The Value of Literary Studies and the Humanities

Maya Jarrel, "The practical benefits of arts and humanities degrees" (2024)

excerpt: "Businesses are not looking for specific training in a particular field, they're looking for general skills and abilities. Critical thinking, oral communication, the ability to work in teams with others, problem solving, these kinds of things. These are really the valuable skills that college is able to give them if they approach it correctly... I would say the humanities are a very good place to develop those communication skills, those critical thinking skills, and so forth, in ways that can be quite attractive to incoming students."

Ann Ardis, "What can't you do with a humanities degree?" (2023)

excerpt: "Key takeaways:

Earnings: Humanities graduates' earnings are substantially higher than those of people without a college degree and are often on par with or higher than those of graduates in non-engineering fields.
Earnings Disparities: Except in a few northwestern states, humanities majors earn at least 40 percent more than people with only a high school degree.
Unemployment: The unemployment rate of humanities majors is around 2-4 percent in every state, similar to that of engineering and business majors and substantially lower than that of people without a college degree.
Occupational Versatility: Humanities graduates make up big portions of the legal, museum and library workforces across all states; other significant areas of humanities graduate employment are education, management and sales."

Marc Vogl, "The Value of a Liberal Arts Degree" (2022)

excerpt: "I'm 50 years old and I can't recall the syllabus of the Harlem Renaissance poetry course I took when I first got to college, or the chronology of the Civil War battles we studied in Professor Thomas' seminar, but the training I developed as a reader to put myself in someone else's shoes, and as a writer to take contradictory information and tell a coherent story, helps me every day as I try to organize my thoughts in a world where politicians can't agree on facts, and where the public increasingly only hears voices they already know."

Steve Strauss, "Why I Hire English Majors" (2013)

excerpt: "I think what I appreciate most about English majors is that they are taught to think critically, and that is exactly what I want in my business. Busy with a start-up, a new book to finish, speeches, and running my regular business to boot, what I need is to be able to give someone an assignment and have them do it. Period. That is exactly what I get from the English majors. They know how to think, to think for themselves, and how to analyze a problem. Business majors are fine, but they are preoccupied with theory, proving themselves, and doing it 'right.' But the English majors are used to getting a tough assignment, figuring it out, and getting it done, (usually) on time."

Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education (2016)

excerpt: "What a liberal education at its best does… is to allow people to range widely, to read widely, to explore their passions. Let one interest lead to another and on and on. I think that kind of breadth and the ability to feed your curiosity and indulge is incredibly important. It's what, now in the corporate world, one would call synergy, or out of the box thinking, or the intersection of disciplines. This has always been a central part of what a liberal education has meant."

Nicholas Bakalar, "Read Books, Live Longer?" (2016)

excerpt: "Compared with those who did not read books, those who read for up to three and a half hours a week were 17 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, and those who read more than that were 23 percent less likely to die. Book readers lived an average of almost two years longer than those who did not read at all."

Daniel Victor, "No, the Internet Has Not Killed the Printed Book. Most People Still Prefer Them" (2016)

excerpt: "Sixty-five percent of adults in the United States said they had read a printed book in the past year, the same percentage that said so in 2012. When you add in ebooks and audiobooks, the number that said they had read a book in printed or electronic format in the past 12 months rose to 73 percent, compared with 74 percent in 2012."

Steven Pearlstein, "Meet the parents who won't let their children study literature" (2016)

excerpt: "In today's fast-changing global economy, the most successful enterprises aren't looking for workers who know a lot about only one thing. They are seeking employees who are nimble, curious and innovative. The work done by lower-level accountants, computer programmers, engineers, lawyers and financial analysts is already being outsourced to India and the Philippines; soon it will be done by computers. The good jobs of the future will go to those who can collaborate widely, think broadly and challenge conventional wisdom -- precisely the capacities that a liberal arts education is meant to develop."

Fareed Zakaria , "Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous" (2015)

excerpt: "Innovation is not simply a technical matter but rather one of understanding how people and societies work, what they need and want. America will not dominate the 21st century by making cheaper computer chips but instead by constantly reimagining how computers and other new technologies interact with human beings."

Loretta Jackson-Hayes, "We don't need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training" (2015)

excerpt: "Employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they're also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry's impact on society and the environment. Some medical schools have also caught on to this. The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has been admitting an increasing number of applicants with backgrounds in the humanities for the past 20 years."

Peter Mandler, "The Rise of the Humanities"

excerpt: "[R]elative to business, both the sciences and the humanities have fallen behind since 1971, and the sciences much further. Since the 1980s, however, the gap between the humanities and business has, in fact, shrunk, while the gap between the sciences and business continued to grow. And, very importantly, the rapid expansion of higher education in the world over the past couple of generations means that, in absolute numbers, more people are studying the humanities than ever before. The question is why humanists have not been able or willing to recognise their own sustained success."

Department of English

The Value of Literary Studies and the Humanities

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