Philosopher Kathleen Wallace (Hofstra) calls my attention to this unfortunate item which lumps philosophy majors with religion majors, and then claims that they have poor employment outcomes during the recession. As Professor Wallace writes:
The graphic lumps philosophy and religion majors together, and shows them as doing the very worst of all the majors included in the graphic. However, other sources, in which philosophy majors are separated out from religion majors indicate that philosophy majors do considerably better than religion majors.
For example, The Wall Street Journal recently published an article based on payscale.com data (which does separate philosophy majors from religion majors) that showed that midcareer salaries for philosophy majors were actually quite a bit better than many majors, including ones that are presented here as doing much better than philosophy. The results for mid-career salaries could, of course, be different from at study looking at the specific issue of graduating into a recession. My only point is that philosophy looked at independently of religion might tell a rather different story.
No other majors in the graphic are lumped together like that (except for Music & Drama, but I can't speak to the appropriateness or not of that pairing). Most philosophy training and programs now, at least at secular institutions, are so different from religion programs that to lump them together is an anachronism.
I've written to the authors of the (unpublished) study to ask if they couldn't do a more refined study with philosophy majors separated out from religion.
UPDATE: Professor Wallace wrote to the authors, and Professor Joseph Altonji, an economist at Yale, kindly gave his permission to share his reply:
Dear Professor Wallace,
Thank you for your email.
We work with multiple data sets and are constrained in how much we can disaggregate fields of study by the fact that most of them do not provide detailed college major. (We use 50 or so majors). The aggregate called "philosophy and religious studies" combines philosophy, religious studies, theology, and religious vocations. It is almost certainly the case that philosophy majors earn more than those in a religion or theology major that is oriented toward career as a cleric. I don't have a clear sense of whether philosophy majors do better than "arts and sciences" religious studies majors.
I have taken the liberty of attaching a 2012 paper that I wrote with Erica Blom and Costas Meghir that sheds some light on this issue. In that paper we report results separately for "philosophy and religious studies" and "theology and religious vocations" using a data set called the 2009 American Community Survey. The group at Geogetown headed by Anthony Carnevale has also made use of this data. It is one of several date sets that Lisa Kahn, Jamin Speer, and I use, and it has more detailed major categories. Unfortunately, it does not separate philosophy and religious studies. Supplemental Table 3 reports regression estimates of the relationship between the natural logarithm of the hourly wage and college major, with controls for whether the person has obtained an advanced degree and a few demographic variables. The coefficients on the majors are relative to a "general education" major---not the average major. Results are reported seperately for women and men. For women, the coefficient of 0.08 on Philosophy and Religious studies implies an 8% advantage over general education majors. The coefficient on Theology and religious vocations is much lower-- -0.242. The corresponding coefficients for men are -.003 and -.304. The numbers imply that men who major earning in "Philosophy and Religious Studies" earn about the same as general education majors, while men who earn major in Theology and religious vocations earn about 25% less. These results strongly suggest that combining philosophy majors with the other majors leads to an understatement of the labor market prospects of philosophy majors.
Kahn, Speer, and I are in the process of revising our paper for publication. We can't disaggregate further by college major, but will make sure that the label we give to the category containing philosophy indicates that it is a broad category. We should also probably avoid that category when illustrating our results.
Finally, you mention the Paycheck website. It is an interesting data source, but at this point, it is hard to know what population that site represents.
Thanks again for you email.
Sincerely,
Joseph Altonji
Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics
Yale University
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