4Humanities’s The Humanities Matter! infographic — with arguments and statistics for why the humanities matter — has been updated! It can be downloaded as a large, vertical PDF file or image file (or as production files to facilitate adapting it under its open license).
By: Christine Henseler It baffles me to hear parents tell their kids that art is a hobby, not a career; that you can’t make good money with a degree in English. Wasn’t it just yesterday evening that these same adults binged for hours on the entire season of Grey’s Anatomy? For the second time? It so […]
[Now also in paperback] A new, open-access guide book has been published online by 4Humanities.org’s co-leader, Christine Henseler. Called Arts and Humanities: Don’t Leave College Without Them! (2022), the work takes the form of a “flipbook” giving a broad overview and specific examples of the humanities and arts, and the kinds of careers they lead […]
Edited by Alain-Philippe Durand and Christine Henseler Call for Essays When the general public hears the word “entrepreneurship” and reads articles and magazines that sell us on the “100 Most Entrepreneurial People in __________ (fill in the blank),” they usually think of new business models and products in technology and the sciences. “Entrepreneurship” is rarely […]
In the spring of 2018, a group of Union College students took my class called “Millennials and Social Change”. They were in for a surprise. They registered for a course about the rise of the everyday changemaker. It was a class that focused on the current student generation, the Millennials (b. 1980-2000), and the changes they wished to see in their lives and in their communities.
Ten weeks later, the students in this class had become changemakers themselves. They had risen to the challenge with honesty, passion, and ambition and had written personal stories that inspire and give hope to others. Their collective calls for change became this book, Generation Now: Millennials Call for Social Change.
Calling all students and young professionals from all communities, backgrounds and interests to share experiences and opinions on what they would want their peers to know now about why, how and where the arts and humanities can play a foundational and transformative role in their educations and career opportunities.
“What are you going to do with that degree?” Sadly, many students in the liberal arts and humanities have gotten used to that condescending question by now. With economic downturn in 2008 and a job market demand trending towards science and engineering degrees, a specialized education seemed like the obvious solution to steady employment in a tough market.
But trends in industry and the very nature of work since then are beginning to paint a very different picture of the future. A recent study even suggests that this reputation is undeserved and deeply misleading. Instead, it finds a high correlation between a broad undergraduate education and financial success. In fact, those who take the arts and humanities in addition to their main field of study are 31-72% more likely than others to have higher-level positions and earn more than $100,000.
