Is your liberal arts degree useless? Find the facts here.

The dreaded question: “what are you going to do with a history degree?”

Susan Wojcicki may not have known the answer to that when she effectively co-founded Google in her garage alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but I’d say her options are pretty good.

There’s a tendency to point to STEM as the only sane option for school because a handful of disciplines on that side of campus feed into booming industries right now. Computer Science, Engineering, and Nursing come to mind.

Yet that doesn’t represent the entire working world or its needs. Education isn’t just about getting a job, either, although it should absolutely be a big part of the equation.

You’re left with this sinking feeling that you somehow chose wrong, even if your teachers and parents encouraged you to do take this path.

Did you actually make the wrong call?

No.

This is why the liberal arts are absolutely worth it.

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Uninformed people may call that liberal arts degree useless financially, but it will likely put you on a solid career path. There’s a strong view out there that arts grads are doomed to stay unemployed or underemployed for their entire lives, earning minimum wage at some fast food joint. That’s incredibly misleading, according to the employment and salary data out there.

The answer isn’t nearly as simple as “jobs or no jobs,” but it can be boiled down to 3 statements based on hard data:

1. Liberal arts graduates share equal unemployment rates with STEM and professional program graduates right out of college.
2. Liberal arts graduates experience higher underemployment rates than STEM and professional programs right out of college.
3. At their peak earning periods, liberal arts graduates earn a little bit more than professional program graduates and about 75% of what STEM graduates earn.

Take a look at this bar chart comparing salaries immediately after graduation and during the peaks of people’s careers:

• Liberal arts students start out a little bit ahead of the pack right after graduation (ages 21-25).
• STEM students end up with the highest salaries at the peak of their careers (ages 56-60).

Liberal arts graduates find survival jobs as fast as anyone else, take longer to build careers suited to their education, and then end up earning a good amount of money. They are by no means staying underemployed forever. Yes, STEM graduates do earn more on average by their peak careers, but graduating with a liberal arts degree isn’t going to doom you to a life of serving coffee.

You’ll earn a good salary either way.

A word to the wise: the rise of automation and the business trend to off-shore technical white collar work is going to throw these numbers off-balance over the next 10-20 years. Don’t jump into a purely STEM or purely literary program just yet! Get a solid footing in both to arm yourself for the future.

Liberal arts can groom you for leadership (and leaders earn more)

Ever had the impression that earning an expensive MBA or an engineering degree doesn’t necessarily make you a better leader?

You’re not wrong.

DDI, a leadership consulting company, did a study on a sample of the 2016 graduating class and produced some interesting findings. Chief among them was that undergraduates from liberal arts programs scored better in leadership skills than students from just about every STEM program out there.

For those keeping score, Business ranked the highest out of all 7 education types for leadership skills in business—and the Humanities ranked second. Leaders with a Humanities background scored higher in overall leadership qualities than those with backgrounds in Engineering, Law, Information Technology, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.

Even better, leaders with Humanities backgrounds can leverage three of their 5 strengths to carve out a niche where Business-educated leaders fall behind:

1. Effective communication skills
2. A results-first approach to work.
3. Inspiring excellence in others.

That’s good news for liberal arts students! It means that the skills you develop throughout your education and career prime you for leadership (read: promotion) later in life.

And guess what? Leaders get paid well.

Here’s the rub, though: you can’t really list soft skills on your resume. Because they’re so hard to quantify, nobody is going to believe you if they see them written on your resume or cover letter. Hiring managers will just roll their eyes and move on to the next application if you do that. In the worst cases, some people with extreme opinions interpret soft skills on a resume as an admission of their liberal arts degree being useless. Couldn’t be further from the truth.

What’s important here is that you can not only catch up to STEM grads’ salary ranges in time—you can surpass them by growing into an empathetic, motivational, and nurturing leader throughout your career.

Company leaders make good money. Not every leader has a liberal arts background, but a very good portion of them do. Those soft skills that people mock actually dictate who’s a viable company leader and who isn’t (take a second look at how engineers scored in that study).

Keep focusing on building hard skills early in your career, but don’t shy away from your soft skills as you grow, either. Lean into them.

For all the emphasis put on programming, engineering, nursing, and business school, some of the most successful people in the world possess a liberal arts background. What sets these people apart is that they used that background as a springboard to learn everything they could, to see the big picture, and to rally around a central vision. They didn’t stick with companies that believed in measuring success with “words typed per minute.”

These people leveraged their background in the liberal arts to become well-rounded business professionals. I bet you’ve heard of some of them.

All of those CEOs used their arts backgrounds as a means to see what others didn’t, often infusing customer empathy and a holistic business outlook of their companies. Calling their liberal arts degree useless misses the point of their success stories.

It’s also part of the reason why technology companies want to balance their engineering and software development talent with professionals from the liberal arts:

Successful professionals balance their technical skills with skills and perspectives earned from their liberal arts backgrounds. In fact, most of them used their liberal arts backgrounds as a platform to acquire additional skills and knowledge down the road. 

If you still don’t believe that tech companies value the liberal arts, then you can read more about the upward hiring trend from these publications:

• Washington Post: Tech companies are hiring more liberal arts majors than you think
• Forbes: That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket
• PBS: How these humanities graduates are finding jobs in Silicon Valley
• Maclean’s: Yes, you will get a job with that arts degree
• Huffpost: Liberal Arts is the Foundation for Professional Success in the 21s Century
• EdSurge: As Tech Companies Hire More Liberal Arts Majors, More Students Are Choosing STEM Degrees

Not everyone gets to be a CEO, of course. There are plenty of roles that liberal arts graduates can fullfil outside of the executive suite. Many of them are quite important to society, too, and even technical jobs of the future are going to require the skills one learns from a liberal arts education.

Just ask this executive from Intuit (a $5 billion financial technology company) what he thinks of your liberal arts education:

He’s right on the money. The jobs of today and tomorrow require more technical skills than than jobs from a decade ago, but they won’t carry professionals on their own for much longer. That’s why liberal arts majors can bring a competitive advantage to the workplace, starting with these career areas:

Those fields aren’t too shabby. Many of them pay quite well beyond entry level positions, even if those entry-level jobs will make you work for your money. You can get your foot in the door for any of these industries with the right combination of courses, certifications, portfolio projects, and networking.

Even lawyers start as freshmen who don’t know exactly what they want to do in life, but you can absolutely build a fulfilling career in any of these professional fields (and beyond). Is your liberal arts degree useless when it can open doors to so many career paths? Not likely.

Did you know that writing is the third-most desired skill in a new hire, generally speaking?

According to surveys conducted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, it comes in close behind oral communication and teamwork skills.

Source: Association of American Colleges & Universities

Most people lack passable writing skills even though it’s critical to success in the workplace, and that is a core advantage for liberal arts graduates. It’s definitely become one of mine. Calling a liberal arts degree useless when it can impart so many sought-after skills is as uninformed as it is unfair.

But many people believe themselves to be great writers when they can’t even use punctuation properly. They’re everywhere, too, and this mentality is pervasive. They think that they’re good at writing because it’s a “soft skill” that can’t be measured objectively. They believe that the measurement of written work is entirely subjective, and therefore of equal quality automatically.

But it’s not. It’s really, really not.

If you’ve spent time honing your writing skills with any kind of feedback loop, then you’re aware just how hard it can be to crystallize your message with a rhetorical triangle to get someone else to take action.

Let’s take a page from Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing to see this dynamic in action (you’ll get a chuckle, too):

You’ve probably had a similar experience already. If you’ve ever had to deal with awful writing from coworkers and bosses, then you know how widespread (and flat-out wrong) that attitude really is.

There’s a reason for that. According to a study from Partnership for 21st Skills, employers think that a lot of new graduates lack writing skills. Specifically:

• 46.4% of graduates with a 2-year diploma have deficient writing skills.
• 26.2% of graduates with a 4-year degree have deficient writing skills.

Take a look at these pie charts to get a sense of how many people that really is:

That doesn’t mean that chemists and engineers can’t be good writers. They absolutely can be! But as a liberal arts graduate, you have years of experience over graduates from other disciplines here—and that’s because liberal arts disciplines tend to be literary by nature. If you graduated in History, Philosophy, English Literature, or a stream of Cultural Studies, then you have a particular advantage here for several reasons:

1. You’ve spent 4 years taking writing-intensive courses.
2. You’re more likely to have taken an actual writing course (this is super important).
3. You know how to use the rhetorical triangle to make air-tight arguments.
4. You’ve studied literature in various forms, understanding where, when, and why it’s effective.

That’s a killer advantage for you as a recent graduate. Having worked with plenty of programmers, executives, small business owners, and even a few investors, I can tell you that very few of them communicate effectively through writing. Even most marketing people don’t seem to write very effectively, if we’re being honest here.

And that’s a shame, because mastering communication is part and parcel of “information literacy,” a highly valued white collar skill in today’s professional landscape.

And you can build on that skill as a writer to outshine all of them. You might even outshine specialists in other areas with your ability to distill ideas with more clarity and to pitch them with more precision.

The importance of writing skills in the workplace

Writing underpins so much of what liberal arts grads go on to do out there. The skills that arts programs impart are almost guaranteed to put you on a career path in which you’ll engage in these tasks:

Writing is a big deal. It’s not the only important thing you have to offer, but it’s a flagship skill that liberal arts graduates can sharpen further and further throughout their careers to win where other experts might not.

Make this skill yours to command and you’ll find that it can also amplify the effectiveness of your other skills—even unrelated things, like coding. Being able to crystallize and convey your ideas is the key to moving into other roles, and plenty of business leaders out there agree. You don’t need to believe me, though. Believe Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp:

Personally, I’ve found that I’m quite effective in roles involving web analytics and digital strategy because I can explain things clearly to executives and other department heads who lack the expertise, such as:

• What traffic fluctuations mean.
• What caused a certain trend and how to amplify or counteract it.
• How to forecast based on conversion rates.

And guess what? Those executives come to me for things outside of my job description because even they need someone who can distill complex ideas to get at the point. This has increased my prominence every company I’ve worked for so far, and it made me difficult to replace.

• Editing and proofreading award submissions? Check.
• Becoming the go-to copywriting guy? Check.
• Submiting strategy proposals to investors? Check.

Mastering your writing skills actually accentuates all of your other skills to everyone else in the room. That’s why it’s not just a convenient skill in its own right. It’s critical to your employability as a liberal arts graduate.

Writing isn’t the only skill that you can bring, and employers know it. Let’s take another look at that list of desired skills, as reported by the Association of American Colleges & Universities.

I left “oral communication” unhighlighted because, honestly, it’s arguably a hard skill these days. Still, look at that list! They’re soft skills, not hard skills that come with one particular program over another.

And they’re all things you can learn, nurture, and master with a liberal arts background. It’s hard to imagine calling a liberal arts degree useless when it nurtures so many of the most in-demand skills in the job market.

Those skills are geared more toward mid- and upper-level positions, true. They’re also not straight replacements for other hard skills. You can’t program an application with leadership skills, obviously. But it shows that there’s a lot of opportunity to grow with organizations by leveraging those soft skills… after you get your foot in the door with hard skills, too.

You see, the future of work isn’t about just hard skills or soft skills. It’s about merging them both to become a professional powerhouse that can spot trends, create a vision, and implement it. Don’t just take my word for it, though. Take Steve Jobs’ word for it.

Steve Jobs isn’t the only person out there who thinks so, either. After surveying executives around the world, the World Economic Forum produced a global challenge insight report that outlines the most high-paying skills for 2020.

Here’s how they rank:

1. Complex problem-solving
2. Critical thinking
3. Creativity
4. People management
5. Coordination capabilities
6. Emotional intelligence
7. Decision-making
8. Service orientation
9. Negotiation
10. Cognitive flexibility

Why are soft skills important in the workplace? Automation is coming.

Look at how many of those are soft skills—just about all of them. There’s a reason for that: automation. A report from McKinsey and Company estimated that as many as 800 million jobs worldwide could be effected by or even lost to automation by 2030. The report was published in November 2017.

By the numbers, automation will most likely replace only 15% of work across the globe, but that’s not the same as replacing 15% of jobs.

6 in 10 jobs for today’s market cover tasks and responsibilities of which 30% or more could be automated. That doesn’t mean 15% of jobs will disappear. That means most of those jobs will need to adjust themselves to perform new work, filling the vacuum where that soon-to-be-automated 30% used to live.

In fact, fewer than 5% of today’s jobs could be fully automated, according to that same report. But as automation grows, the job market’s focus will shift to include more and more soft skills that empower people to accomplish more with technology at their disposal. Instead of calling a liberal arts degree useless, savvy professionals will find ways to merge their hard and soft skills to become the most capable and well-rounded candidates in the working world.

Automation is going to change the way that we work across most industries. Soft skills are going to play a big role in redefining who pulls ahead in the professional landscape as a result. You’ll still need technical skills, but the professionals who will pull ahead of everyone else will merge their specialties with soft skills like emotional intelligence, communication, and lateral thinking.

Listen to what Ravi Kumar, President of Infosys, has to say:

Liberal arts  graduates do need to acquire more hard skills to get a foot in the door, but they also bring skills that haven’t gone out of style in the last 70 years. These skills get more important as you move higher up the professional ladder, and not all of them are soft skills, either:

• Good old-fashioned research
• Synthesizing information (part of “information literacy”)
• Abstract thinking (read: strategy and trend-spotting)
• Rhetoric and persuasion
• Cross-cultural knowledge in a globalized market
• Foreign languages
• Being able to deal with ambiguity

Want to move into higher positions later in life? Management? Executive leadership? Consulting, even? Then you need to learn these kinds of soft skills over time. Liberal arts programs don’t have a monopoly on soft skills, but they do tend to facilitate them beyond a controlled laboratory, which is exactly where they’re most useful.

The future of the workforce literally depends it.

After all that, is it fair to call a liberal arts degree useless? Not even close. Liberal arts graduates go on to make rewarding careers for themselves with solid pay, and there are plenty of paths from which to choose. Even better, people with liberal arts backgrounds already have a critical piece of the puzzle to survive and thrive in the automated future of work.

Liberal arts graduates do not spend their lives serving coffee, nor do they pursue useless jobs. Liberal arts graduates go on to be journalists, lawyers, teachers, fundraisers, and policy creators. They make the world a better place with lateral thinking and an eye for the big picture.

It’s not the only path to success. But it is the foundation for lifelong learning and cross-pollinating skills for the future, making it the first step on your path to long-term success.

Are you ready to take the next step toward a job?