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A university campus in the summer can seem so relaxed, with professors retreating to their research, students spread out across the region at summer jobs, internships or taking intensive classes in small cohorts, and staff like me with a few weeks to devote to long-term thinking and big projects. It’s ideally a restorative time, but also a generative one at the University of Minnesota, as thousands of new students arrive on campus for orientation, learn more about the U, sign up for classes and are pushed to make decisions about their majors. Many, I fear, are going to make suboptimal decisions based on bad information.
Earlier this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its latest analysis of the college labor market, looking at general wages, unemployment and underemployment over time for people with and without college degrees, but also specifically analyzing its data by major. The biggest surprise is that computer engineering, far from a sure path to employment and wealth, now has the third-highest rate of unemployment. Computer science isn’t far behind. The lesson here is simple: Major in what you love, not what you think will get you a job.
Cards on the table: I’m a historian. My main job at the U is advising and recruiting history majors and minors. I’d like more of each, and I think studying history is fun, useful, tends to result in good jobs for people who work hard and moreover is essential to producing an informed citizenry who learn from the past in order to build a better future. History has a 4.6% unemployment rate compared to computer engineering’s 7.5%. I expect the gap to grow as generative AI proves to be much more of a threat to computer programmers than to historians (although, yes, generative AI can write a C+ freshman essay for you. Congrats. You’ve got an adequate grade and learned nothing). This isn’t because history is so special, but because the operative skill of the future is critical thinking and “soft skills,” and history is one of the many disciplines that produces good thinkers.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Last year, Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.” More recently, the CEO of DeepSink, an AI company, said he prioritizes hiring humanities majors for long-term projects because of their “inventive mindset” — an attribute he prioritizes over technical skills. That’s good to hear, but I am skeptical the message will sink in, in part because it’s not the first time a rich and powerful executive has said such a thing.
Here are just a few examples. In 2017, marketing executive Michael Litt wrote for Fast Company that he’s hiring more humanities majors than coders because the jobs that AI won’t replace “will require creativity, adaptability, and artistry in equal measure.” In 2013, Edgar Bronfman, the former CEO of Seagram urged people who wanted to go into business to study the liberal arts, an argument backed up by a huge survey of business leaders that same year. Canadian corporate leaders declared “liberal studies” a must for businesses in 2000. In the 1990s, when I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history, I was recruited by a few New York banks on a “new” liberal-arts hiring plan, but chose instead to go to graduate school (whoops). In 1986, the New York Times wrote that “Business Returns to Liberal Arts Majors,” a finding that was scooped by the Rochester Minnesota Post Bulletin’s 1985 article that the “Pendulum may be swinging to liberal arts.” Maybe it’s time for the pendulum to stop swinging, and this time more people could pay attention.
The data on salary is also pretty reassuring, because strong students in any field do better than average students in most presumably more lucrative fields. All of this is just aggregated data, but it’s long felt to me that students — and especially their parents — push toward certain majors in hopes of a reliable path to gainful employment. But learning to code is not that pathway, so you should only spend your time coding in college if that’s where your vocation lies. Then code away!
