Today’s students increasingly see higher education as a vehicle to employment, and colleges and universities have a responsibility to ensure that graduates are well-positioned to meet their career goals. Too often, however, the measure of whether colleges are meeting that responsibility is reduced to a single number—students’ early career earnings. The reality is more complicated, and taking a broader, longer-term view is essential: outcomes like career adaptability, lifetime earnings, civic engagement, and even personal fulfillment all matter, too.

Determining the value of a college degree based only on students’ initial earnings has real consequences: it can funnel students with less agency and fewer options into short-term, workforce-aligned programs that lead to jobs without long-term upward mobility; it can prioritize programs that can demonstrate short-term earnings gains over those with longer-term wage growth and career adaptability; and it can de-prioritize the social and civic purposes of higher education, and the careers and experiences that uphold them.

Humanities disciplines, especially, can come up short. In addition to dissuading students from pursuing majors or coursework in the humanities who might have benefited from them, there can be negative consequences for departments, institutions, and faculty. There exists the real risk of program closures and financial penalties at a time when institutions are already facing significant financial pressure.

The field needs a clear picture of what humanities exposure looks like across higher education, what it leads to over time, and what it returns not just to individuals, but to communities and states. If we’re going to make decisions about which programs to sustain, how to advise students, and what public investments we should prioritize, we need evidence that matches the complexity of the questions. That’s why Ithaka S+R is launching a new research project: The Economic and Civic Value of a Humanities Workforce, supported by the Mellon Foundation. Our aim is to build a clearer, multi-dimensional account, grounded in evidence, of how the humanities fit into the higher education ecosystem, and what that means for students, institutions, and the public.

What questions are we asking?

Who has access to the humanities, how much, and in what majors and levels?

Humanities disciplines matter for all students, not just for humanities majors. Students across disciplines encounter humanities coursework through general education, electives, and interdisciplinary programs. Those experiences shape how students learn to interpret evidence, communicate, and reason about complex social questions—capacities that matter across professions and over a lifetime. But we know surprisingly little, at scale, about where humanities exposure is happening, the nature of that exposure and for whom it is robust or limited, and how it relates to longer-run outcomes.

What are the long-term trends in humanities program offerings?

At the same time, headlines about humanities program closures raise a different set of questions: Are humanities programs disappearing everywhere, or in specific places? Are closures driven primarily by enrollment shifts, budget pressures, or something else altogether? How do new accountability rules calculate “earnings thresholds” and what kinds of programs are most vulnerable under those methodologies? Without a clearer view of these dynamics, it’s difficult for policymakers to act early to protect high-value offerings, safeguard access, and sustain the future humanities workforce.

What does the humanities workforce actually look like?

Another part of the story gets flattened by the way we talk about career outcomes. Humanities graduates don’t move along a single track: they enter a wide range of industries, often with meaningful variation in outcomes by institution type, region, cohort, and graduate education. Capturing that variation is essential. A humanities degree can be a direct pathway, a stepping stone, or a foundation that supports mobility across jobs and sectors. If we only look at one snapshot in time—or one dataset—we miss the diversity of outcomes and the factors that shape them.

What is the economic and civic value of a strong humanities workforce?

States and the federal government invest heavily in higher education and use policy to shape what programs are offered, who can access them, and how students fare. The relevant questions are both “What do graduates earn?” and “What do states gain when more residents complete humanities degrees?” We can measure this through increased tax revenues and decreased public spending, but also the social and civic contributions that humanities majors make to their communities.

We’ll be sharing findings as the project progresses, along with tools and briefs designed to make the results of this research useful. If you’re working on similar questions that can shape the future of the humanities, we’d love to connect and we hope you’ll follow along. Please reach out to Madeline Trimble (madeline.trimble@ithaka.org) to learn more.