There is a stereotype out there that humanities college degrees offer terrible ROI when compared to STEM subjects. The truth is that STEM majors, on average, start out faster and earn higher, but then burn out in terms of earnings compared to their humanities counterparts. Let’s examine why that happens.
Effect of New Graduates
A typical STEM major will come out of school skilled in a variety of in-demand tech, coding languages, and the like. He gets a corresponding job and expects his high salary to soar, but twenty years down the road he sees a frightening sight: another batch of STEM graduates skilled in a variety of in-demand tech, coding languages, and the like. Since a stereotypical STEM career is long on tech and short on soft skills, the experienced STEM graduate has to compete against an ever-growing number of trained new STEM graduates.
The personal experience and soft-skill set of communication, collaboration, teamwork and people skills is far more difficult to duplicate in new humanities grads. Lower starting salaries of humanities graduates reflect the fact that even with a college degree, on-the-job people skills and “office politics” that are more comprehensible to humanities graduates can only be had by experience. Hence, older humanities majors retain an advantage. Textbook knowledge gained by new grads isn’t enough to erode the older worker’s bargaining power.
New Technologies vs Constant Human Nature
Humanities majors specialize and intuit people’s subtleties, complexities, quirks, and other hard-to-quantify variables. These factors have a huge effect on workplace dynamics, negotiations, customer satisfaction, and so on. Though the subject of “humanities” is hardly quantitative as is a STEM specialty, it is constant. Human nature doesn’t radically change. By contrast, technology changes constantly.
The “humanities is a waste” stereotype shows itself to be false upon closer inspection. Also, the division between STEM and humanities isn’t sharp. Even the most hard-nosed STEM major needs some degree of human touch taught by humanities, and the most devoted humanities major needs the precision and objectivity emphasized in STEM. Though slower out the gate in terms of earnings, humanities are not a career death sentence. Over time, humanities degrees can be refreshingly rewarding.