New York Times Dumps on Philosophy Majors

Michael Weisberg (Philosophy, Penn) has called my attention to this recent article in The New York Times on the choice of college majors; a pertinent excerpt:

In their recently published "College Majors Handbook With Real Career Paths and Payoffs" (Jist Publishing), three economists from Northeastern University in Boston try to quantify just how much students with a variety of majors can expect to earn in their careers. The authors concluded that choosing a major was more crucial to future financial success than the college attended.

One of the authors, Paul E. Harrington, an economist and associate director at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern, said that, on average, humanities and education majors fared far worse financially than students in business or engineering.

In 2002, workers with degrees in chemical engineering and accounting were on the high end, earning an average of $75,579 and $63,486, respectively. On the low end, philosophy majors made an average of $42,865 and elementary education graduates $38,746.

Mr. Harrington said the research was not intended to dissuade sociology majors from following their passions. Instead, he hopes the information will help students prepare carefully when choosing a major. He recommends that students contemplating majors in the liberal arts or humanities also take some business-oriented courses. A philosophy major, Mr. Harrington said, should probably get some real-world internship experience.

"The world is a more unforgiving place than it used to be, and investment costs are too high for four years of drift," he said. "If a student doesn't take the right sequence of math courses in high school, they can lose out on the best jobs."

A few obvious points:  first, not everyone does, or ought to, frame the question of what major to choose in terms of financial rewards; second, it would be useful to know how the results are affected once you factor in the quality of undergraduate institution (it could be that philosophy majors at Harvard fare better, financially, than business majors at Loyola, for example); third, how does one factor in graduate training?  It is well-known that philosophy majors are top performers in the humanities on all kinds of standardized testing (this could, of course, simply be a self-selection effect), meaning, presumably, that they also get in to the best graduate and professional programs, which, presumably, also impacts their lifetime earnings.  It is unclear how, if at all, the Northeastern study factored this in.

Some merely anecdotal evidence:  when I think back to the folks who majored in philosophy with me at Princeton 20 years ago, there are, besides me, now two law professors (at Texas, American, and British Columbia) and two philosophy professors (at Stanford and Montana); at least two partners at major law firms; a fellow who got an MBA and made a fortune in business; a mathematics professor at a small college (in Kentucky, I think); a private school teacher in New Jersey; and a linguistics professor somewhere in Canada.  Our average income, even factoring out our mutli-millionaire, is, I would guess, competitive with the business majors elsewhere...but we also all (with one exception, I think) earned graduate degrees. 

Is there hard data on this anywhere?  What do others make of this article?

Comments are open; no anonymous postings, of course.

Comments

[Robert Allen]

The article encourages students (and their parents) to think of colleges and universities as glorified vocational schools, instead of institutions of higher learning, a vulgar, pernicious notion if ever there was one.

[Dan]

I find the results very hard to take seriously on their face, simply because so many philosophy majors wind up in law school as a default option, and then find themselves at a firm in three years. Of the 8 or so philosophy majors in my class (at a tiny, unimpressive school in the midwest, class of '97) I know of three, myself included, who took that route; all three of us are now at major firms, so the average salary for 3/8 of my class is somewhere around $150,000. Although I can't draw on anything other than anecdotal evidence, I bumped into a wildly disproportionate number of philosophy majors at law school; my theory is that the LSAT is essentially a test of formal logic ability, so we have an enormous advantage.

I was also struck by the majors on the high end of the range. Does accountancy really pay that well, or are accountants uniquely scarce (such that there are virtually no unemployed accountancy majors dragging down the average), or is it just that a lot of people who want to get MBAs eventually choose an accounting major over the more traditional business major?

Based on the above, I wonder if the methodology of the study cited by the Times wasn't to look at salary data within 2 or 3 years of graduation. I imagine accountants can get pretty good jobs pretty quickly, although I know that they are limited in terms of future salary growth, for the most part. On the other hand, I think my experience immediately upon graduation with the philosophy degree was typical: I could go to school for a PhD in philosophy, I could go to school for a JD, or I could go to work at a Sam Goody's. In any case, my earning potential was severely limited for several years.

[Matt]

My first
response when reading the article was that I don't suppose the amount of
money made for philosophy majors is far off, and that one reason for this is that even for many philosophy PhD's it's not going to be that far off. At Boise State University, where I did my BA (as a philosophy major) the starting salary for an associate professor was about 35K when I left. Given the financial situation of the state I doubt it's much better. The
salary scale topped out about about 55-60K for humanities professor, I believe. At Idaho State University, considered the 3rd best of the 3 public universities (that's saying something) the scale was even lower- I believe assistant professors started at something like 29K, maybe lower. I suspect that the pay scale is similar at many state schools that don't have graduate programs. So, even those w/ grad degrees in philosophy, if they end up in places like that, will likely not be bringing up the
average much. (Of my group-mates from my years as an undergrad, now about 8 years in the past, one is a poorly paid assistant to a literary agent in NY City and would-be novelist, one is working on a PhD at Bowling Green, one just finished a PhD is Psych at Nevada Reno, one is studying art, history and another Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, One is a guard at the county
jail, one owns a bar, one is a lawyer in Boise (went to Drake, I think), one dropped out of law
school and was a body-builder and bouncer in a bar, one dropped out of the PhD program in Philosophy at Brown to become a minister The others I don't know about. I suspect the one who owns the bar makes the most money at
this point, if he's not drinking all the profits! (Even the lawyer in Boise only starts out at about 60K/year.)

[david]

"Based on the above, I wonder if the methodology of the study cited by the Times wasn't to look at salary data within 2 or 3 years of graduation."

Don't the salary figures seem awfully high if they're supposed to represent the first 2 or 3 years after graduation? Elementary education majors, for instance, probably don't make $38,000 right out of the box. I bet they average half that figure to start.

I haven't read the article, but I don't find anything in the provided quote very surprising. All this kind of information shows is that if you really want to be valuable to your employer, learn how to build a bridge (or whatever) for him; don't concentrate on subjects with no immediate practical application.

[Michael Cholbi]

The article makes no mention of unemployment rates either, so it's not clear if that's factored into average salary or not. Is there reason to think that philosophy majors, given that they enjoy a wide breadth of skills when they leave udnergrad, might enjoy higher levels of employment than other humanities disciplines? Or even than technical disciplines like engineering and accounting? I'd be interested to see the unemployment rates for philosophy majors over the last five years when compared to those for, say, computer science majors, where there's been a major downturn in employer demand.

[Richard Zach]

Compare this with this previous NYT piece.

[Larry Bailey]

2 cents from a non-philosopher.

The author does no analysis into what an undergraduate degree in philosophy can offer to the working world. I used to sneer at them until I had a chance to work with several in business consulting. In consulting we typically have a client with a problem and (metaphorically speaking) we are aseked to assess the problem and suggest a program for building a bridge to solve the problem. What I have discovered is that philosophy majors are taught more than vocation-specific problem solving skills. They are taught a creative and analytical process that helps them design and build bridges to solve problems that is unlike what is taught in B-school.

Granted philosophy majors may need marketing, statistical, risk management, accounting, and other vocational skills to supplement their training. Without the analytical discipline of philosophy many consultants I see are clueless in thinking about dramatically new approaches to business and public administration.

[Josh Narins]

Thinking must be discouraged.

The more I learn about Art Sulzberger, Jr. the more I am happy that Dick Cheney won't let any NY Times reporters on his plane (even if, in this particular instance, their aims are identical).

[Philip Brooks]

Another anecdote about philosophers with graduate degrees:

I have a BA in philosophy from a small liberal arts college where I did not take much in the way of math. Nevertheless, I've found that my philosophy background has really helped me with my current graduate program, which terminates in an MS in artificial intelligence. What I lack in numeral mathematical knowledge I've made up for in training in formal logic and rigorous thinking about non-numerical ideas. At least where logic programming is concerned, people with backgrounds in analytic philosophy tend to be more comfortable than those with traditional computer science backgrounds. The same seems to be true for linguists and I have a feeling it would be for mathematicians, too, but we don't have any currently enrolled.

As far as salary goes, a graduate in AI (with a philosophy background) is in about the same tier as a graduate in computer science.

[david]

"Could he be in cahoots with those institutions that benefit from such ignorance?"

Why would colleges prefer kids major in engineering or accounting than in philosophy? The tuition is the same either way, but the faculty is cheaper and you don't have any expensive labs, etc.

[Arthur]

It's probably more fair to compare your Princeton philosophy class with the chemical engineers at Caltech. I bet the engineers--on average--are smarter, happier and better looking.

What's more, I bet this translates all the way down the academic ladder. That is, a B+ Chemical Engineer at LSU is a better human being than a B+ Philosopher from a similar university.

I can't explain the accountants. But, I suspect that once you get down into the 2nd tier public universities--where the NY Times averages are likely to reflect reality--the philosophy departments are a simply a refuge for would be accountants who can't do math.

[andy altman]

At one of my former schools, the number of philosophy majors was systemtically undercounted, because the students would often double major and yet be counted as majoring only in their other field.

Even assuming the accuracy of the raw data, the conclusions would be worthless unless one controlled for the amount of time that people had been in the labor force. Everyone knows that income goes up with number of years in the workforce. Maybe philosophy majors had a below average number of years working because they are more likely to undertake grad or professional study than most other majors.

The article is yet another in the endless stream of examples in which social scientists (or some other experts) have a study that (maybe) shows that X is the case, and then the fact that they did the study is regarded as grounds for treating them as an authority on questions the study never addressed. So one of authors of the study advises philosophy majors to take internships. Well, the study did not examine the economic value of internships to philosophy or any other majors. But that presumably does not matter because the author of the study is now an authority licensed to speculate on Y because he has shown that X is the case, and Y is, well, kind of close to X. This kind of illogical authority-inflation is rampant in the media.

[Samuel Gross]

Thinking of a college degree as "vocational" is not pernicious. It merely reflects the fact that most people want some sort of financial benefit for the money they outlayed to go to school in the first place. College is no longer (and hasn't been for quite some time) a place where someone goes simply to better themselves. College has taken over from other forms of career advancement (such as working your way up the latter, apprenticeship etc.) and for a large number of majors college is vocational in fact: Accounting, Finance, Management, All types of engineering, Biochem, Chemistry and Education.

Some of the best paying and highest status jobs are from "vocational" schools: Doctors, Lawyers, Pharmacists, Veterinary and MBAs are all really just vocational degrees. The idea that somehow thinking of college as a place to learn a skill and a trade is bad is just plain wrong. If you, or your family, can afford the tuition and opportunity cost for you to simply become educated that's all for the good, but there's nothing wrong with going to college simply to get the training to do a job either.

My guess is that those philosophers (and other humanities and social science students) who do make larger salaries have other degrees that do the heavy lifting in terms of earning power such as the former philosophy student with a MS in AI. There just isn't any real demand for the skills taught in those undergraduate degrees in the job market (although they might help in graduate programs or in performing another job, but people don't get that other job unless they have the skills in the job description).

[Robert Allen]

Mr. Gross:

I did not say that "thinking of a college degree as vocational is pernicious." I would never say such a thing because I don't think of degrees as being vocational so much as the training one receives to obtain them. (In the same way, "Doctors, Lawyers, Pharmacists, Veterinary and MBAs" are not "vocational degrees," but members of professions.) And if that's what our colleges and universities are now supposed to be providing certain students- the ones who expect to benefit financially from all of their classroom experiences- then we should acknowledge the fact that not all those who graduate from them are well-educated. Bush the Liar has an MBA from Harvard, for heaven's sake, and he's a complete fool with no respect for higher learning. "Students" who pursue a college degree with the sole intention of advancing in one of the fields you list, emerge as learned as the typical auto mechanic (who at least is modest enough not to portray himself as well-educated). Moreover, I did not say that it is "wrong" to approach college in this way (as in 'It is wrong to illegally invade another country, slaughter tens of thousands of its citizens, including women and children, and plunder its natural resources'). I said that it is vulgar and pernicious to think of (what are supposed to be) institutions of higher education as vocational schools: vulgar because it smacks of anti-intellectualism; pernicious because its leads to the lowering of academic standards.

BTW, my parents are working class folks who, thank God, didn't try pounding it into my head that I had to take courses that would lead to lucrative employment.

.

[Fernando]

There are several potential issues related to the NY Times article regarding the market value of a philosophy major. I mention “market value” because some of the infra postings seem to stray in that direction. To begin with it’s important to note that the article deals with empirical data, in the form of informative responses generated through a survey-like questionnaire. The aggregate result is nothing more than a set of numerical indexes juxtaposed to pre-selected pigeonhole categories. All this should be obvious. Surveys are questionable from various angles. Granted, this topic leads to methodological issues regarding statistical information and the means by which such information is organized. Supposing the NY Times article is problem free, i.e., no biases, and the surveyed were honest in their replies to the questions on the survey, the odds are rather high, from an intuitive point of view, informed by a university education, that the NY Times article is a useful bit of information for those mapping out the next four years of their undergraduate education, especially those considering a philosophy major. For those ex-philosophy majors exceeding the predictions, well, more power to you. The NY Times article purports to use salary range as the key-organizing category, yet the article makes use of the category phrase “philosophy major” in an equivocal sense, by not distinguishing various possible academic levels, i.e., baccalaureate, masters, and philosophical doctor degrees. But assuming that the author(s) intended to use only the former, i.e., a baccalaureate degree in philosophy, there is some merit to the survey. It helps to think in terms of probabilities. As any well educated school “boy” knows, a survey, like the one at issue, is a statistical instrument used not only to gather facts per participant (the surveyed), but also functions as an instrument of prediction. Like any tool at one’s disposal, you can use it or not; it’s really your prerogative. Now the info amassed by the NY Times basically provides useful facts, by which statisticians, either amateurish, professional, or anywhere in-between, can go on and make informed decisions as to whether or not a philosophy major, despite naming or taking into account the actual institution, would be a desirable choice, all things considered equal. It makes it possible to help deliberate about making such a decision by using a practical plane, i.e., salary, in combination, to create a deliberative crossroad, with one’s ideal of how much one would like to make upon graduation; all of which can result in providing more clarity than otherwise. But “market value” itself is a complex economic phrase. Candidates for PhDs in economics or rigorous social sciences write dissertations on the topic. My point is quite simple. All in all, the survey has a dual function: 1.) it gathers facts, and 2.) it provides the means to “somewhat” predict a salary range given a handful of factors (variables). The survey does not explicitly nor implicitly diminish the “value” of studying philosophy at universities. And it does not provide any clear link to “market value”. If it’s one thing that an earnest student of philosophy gains in value it’s the cherished know how to read carefully-- (better yet critically).

[david]

It might also be worthwhile to consider that there is probably more diversity among philosophy programs than among, say, engineering programs. I'm guessing engineering is the same discipline everywhere; the only variation among engineering programs would be in terms of quality and depth, not subject matter. On the other hand, the philosophy major at an analytically-oriented department is probably much different from the major at a historically-oriented one, or at a department with a heavy Continental orientation, etc. Given this, it might be that the orientation of your department has a significant effect on your earning potential. This "orientation effect" might be dampened by a tendency of employers not to differentiate among different styles of philosophy, but I'd bet it's still there, and probably worth taking into account if you're considering becoming a philosophy major but are worried about your career prospects.

[Len Cleavelin]

Somehow, when I read of these studies of the earning potential of various undergraduate degrees, I'm reminded of the story (probably apocryphal) of representatives of the Geography Department at the University of North Carolina telling potential Geography majors (quite truthfully) that the mean salary for recipients of a UNC bachelor's degree in geography was somewhere in the mid-to-high 6 figures, without pointing out that NBA superstar Michael Jordan had graduated from UNC with a geography major....

[Graham Smith]

As someone who has graduate degrees in engineering and physics along with a B.S. in philosophy, I would like to say that it seems to me that the benefit of a degree in philosophy is that it inculcates a general habit of critical reflection. While an engineering and science education will teach its recipient how to reason critically about specific issues of concern within those disciplines it sometimes fails to provide the skills necessary to reason outside those issues and it almost always fails to inculcate the general habit of using such skills where they are possessed. Further, time spent thinking about nano-technology is time that is not spent thinking about ethics, politics, and religion. This explains why the U.S. can be a world leader in science and technology, but yet remain a lesser country, culturally. In fact, it seems to me that the higher proportion of our resources that are directed toward scientific achievment, compared to those spent on philosophy, for example, the worse off we are likely to be, culturally.

[Cal]

I think Brian Leiter comes off as contradicting himself on this point as the ethos behind his infamous "Gourmet Report" in philosophy is founded in large part on employment figures. As professor Leiter would surely admit, even within philosophy itself, employment matters. You can't throw stones at someone for doing the same thing you have done on an interdisciplinary scale.

Personally, while I confess to indulging in the philosopher's past-time of righteous indignation towards those who would suggest the purpose of the modern university is vocational training; I can't help but sympathize with those (including Leiter) who provide students realistic facts and figures about the likely outcome of their education.

So why do philosophers make less money? You don't need profound philosophical reflection, reduction or dialectic of any kind to figure this one out, there is an excess in supply and deficit in demand for "trained philosophers." Demand is directly linked to perceived social and material benefit by students and parents. Survey any college campus, my guess is that philosophy wouldn't be up there in the "indispensible departments" or "things I would want my son/daughter to major in" lists. Philosophy doesn't garner the same respect and admiration it did in the Hegel "Queen of the SCiences" days.

Medicine is a particularly relevant example of my point since it wasn't considered a very dignified thing to do until fairly recently. Through much of the early to mid twentieth-century, many American and Canadian schools required nothing more than a simple admissions fee. Famously, in the early twentieth century, Frederick Banting (discoverer of insulin) was thrown out of the arts and humanities at the University of Toronto and sent where many other remedial students were, medicine. Compare that with the current situation where medicine is considered the royal road to social status and material benefit. Predictably the admissions criteria have become, from what I'm told, massochistic. On a smaller scale, the admissions criteria for those graduate philosophy programs where good employment is more likely are, similarly more demanding.

Great blog btw.