The humanities often get a bad reputation, branded as a useless degree in comparison to science, technology, engineering and math-based degrees; however, this is not the case.
Society is always looking for a way to develop into the future, and STEM seems to be the way to do it. Jobs in fields like engineering and computer science are expanding to keep up with the demand for innovation.
As the demand for STEM workers increases, so does the interest level in majoring in such programs. Politicians, parents and teachers push students to pursue a major in these fields while belittling and avoiding majors in liberal arts or the humanities. This is leading to a consistent decline in the number of humanities degrees earned in recent years.
“The 202,665 humanities degrees conferred in 2018 was 2% below the previous year and 14.1% below the recent high-water mark of 235,969 degrees in 2012,” according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
However, in an expanding world of STEM, the humanities still have importance. Humanities studies preserve the human touch that produces creativity needed for a fresh viewpoint in a more technological world.
People shy away from the fear of a non-immediate return from a humanities degree; however, humanities delivers more opportunities than people give credit for. Many companies seek people with humanities degrees to help solve problems that require a more creative and humanist outlook than STEM majors can typically offer.
Hiring managers at the most prominent companies are not seeking what one would traditionally expect, and rather, “Uber was picking up psychology majors to deal with unhappy riders and drivers. Opentable was hiring English majors to bring data to restaurateurs to get them excited about what data could do for their restaurants,” according to George Anders, past technology reporter for Forbes.
Many would chastise the lack of explicit training in a specific job field, but studying humanities creates a versatile thinking process indispensable to employers. The most wanted job skills by employers for 2019 were defined as “soft skills” were creativity, persuasion and collaboration, and people management was included in the top five “hard skills,” according to Linkedin’s 2019 study on The Skills Companies Needed Most in 2019.
Knowing and understanding people are vital components of preserving the human perspective and an essential step in creating, upkeeping and marketing products of the future. For example, two of the top executives for Microsoft state that “as computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important.”
A humanities degree does not shut one out from getting a job but instead opens the array of opportunities to various job fields and teaches a versatility of skills and ways of thinking.
