Humanities Graduates Can Find a Great Job. It’s Time to Make This Fact Known.

It is a well-kept secret of US higher education that undergraduate students who have earned a degree in the humanities fare quite well on the job market. Indeed, while students, their families, and their academic advisors alike tend to labor under the widespread misconception that humanities majors are ill-prepared for post-college employment—and that they in fact are generally unsuccessful in securing jobs after graduation—the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that, at latest count, 96.3 percent of terminal humanities bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 23 and 32 were fully employed, a share that is on par with that for degree holders in the same age range across all fields. Further, the earnings of terminal bachelor’s degree holders in the humanities are comparable to those of their counterparts in the behavioral/social sciences and the life sciences, while the job satisfaction levels among humanities graduates are in line with those of degree holders in all fields. 

In short, there is a serious mismatch between the actual employment landscape for humanities graduates and the general perception of it among relevant constituencies. As a result of this mistaken perception, many undergraduates who might wish to specialize in the humanities refrain from doing so, because they see humanities study as a practical dead end—a misunderstanding that became acute during the 2008 recession and has not appreciably abated since then. 

The stubborn persistence of this unemployability narrative, even in the face of contrary evidence, necessitates a specially tailored approach to the objective of enhancing broad, equitable access to advanced humanities thought and knowledge. To use the familiar metaphor of the academic “pathway,” if we conventionally think of access in terms of permission to embark on a particular route, the notion that humanities majors confront limited job prospects requires us to focus instead on what happens—or is imagined to happen—at the far end of the road.  

Such a reoriented focus characterizes grantmaking from Mellon’s Higher Learning program area that is designed to support the provision of paid internships to undergraduate humanities majors. In addition to serving as visible instances of remunerative employment for humanities students, thereby countering the belief that humanities study entails no material payoff, these internships promise to enhance students’ already favorable post-graduation employment prospects. 

Indeed, if humanities majors are largely successful in securing jobs after they graduate, students who undertake internships while in college—whatever their majors—generally do even better in this regard. According to data gathered by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which tracks employment among college degree holders, graduating seniors who have completed a paid internship receive over twice as many job offers as their peers with no internship experience. More broadly, a review of the literature on the topic conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin confirms not only that internships improve students’ employability—along with their academic outcomes—but also that they help students clarify their career plans and their prospective professional identities. 

These benefits of internships notwithstanding, humanities students have typically confronted several challenges in availing themselves of internship opportunities, including academic course loads that preclude their taking on work outside of school and their need to be adequately paid for any such work they do take on—to say nothing of the potential difficulty of even finding internship opportunities in the first place. The programs supported by these new grants promise to address all of these difficulties simultaneously, cultivating internship prospects among the nonprofits and other host organizations located in the grantee institutions’ communities and making them readily available to humanities students, providing payment to the students who assume those internships, and incorporating internship service itself into students’ course loads through linked curricular offerings.  

The grantee institutions in Mellon’s $25 million pilot cluster included California State University, Fresno, the City College of New York, Old Dominion University, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. These schools have demonstrated a steadfast commitment to humanities education, maintaining robust curricular offerings and large cohorts of humanities majors: across the five institutions, the share of students choosing a humanities field as their primary major ranges from 9 percent to 16 percent, while that of students with a second major in the humanities ranges from 11 percent to 53 percent.

Following on the heels of this $25 million investment, in March 2024, Higher Learning launched a limited call for concepts through which it invited 20 institutions from the South, plus Puerto Rico, to submit concept notes for similar grants of up to $5 million, with up to $1 million of that amount to be potentially awarded as matching endowment funding to help sustain the internship programs indefinitely. The funded institutions include Marshall University, the University of Memphis, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, the University of South Carolina Upstate, the University of South Florida, and Valdosta State University. This most recent wave is part of what Higher Learning envisions as a multiyear, national plan to establish internship programs for humanities students in every census-designated region in the country. In each instance, the institutions propose innovative internship programs that are integrated with their humanities curricula, closely involve faculty and incentivize their participation, and feature strong partnerships with local organizations.

Having identified a set of universities that are ideally situated to implement and maintain humanities internship programs—and having honed our sense of optimal grant structures through the proposal development process itself—we are confident in the positive results of this new philanthropic approach to supporting humanities internships, and look forward to expanding our work in this area in the coming years, which we feel are critical. The rapidly changing nature of work, especially with increasing use of artificial intelligence, demands adaptability, creativity, and the ability to think critically. These are precisely the qualities and skills the humanities instill in students, which will serve them well not just in their first job out of college, but for the rest of their professional and personal lives.