English majors get good jobs

English majors get good jobs

Posted on August 21st, 2019 by Scott Warnock

I am an English Professor, so I am invested in demonstrating that students who major in English are successful, as measured in various ways. Keep in mind, thought, that I would consider it unethical to persuade a student to major in English simply because it’s my field: Instead, it’s my field because I believe in its value.

Now that I have laid out a disclaimer, I want to discuss an article I read recently, another in a long line of pieces about the value of English specifically and the humanities generally as major courses of study.

Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, distributes an email newsletter The Edge. She recently wrote about a study, “Degrees at Work: Examining the Serendipitous Outcomes of Diverse Degrees.” In that study, the labor market analytics company EMSI crunched data from the first, second, and third jobs of almost a million professionals; that data set mapping the career paths of real people demonstrated that “the outcome of the English major looks pretty similar to the outcome of the business major,” Blumenstyk quotes Rob Sentz, the company’s chief innovation officer, as saying.

In other words, said Sentz, your major “doesn’t doom you to a fixed path.”

The reason? EMSI’s analysis found that the very skills held by those who had majored in English — or philosophy or social sciences or business or communications — seemed to have prepared them well for jobs in fields like sales, marketing, training, and management, which are all now in high demand.

In other words, a key finding in the report was that English and similar majors had the same employability and success as business majors.

This is not at all to denigrate other majors or disciplines. But it indicates there are things that will have value for the many interactions we have in our culture that you can learn in a variety of generalized ways.

Blumenstyk recommends that colleges should be more proactive about communicating these outcomes. As the above-quoted Sentz says:

People are landing in good jobs from a variety of majors, but “it’s happening without a lot of intentionality.” Now that “we can see this in the data,” he asked, “can we talk about it a little more?”

Indeed, colleges should continue to believe in their own general mission and communicate that to students. This makes me want to repeat an old tune of mine. If you go to college–and perhaps you won’t–do the following: Read, write, think, meet a few smart friends, meet a few smart teachers. If you do those things, you will likely get your money’s worth and provide something back to the great world, which might really need you right now.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.