Recently an article from CNBC has been going around, entitled, "College majors with the best and worst job prospects — art history beats finance" Not to beat around the bush, nothing in the article is technically false, but the entire article is knowingly misleading. A lie, in other words. The article points out that for several typical humanities majors there is a *slightly* higher employment rate than for many business degrees. The unemployment rate for a art history, for example, is 3%. The unemployment rate for finance is a whooping 3.7%!!! Erm, I guess you could round up? This data comes from the New York Fed, which has been keeping all sorts of data about the economic realities of college attendance (including majors) from 1990 through the first quarter 2025. Their blog, Liberty Street, regularly publishes analysis of this data, and a recent post about if college is still worth it (more on this later) went a little viral, reminding people of the underlying data. So here is the Liberty Street post, and here is the underlying New York Fed data. Here is an excerpt from the Liberty Street post:
Now I know what you are saying, that doesn't look good for typical humanities degrees? That's because it is not. The data that was pulled from the CNBC article ignored all the other data in the graph when they got the data for unemployment rates. Data they saw, and did not indicate in their article at all. While art history has slightly better employment data, every thing else is bleak. Let's keep with the contrast the article began with between art history majors and finance.
Art history has a 3% unemployment rate, a 46.9% *under*employment rate (defined as employed in jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree), $45,000 median wage early career, $71,000 median wage mid-career, and 47.9% have a graduate degree (meaning likely higher debt load and longer to start making money). That's not great. Let's look at finance! There is the 3.7 unemployment rate. 31.5% underemployed, $70,000 median wage early career, $110,000 median wage mid-career, and a lower graduate school rate of 30.9%. Anyone looking at these numbers would not realistically think the most important thing was the .7% different in employment rate. You can compare various traditional humanities degrees (and social science degrees) to various usual business school degrees, and the business school almost always outperforms. (For what is the worth, my two most biggest take aways from the chart is how profitably anything called engineering is, and how terrible our financial rewards to any kind of teacher is).
Now, finance is one of the more extreme outliers. If one had picked, say, business management versus a philosophy major, you will not see such extreme differences. The underemployment rate is worse for a business management degree, and their median salary is not so strikingly different. Indeed, any number of individual factors (like what part of the country you live in) will obviously have bigger effects than those two degrees. I am not making the argument students should clearly all go to business school. I think it is good for our society for universities to be mostly institutions of liberal arts, and not trade schools. Furthermore, in general, I think intellectually curious students are doing themselves a real disservice by not majoring or studying within the liberal arts.
I have two major concerns with the CNBC article. The first is that I believe what we are all engaged in is a truth-seeking enterprise. Articles that are fundamentally misleading should make us angry, even if they mislead us in ways I *wish* were true. And we should also be a little sad to see journalism weaken their epistemic authority for just a little bit of clickbait.
Second, I am concerned that many of my colleagues in the traditional humanities believe there is nothing that needs to be fixed, that they are losing majors because students are making irrational decisions. From only a financial perspective, students should seek to be engineers, pursue certain hard sciences (which are still in the liberal arts!), or go into health services. If students are not very good at math, it makes sense for many of them to pursue degrees in business (or hey, communication studies! A humanities degree with outcomes like several business degrees). We need to recognize that things are not like they were 15 years ago or 25 years ago, where we could say that by mid-career all of this had evened out. What's worse, is that many students
regret their program of study after graduation (44% regret their degrees in behavioral/social sciences, and 43% regret their degrees in the humanities and arts. Sadly these are not broken up more by major). Many disciplines I care about a lot are in dire straights. I am not sure what the solution is, but I know that gas lighting potential students (and even each other) that an art history major is economically a better bet than a finance major is not going to work. We got to stop lying to ourselves, and treating all of this kind of information as some weird propaganda tool.
