I teach English majors at KU. They’re great workers because they learn to read people

What the world needs right now is more English majors. This may sound counterintuitive, even ridiculous. Indeed, the question English majors most dread is, “What will you do with that when you graduate?”

As a professor of English literature at the University of Kansas, I’ve taught thousands of English majors over the years. I keep a card in my desk recording the jobs that my former students have, ranging from editing a magazine called Thoroughbred Times to writing for the Conan O’Brien show to serving in Congress.

While majoring in a STEM field seems to promise a clear career path, the 2019 US Census reported that 72% of STEM graduates did not actually end up in a science, technology, engineering or math field. To do that requires advanced expertise acquired only through years of graduate school. Instead, most worked in management, law, education, social work or health care — the same jobs that English and other humanities majors get. Meanwhile, the employment rate for humanities graduates has been estimated at 91%. Thus an English major is not a bad choice even in today’s economy.

Of course, many English graduates go into law, medicine or business. A few go to graduate school or into secondary school teaching, or become successful writers. The skills that humanities majors learn make them good candidates for such careers. When I taught undergraduates at Johns Hopkins University, most majored in biology, hoping to get into its famous medical school. However, our handful of English majors had a much higher acceptance rate to the med school, where admissions committees favor English majors because they are good at reading — not only technical books, but also people. They notice the incidental things patients say that may be clues to diagnosing their health problems.

Similarly, the human resources manager of a large corporation told me that his company would far rather hire English majors than business majors because their focus was not simply on making money, but on developing new ideas that could both give the company an edge in the market and make it more socially responsible. Employers recognize the intangible skills that English majors develop through extensive reading, writing and discussing ideas.

But English majors and their parents need to know that the world is rife with jobs that don’t match up with typical college majors. Humanities majors excel at careers students don’t even imagine. One English major I know moved to a large city after graduation without any concrete idea about what he would do. He was hired at a science museum doing customer service, but he especially enjoyed his shifts in the planetarium. Using his research skills, he studied the latest developments in astronomy and was soon hosting shows, then assisting with the writing, and finally writing and hosting his own shows. Having studied drama and creative writing as part of his English major paid off in his lively manner of hosting and inventive presentations. Needless to say, planetarium presenter was not a job he imagined when he graduated from college with an English major.

All of this answers the dreaded “What can you do with an English major?” question. But I began by claiming that right now the world needs more English majors. We live in a world torn by misunderstanding, prejudice, dissent and violence. Because English majors spend so much time reading about other people and other ways of thinking, they develop a sense of connection with people unlike themselves, resulting in a strong desire to help change the world for the better.

So if your daughters or sons say they might want to major in English — or philosophy, or history, or Spanish, or some other humanities field — don’t squelch the idea. Encourage them. You may very well be doing all of us a big favor.

This story was originally published August 24, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "I teach English majors at KU. They’re great workers because they learn to read people."