The Empirical Case for 'Impractical' Majors

TL;DR

Philosophy majors have 3.2% unemployment vs. 6.1% for CS majors (Federal Reserve, 2023-2025). By age 40, history/social science majors earn $131,154 vs. $124,458 for CS/engineering (Harvard). Technical skill half-life has collapsed to 2-5 years while "durable skills" last 7.5+ years. 93% of employers say critical thinking matters more than major. AI threatens routine technical work more than creative rolesentry-level programming jobs fell 27.5% since 2023. The evidence suggests narrow STEM focus may actually be the higher-risk educational strategy.

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Philosophy majors now have lower unemployment than computer science graduates, and research consistently shows that humanities students catch up or surpass STEM earnings by mid-career. The prevailing narrative that liberal arts education is economically irrational contradicts decades of longitudinal data from the Federal Reserve, Georgetown University, and Harvard economistswhile mounting evidence suggests that narrow technical training may actually be the riskier bet in an era of rapid technological change and AI disruption.

This research report provides comprehensive, peer-reviewed evidence supporting the value of humanities, arts, and social sciences education across ten key empirical claims.

The Unemployment Myth Collapses Under Scrutiny

The most surprising finding from Federal Reserve Bank of New York data (2023-2025) directly contradicts the "unemployable humanities major" stereotype. Philosophy majors face just 3.2% unemploymentnearly half the rate of computer science majors at 6.1% and well below computer engineering at 7.5%. Art history graduates fare even better at 3.0% unemployment. History and English majors hover around 4.6%competitive with most fields.

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences confirms these findings: humanities bachelor's degree holders experience 5.2% unemployment versus 4.3% for all college graduatesa modest gap that narrows to just 0.6 percentage points for those with advanced degrees. These numbers demolish the notion that studying philosophy or history condemns graduates to joblessness.

The more important story, however, is salary trajectory. Harvard economist David Deming's longitudinal analysis reveals what he calls the "catch-up phenomenon." At ages 23-25, computer science and engineering graduates earn approximately $61,744 while history and social science majors start at $45,032a substantial 37% gap. But by age 40, social science and history majors earn an average of $131,154 compared to $124,458 for CS and engineering graduates. The gap doesn't just close; it reverses.

Georgetown CEW's 2025 report confirms that 14 of 19 humanities and arts majors lead to median earnings above $65,000 at prime working agesurpassing the 25th percentile of STEM earnings. Meanwhile, PayScale data shows political science majors ($54,000 starting) reach $90,000 mid-career, matching chemistry and exceeding accounting.

Most Jobs Don't Actually Require Specific Majors

The data on job requirements reveals another gap between perception and reality. Indeed Hiring Lab reports that 52% of U.S. job postings now mention no formal education requirementup from 48% in 2019. Only 17.8% of postings require a four-year degree or higher, down from 20.4% five years prior.

Even more striking: Federal Reserve research shows that only about one-fourth of college graduates work in jobs directly related to their major. For history and liberal arts graduates, this means their "non-vocational" education isn't a liabilityit's the norm across all fields. A Harvard Business School study found that in 9 out of 10 job postings requesting a bachelor's degree, the job duties were identical to postings without degree requirements.

The AAC&U employer survey (2023) of over 1,000 executives and hiring managers crystallizes what employers actually value: 85% say "range of knowledge combined with specific skills" is ideal, while only 15% prioritize specific skills alone. The survey explicitly states: "Field-specific knowledge and skills developed through the major are NOT what employers value most in new hires."

Technical Skills Depreciate Faster Than Ever

The case for investing exclusively in technical training weakens considerably when examining skill obsolescence research. The half-life of technical skills has collapsed dramatically:

• 1920s: Engineering knowledge half-life approximately 35 years
• 1960: Approximately 10 years
• 1991: Less than 5 years for engineers; less than 3 years for software engineers
• 2025: IBM reports 2.5 years for technical skills; AI-related skills as low as 2 years

The OECD documents that technical skill lifespan dropped from 30 years in 1987 to approximately 2 years today. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report confirms that 39% of core skills will become outdated by 2030, with two-thirds of workers requiring retraining.

Chief Learning Officer Magazine calls it the "perishable vs. durable skills" divide. Technical skills (vendor-specific technologies, programming languages, organization-specific tools) have half-lives under 2.5 years. Durable skillscommunication, critical thinking, creativity, leadershipmaintain half-lives exceeding 7.5 years.

The programming language graveyard illustrates this reality. AngularJS, once dominant, reached end-of-life in 2021. Objective-C has been largely supplanted by Swift. Perl has faded from mainstream use. Even COBOL, still running 90% of Fortune 500 backend systems, faces a devastating skills crisis: 89% of large businesses worry about legacy system staff shortages, with 63% of vacancies unfilled as the original programmers retire without replacements.

AI Threatens Routine Technical Work More Than Creative Roles

The automation research presents a nuanced picture that generally favors humanities-adjacent skills. Entry-level programming has experienced severe disruption: Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows U.S. programmer employment fell 27.5% between 2023 and 2025. Entry-level tech postings dropped 60% between 2022 and 2024. Google, Meta, and Salesforce have dramatically reduced or halted junior hiring.

GitHub Copilot now has 15 million usersa 400% increase in one yearwith 41% of all code now AI-generated. Junior developers see the largest productivity gains (35-39% speed increases), which paradoxically makes them more replaceable. Stanford data shows employment for software developers aged 22-25 declined nearly 20% from the 2022 peak.

Meanwhile, research consistently identifies automation-resistant skills: empathy, ethical judgment, complex communication, creativity, cross-cultural competence, and leadership. The MIT Sloan EPOCH Framework identifies five human capabilities AI cannot match: empathy, presence and networking, opinion and ethical judgment, creativity and imagination, and hope. McKinsey projects social and emotional skills demand will grow 26% by 2030, while basic cognitive skills decline 19-23%.

The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2024-2025) research confirms that creative skills are rated "highly complementary to automation and unlikely to be replaced," while technical skills face higher vulnerability. Jobs requiring writing are 50% more likely to request liberal arts skills; problem-solving jobs are 40% more likely to value humanities backgrounds.

Steve Jobs' Calligraphy Story Is TrueWith Nuance

The claim that Steve Jobs credited a Reed College calligraphy class for Apple's typography focus is substantially verified. Professor Robert Palladino, a former Trappist monk who taught the class, personally confirmed teaching Jobs, noting that Jobs later "came back to Reed to tell me he was working on computers out of his parents' garage."

In his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Jobs stated: "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great... Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me."

However, the story requires important context. The Xerox Alto (1973) already had high-resolution bitmapped displays, multiple proportionally spaced fonts, and WYSIWYG text editingcapabilities Jobs saw during his 1979 visit to Xerox PARC. As computer historian Ken Shirriff notes, the calligraphy class likely gave Jobs "the aesthetic vocabulary to appreciate what he was seeing" rather than providing the sole inspiration. The story is best understood as substantially true regarding personal influence but historically incomplete regarding the technological origins of computer typography.

Cognitive Diversity Drives Measurable Innovation Gains

Research on team composition strongly supports the value of diverse educational backgrounds. Scott Page's mathematically proven "Diversity Trumps Ability" theorem (published in PNAS) demonstrates that randomly selected cognitively diverse groups can outperform groups of the most individually skilled members on complex problems. High-ability individuals who think similarly tend to reach the same dead ends.

The business case is compelling. Boston Consulting Group's 2018 survey of 1,700+ companies found that organizations with above-average leadership diversity reported innovation revenue 19 percentage points higher than less diverse companies (45% vs. 26% of total revenue). McKinsey's 2023 analysis of 1,265 companies across 23 countries shows top-quartile diverse companies are 39% more likely to outperform financially.

Harvard Business Review research found cognitively diverse teams solve problems up to 3x faster than homogeneous teams. Stanford research shows diverse teams generate 60% more creative solutions. Scientific American reports diverse teams consider 48% more solutions to problems.

Steve Jobs himself embodied this philosophy: "Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

Tech Ethics Failures Reveal the Cost of Narrow Training

Documented cases of technology causing harm illustrate the consequences of insufficient humanistic perspective in technical fields. Internal Facebook research revealed that "64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools." Former executives testified that the platform used "Big Tobacco's playbook...to make our offering addictive" and that the system was "optimized for frictionless virality" of extreme content.

Amazon's AI recruiting tool, developed in 2014 and trained on 10 years of male-dominated resumes, was scrapped after it systematically discriminated against womenpenalizing resumes containing the word "women's" and downgrading graduates of all-women's colleges. ProPublica found the COMPAS recidivism algorithm disproportionately classified Black defendants as more likely to reoffend. The Cambridge Analytica scandal harvested 87 million Facebook profiles without informed consent, resulting in a $5 billion FTC finethe largest privacy penalty in U.S. history.

Safiya Noble's "Algorithms of Oppression" (2018), which contributed to her 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, documented how Google search for "Black girls" returned pornographic results while "white girls" returned radically different content. She coined "algorithmic oppression" to describe how systems "replicate the power structures" of society.

Most damning is the research on engineering education itself. Rice University's Erin Cech found that engineering students are less concerned about public welfare at the end of their degree than at the beginninga decline that "does not rebound upon entering the workplace." Multiple studies confirm that students' moral reasoning decreases throughout engineering studies, even after receiving ethics training.

Philosophy Majors Outperform on Standardized Reasoning Tests

Perhaps the strongest evidence for humanities education improving cognitive skills comes from standardized test data. Analysis of GRE scores across 24 undergraduate majors shows philosophy majors rank #1 in verbal reasoning and #1 in analytical writing. They also rank 9th in quantitative reasoninghigher than business majors, all social science majors, and all other humanities majors. On cumulative rankings across all major tests, philosophy places first overall.

LSAT data (2022) shows philosophy majors score second highest among all majors, behind only physics/math majors and consistently outperforming pre-law and criminal justice majors. GMAT data confirms philosophy majors rank in the top five of all majorsscoring higher than management, finance, accounting, and marketing majors.

The crucial question is whether high-performing students simply choose philosophy (selection effect) or whether philosophy training improves reasoning (treatment effect). Thomas Metcalf's 2021 analysis compared incoming SAT/ACT scores of intended philosophy majors with their later GRE/LSAT scores and found that intended philosophy majors' incoming scores are not especially impressive. The conclusion: **"A substantial portion of the effect is treatment"**studying philosophy confers measurable cognitive benefits.

What Employers Actually Want Contradicts the Vocational Narrative

America Succeeds' analysis of 82 million job postings found that 7 of the top 10 most requested skills are durable soft skills, with durable skills requested 3.8 times more frequently than the top 5 technical skills. Leadership and communication appear in more than 50% of job listings.

The AAC&U's 2023 survey delivers the definitive finding: 93% of employers agree that "a candidate's demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major." Critical thinking consistently ranks as the #1 valued skill, with the largest "preparedness gap" between importance and graduate readiness (21 percentage points).

The NACE Job Outlook survey (2024-2025) confirms this hierarchy: problem-solving ability (90% of recruiters), teamwork skills (80%+), and communication skills (75%+) top the list, with technical skills ranking fourth. The use of GPA as a screening tool has dropped 35% in five yearsonly 38.3% of employers now use it.

Conclusion

The empirical evidence assembled here challenges the dominant narrative about educational value in several important ways. The data shows humanities graduates achieving competitive employment outcomes and catching up on salary by mid-career. Technical skill half-lives have collapsed to 2-5 years while durable skills retain value for decades. AI and automation are disrupting routine technical work while increasing demand for the critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and communication skills that humanities education develops.

The research suggests that a narrow STEM focus may actually be the higher-risk educational strategyone that front-loads earnings but leaves graduates vulnerable to skill obsolescence and automation. Meanwhile, cognitively diverse teams consistently outperform, tech ethics failures correlate with insufficient humanistic training, and philosophy majors demonstrably improve their reasoning abilities through their coursework.

None of this argues against STEM education. The strongest evidence points toward integrationthe "T-shaped" professional combining technical literacy with broad humanistic foundations. As the World Economic Forum notes, the most exciting discoveries emerge from crossing disciplines. The question isn't STEM versus humanities; it's whether our educational priorities match the evidence about what actually produces career success, innovation, and socially responsible technology.