Earnings of Humanities Majors with a Terminal Bachelor’s Degree
- In 2021, terminal bachelor’s degree holders (TBHs) in the humanities had annual median earnings of $64K, while the median for all workers with a terminal bachelor’s degree was $72K (Indicator III-06a).1supplemental table.
Median earnings for humanities TBHs were 56% higher than those of workers with only a high school diploma ($41K). - Among men whose highest degree was a bachelor’s, median earnings for humanities majors were $72K, which was most similar to that of majors from the life sciences (with median earnings of $70K). The humanities male median was 72% of the median for male engineering TBHs (the group with the highest median earnings, $100K) and 88% of the median for all male TBHs.
- The median earnings of female humanities TBHs ($60K) were most similar to those of arts, life sciences, and behavioral/social science TBHs ($57K). The humanities median for women was 72% of that for the highest-paid women with terminal bachelor’s degrees (those who majored in engineering, with earnings of $82K). Women’s median earnings were closer than men’s to the gender-specific median for all fields combined, with the female humanities median being 97% of that for all women with terminal bachelor’s degrees.
- At 17%, the gender earnings gap experienced by TBHs in the humanities fell near the middle of the range found among the major academic fields (Indicator III-06b). (In keeping with the practice of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the gap was calculated by dividing the difference between men’s and women’s median earnings by men’s median earnings.) The gap was smaller than the disparity observed in the behavioral/social sciences, life sciences, physical sciences, and business, but greater than that in the arts, education, and health/medical sciences. The gender gap for humanities was eight percentage points smaller than that for TBHs in general.
Endnotes
- 1All earnings estimates presented here are for full-time/full-year workers and for the 12 months preceding response to the ACS. The estimates have been rounded to the nearest $1,000.
Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into four groups, each of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (earnings, in this case) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The middle quartile is also known as the median.
In its analyses of the earnings of humanities majors and how they compare to majors in other fields, the HI always reports the median rather than the mean (“average”). This is necessary due to the highly skewed nature of the U.S. earnings distribution; that is, a small share of the U.S. population earns considerably more than the vast majority of Americans. The mean is very sensitive to such extreme values. The median is far less so and is thus a better measure of “typical” earnings.
For information regarding the earnings of all humanities majors, irrespective of subsequent education, see the
* Full-time workers are those who worked 35 or more hours per week for 50 or more weeks in the previous 12 months. Fields are arranged in descending order of earnings for all full-time workers.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 American Community Survey Public-Use Microdata Sample. Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
For the purposes of the American Community Survey (ACS), the source of these data, the U.S. Census Bureau defines earnings as “the sum of wage or salary income and net income from self-employment. ‘Earnings’ represent the amount of income received regularly for people 16 years old and over before deductions for personal income taxes, Social Security, bond purchases, union dues, Medicare deductions, etc. An individual with earnings is one who has either wage/salary income or self-employment income, or both. Respondents who ‘break even’ in self-employment income and therefore have zero self-employment earnings also are considered ‘individuals with earnings’” (from ACS documentation provided at http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions /2014_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf, p. 83).
The ACS permits respondents to specify up to two fields of bachelor’s degree. For the purposes of this analysis, an individual was counted as having a bachelor’s degree in the humanities if the field of either reported degree was within the scope of the humanities as specified by the HI. For an inventory of the specific fields included under the broad field groupings used here, see the ACS-HI Crosswalk.
Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into four groups, each of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (earnings, in this case) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The middle quartile is also known as the median.
In its analyses of the earnings of humanities majors and how they compare to majors in other fields, the HI always reports the median rather than the mean (“average”). This is necessary due to the highly skewed nature of the U.S. earnings distribution; that is, a small share of the U.S. population earns considerably more than the vast majority of Americans. The mean is very sensitive to such extreme values. The median is far less so and is thus a better measure of “typical” earnings.
* The earnings gap is the difference between male and female median annual earnings expressed as a percentage of male median earnings. Full-time workers are those who worked 35 or more hours per week for 50 or more weeks in the previous 12 months.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 American Community Survey Public-Use Microdata Sample. Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
For the purposes of the American Community Survey (ACS), the source of these data, the U.S. Census Bureau defines earnings as “the sum of wage or salary income and net income from self-employment. ‘Earnings’ represent the amount of income received regularly for people 16 years old and over before deductions for personal income taxes, Social Security, bond purchases, union dues, Medicare deductions, etc. An individual with earnings is one who has either wage/salary income or self-employment income, or both. Respondents who ‘break even’ in self-employment income and therefore have zero self-employment earnings also are considered ‘individuals with earnings’” (from ACS documentation provided at http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions /2014_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf, p. 83).
The ACS permits respondents to specify up to two fields of bachelor’s degree. For the purposes of this analysis, an individual was counted as having a bachelor’s degree in the humanities if the field of either reported degree was within the scope of the humanities as specified by the HI. For an inventory of the specific fields included under the broad field groupings used here, see the ACS-HI Crosswalk.
Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into four groups, each of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (earnings, in this case) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The middle quartile is also known as the median.
When it comes to the analysis of the earnings of humanities majors and how they compare to majors in other fields, the HI always reports the median rather than the mean (“average”). This is necessary due to the highly skewed nature of the U.S. earnings distribution, meaning that there is a small share of the US population that earns considerably more than the vast majority of Americans. The mean is very sensitive to such extreme values. The median is far less so and is thus a better measure of “typical” earnings.
