Over at AHA Today, Rob Townsend offers some online resources “that can help you and your students in thinking about their potential careers and financial prospects.”
Here is a taste:
The prevailing question from students and parents these days seems to be about how salaries for history majors compare to other fields. A new report from the Humanities Indicators finds median annual earnings were $55,000 for workers who majored in US history and $50,000 for those who majored in another area of history (with only a bachelor’s degree). Both numbers compare favorably to $42,000 for the average American aged 25 to 64 (including all those who have not earned degrees), but lag a bit behind the average for graduates from all fields ($57,000). Those numbers can provide a baseline for general discussions with parents and administrators. For a one-on-one conversation with a student, however, PayScale offers a nice visualization of history’s relationship to other degrees. The visualization is very accessible for the average reader, but needs to be read with caution, since it relies only on self-reported data.
Read more here.
And for more anecdotal evidence check out our series So What CAN You Do With a History Major?
