No doubt there are industries that hire humanities degrees. For example, advertising firms hire English majors for copywriting. In my 20 years in commercial real estate, however, I only met a couple people who did not have business, technical, or professional (JD, CPA, Arch) degrees. The ones who were hired with humanities degrees started at very junior levels; basically, they were treated as hires with only a HS diploma or associates degree. I did not see anyone with a management position with only a humanities undergrad.
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For simplicity, I’ll only discuss the first one on the list. In 1975, Schultz graduated from Northern Michigan with a degree in communications. After college, he worked a salesman for Xerox in the late 1970s. According to the linked article, while working at Xerox, Shultz says, “I learned more there than in college about the worlds of work and business.” After Xerox, Shultz worked for a kitchenware manufacturer, where he was responsible for manufacturing coffee machines. With his coffee experience, in the early 1980s, Shultz was hired as director of retail marketing at what was at the time a small coffee chain in Seattle, but soon left the company to start his own coffee store. The store was successful, and Schultz later purchased Starbucks retail chain for an inflation adjusted $11 million. Under Schultz’s ownership, the Starbucks chain took off and has a market cap of nearly $100 billion today – ~1000x his initial investment.
It’s an impressive story, but I doubt that Shultz’s BA in communications from Northern Michigan in 1975 was the key driver in this outcome. I think it’s more relevant to focus on typical outcomes of current grads rather than than what happened to an extremely unique outlier 50 years ago.
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Point taken, although I was simply responding to the insinuation that people with humanities degrees cannot attain positions of power within an organization, then or now. 
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Yeah. Schultz was at NMU on a football scholarship and has been criticized for not wanting to have anything to do with his alma mater. Not only did he never donate a single dollar to NMU, he didn’t even return their phone calls.
The shift away from humanities majors largely reflects the different choices made by women now. Few men ever majored in English; like many humanities subjects, it was traditionally female-majority. Female students are much more likely to join their male counterparts in majoring in engineering, computer science, business or other quantitative fields now.
Many would think that is a good thing.
And why would they do it unless there is a need? Currently there is overproduction of CS majors. Why would any company spend time and money to convert History major into CS professional when they have line of willing and well trained CS professionals hungry for work?
I don’t think there’s anything sad about the decline of humanities majors. Right now, society needs more STEM majors and I doubt that will change in the future, especially as our current society becomes more technology oriented. Most humanities majors indirectly apply their skills to their jobs (e.g. knowledge of History to business, as shown in the article linked above), whereas STEM majors apply their skills directly (e.g. computer science to a SWE job) thus making a STEM degree way more valuable.
In my view, the way to resolve this problem is for tuition to come way down. Then, it’s less of an ROI calculation for the student/family…
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I think that the high cost of attending college is a big factor in this. The immediate payoff of many engineering degrees makes it a more attractive path.
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While different choices made by women is a contributing factor, there are many other contributing factors. For example, I mentioned that the history major has had an especially sharp decline – decreasing by a factor of 6x at Duke over the past 12 years. In the past, history was primarily a male major at Duke. In 2012-13, >60% of history majors at Duke were male. However, this year only 25% of history majors were male. Men at Duke seem to be leaving the history major faster than women, to the point where it’s changed from male majority to male minority.
National totals show a similar type of pattern. Summed across all US colleges the total number of history majors has had a sharp drop over the past 15 years. History major is still mostly male students across all US colleges (recent years at Duke is an exception). However, male students have been leaving the history major faster than women.
Both male and female students are flocking to CS and to a lesser extent engineering, but you are correct that the rate of increase is faster among women than men. Across the full US, CS was 18% female in 2008-09. In the most recent NCES year, it’s increased up to 23% female. Male enrolled nearly tripled, while female enrollment nearly quadrupled.
A longer history of gender balance in CS is at Degrees in computer and information sciences conferred by postsecondary institutions, by level of degree and sex of student: Academic years 1964-65 through 2021-22 . There is a long history of varied gender balance in the major. A brief summary is below. Perhaps the decrease in percent female that began in 1983 relates to popularization of the home computer, which was largely marketed to boys. The recent increase that began in 2007-10 may partially relate to STEM educational initiatives, many of which specifically target women in STEM. Many colleges have also tried to encourage women in CS, in recent years.
- 1964 – 4% female (first year of CS major)
- 1960s, 1970s and early 80s – % female rapidly increasing
- 1983 – 37% female (all time high % female)
- Late 80s, 1990s, and 2000s – % female rapidly decreasing
- 2007-10 – 18% female (record low since 1975)
- 2010s to present – % female slowly increasing
- Most recent available year – 23% female
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Each field is a specific training and a way of thinking. Some people are hired “because they think like engineers”, even for non Engineering related roles.
There are specific ways in which history majors think, ways in which Humanities or Art majors think, which are different from the way CS-trained, Engineering-trained, etc… think. Because diversity of thought and approach is useful to any team, I hope more HR teams see benefits to this.
(I assume that’s why these HYPW … Humanities grads are hired by Bain and Co, companies not known for altruistic or nonprofitable endeavors.)
However I agree that Humanities or history majors don’t know how to sell themselves, highlight how they can be useful, etc., in part because many career centers don’t know how to do that and in part because it’s not part of their curriculum at most colleges - “writing for the professions” in its Humanities version doesn’t (didn’t?) include “using your writing skills in the business world” and just adding a couple classes could make their degree more easily marketable - but this is changing and there’s a whole thread about adaptations already in place or attempted, hypotheses, etc. And finally one can imagine educating people in charge of hiring, training, etc, just like there has been training to understand biases and blind spots that hinder diversifying one’s workforce.
I am not a futurologist and it’s clear STEM is there to stay but since there’s always a sort of “reverting to the mean” pendulum movement, I imagine the respective numbers will decrease/increase compared to now (but will never* be switched ala 1980s).
We’ll see 5-10 years from now if things have changed. 
(* in my lifetime)
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Not all STEM majors are seen as valuable by employers. Consider the pay levels that biology graduates tend to find.
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It’s interesting because History used to be considered rigorous, demanding, lots of difficult reading, writing, research, at least some basic reading knowledge of a foreign language, ie., indicating someone with lots of brainpower and resiliency. At Duke etc, it may have been used as a favorite stepping stone to Law school.
Another effect relevant to CC, as someone pointed out, is that applying for Humanities at top universities, with the relevant background to back it up, makes for an easier acceptance than if the goal is CS, premed, or economics (note that I said “easier”, ie., relative, not “easy” ).
Another benefit is that at universities with world-class Humanities departments such as those at Duke or another top private university where enrollment has suddenly dropped, choosing one of these majors would mean smaller class sizes, a more personal relationship with professors who are also incredible researchers, etc.
As was said upthread, the cost of college and its ROI impact student choices.
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However, many colleges developed their English departments at a time when they were all-male institutions.
I think we are focused on enrollment changes in the last 50 years, not in the centuries before that. Almost all academic subjects were originally studied exclusively by men. When women began entering colleges in sizable numbers, they first concentrated heavily in humanities, nursing, and education majors. More recent trends have seen women migrate to accounting, engineering, and other majors traditionally male-dominated instead.
Nearly 15 years later, even this seems very dated:
Perhaps more of today’s young women want the same lucrative majors as their male peers.
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Using federal categories, the NCES numbers are very different. In the most recent available year, the most common completed bachelor’s degrees by gender are as follows. Neither gender has many humanities majors among the top 10. There is also not a clear STEM vs non-STEM divide. For example, the using federal definitions of STEM majors, the 2 most popular STEM majors in the US are nursing and biology. Both are have a much larger portion women than men. Men are more represented in the tech/engineering portion of STEM.
Women
1 . Nursing – 11.2%
2. Psychology – 7.5%
3. Business – 5.4%
4. Biology – 4.5%
5. Elementary Education – 2.4%
6. Accounting – 1.9%
7. Marketing – 1.8%
8. English – 1.7%
9. Political Science – 1.6%
10. Social Work – 1.6%
…
24. Computer Science – 0.7%
Men
1 . Business – 8.6%
2. Computer Science – 3.8%
3. Finance – 3.6%
4. Mechanical Engineering – 3.5%
5. Biology – 3.0%
6. Psychology – 2.6%
7. Accounting – 2.5%
8. Computer + Information Science – 2.4%
9. Nursing – 2.4%
10. Marketing – 2.1%
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I really find those numbers surprising. On the men’s side I expected higher engineering numbers, and some like EE not listed.
EE was #12. The sum of all engineering (not including engineering tech) was 11% of degrees for men and 2.6% of degrees for women.
Mechanical Eng – #4 men, #35 women
Electrical Eng – #12 men, #75 women
Civil Eng – #18 men, #61 women
Computer Eng – #24 men, #122 women
Chemical Eng – #33 men, #62 women
Aerospace – #37 men, #170 women
Biomedical Eng – #40 men, #54 women (majority women)
Industrial Eng – #45 men, #104 women
Environmental Eng – #139 men, #163 women (majority women)
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