind of patience, the ability to sit with complexity, uncertainty, and difference, is a skill that no algorithm can replicate. It’s also a skill the world urgently needs. The humanities equip people to ask deeper questions about what progress actually means and who it serves. They remind us that technology alone cannot solve human problems without human understanding.
“There’s nothing in the world that isn’t touched by the ways we tell stories, the ways we make meaning, the ways we use language,” says Sweeney. “And that’s what the humanities are about.” Her point echoes across disciplines: every field, from medicine to business to computer science, ultimately depends on the ability to communicate clearly and understand human behavior. The humanities give students those tools, not as abstract ideals, but as daily practices that shape how they think and who they become.
For students like Amanda Jaffe, the pull between practicality and passion can be hard to navigate. Many feel pressured to choose majors that promise stability and status, even if that means setting aside their passions. Yet, as faculty across Michigan emphasize, studying the humanities isn’t an act of indulgence; it’s an act of investment: in curiosity, creativity, and connection.
In a world changing faster than ever, the humanities help us interpret ourselves, understand one another, and stay grounded in what makes us human. They remind us that meaning is something we create together, and that, after all, hope has always been a human art. Which is why Carnell’s final question lingers long after the conversation ends: “Where would we be without the humanities?”
Feature photo by ImageFlow on stock.adobe.com