Weren't there?
Were there many job opportunities in the past for undergraduates with a degree in the humanities?
Yes —
relative to the size of the college-educated population and the structure of the labor market, there were more straightforward job paths for humanities BAs in the mid-20th century than there are now.
The picture is not “everyone with an English degree walked into a great career,” but a bachelor’s in history, English, philosophy, or languages was a more reliable general-purpose credential than it is today.
Why the market looked better then
A college degree itself was scarce. In 1960 only about 8% of U.S. adults held a bachelor’s degree; by 1970 it was still only 11%. Today it is roughly 38%. When few people had any four-year degree, employers treated the BA as a broad signal of literacy, reasoning, and reliability. Major mattered less.
The biggest single destination was
teaching.
The postwar baby boom produced a long teacher shortage that lasted into the late 1960s.
Elementary and secondary enrollments exploded while the supply of new teachers (many of them humanities majors) lagged. School districts hired aggressively; certification was often obtainable after a BA plus a relatively short additional program. Humanities fields fed that pipeline directly.
The surplus only became obvious around 1969–70, when the baby-boom cohort finished pre-college school and the number of education graduates kept rising.
Other common paths were also more open:
- Government and civil-service jobs that valued a general liberal-arts education.
- Management-trainee and white-collar programs at large companies that hired “college men” (and later women) without requiring a business major.
- Journalism, publishing, insurance, sales, and later law school. A 1950s study of English majors from several Midwestern colleges found them scattered across business, education, journalism/writing, law, medicine, ministry, and government — not clustered in one narrow occupation.
Humanities degrees themselves were also a larger share of the pie. Their share of all bachelor’s degrees peaked around 1967 at 17%; history BAs hit an all-time high of about 44,700 in 1971 and have never returned to that number.
What changed
The 1970s broke the pattern. Teacher demand flattened, college enrollment growth slowed, and the number of new PhDs (especially in history and English) far outstripped academic openings — creating a well-documented “lost generation” of historians. For undergraduates the change was slower but real: more people earned BAs, professional and vocational majors expanded, and employers began asking more often for a specific major plus internships or technical skills.
Today humanities graduates still work. Unemployment for established humanities BAs is close to the rate for other college graduates and far below the rate for people with only a high-school diploma. Common destinations remain education, management, legal occupations (usually after further schooling), government, communications, HR, and nonprofits. Mid-career earnings typically sit below STEM and some business fields but well above non-graduates; many humanities majors who later earn a graduate or professional degree close much of the gap.
The difference is that the default path is no longer as clear or as cheap. Tuition is higher, the BA is common rather than distinctive, and students (and parents) now expect a more visible line from major to job. That expectation is what makes the older market look comparatively generous.
Were there many job opportunities in the past for undergraduates with a degree in the humanities?
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What choice do they have?
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