Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 29

THE SECRET LIVES OF
ENGLISH MAJORS
Unlike their STEM peers, Black and white humanities
graduates earn about the same. How did that happen?
By Elizabeth Austin
F
or decades, optimistic liberals believed that by sending
more students of color to college, the United States could
dismantle systemic racial income disparities. But in recent
years, research has made it abundantly clear that's simply
not the case. Even when minority students from impoverished
backgrounds earn college diplomas, they make substantially
less than their white peers. A study by the Economic Policy Institute,
for example, found that Black college graduates earned
22.5 percent less than their white counterparts in 2019, up from
19.2 percent in 2007 and 17.2 percent in 2000. Other researchers
have found similarly large gaps, even among the graduates
of top-tier universities.
Those entry-level inequities can snowball over time. In a
groundbreaking study of students' long-term earnings, the University
of Texas system found that white graduates in computers,
statistics, and mathematics earned a median entry-level
wage of $53,100, compared with a median of $50,000 for Black
graduates and $45,000 for Latinos. Fifteen years after graduation,
the salary gaps had increased dramatically: White students
were making a median of $112,000, compared with $83,500 for
Black students and $68,200 for Latinos. Graduates in engineering
and business saw similar salary inequities.
But when officials at UT dug into their data set, which
combined university records of almost 550,000 students who
attended nine UT system institutions from 2002 through 2018
with 15 years of wage data from the Texas Workforce Commission,
they unearthed some unexpected findings. As they sliced
the data by student major, gender, race, and family income, they
found that Black, brown, and female alums are often massively
underpaid compared with their white male peers in many highwage
career paths, such as computer science, engineering, and
business. But they also found that students of color who majored
in education, health, and the humanities tended to earn
roughly the same amount as these disciplines' white graduates,
both right after graduation and 15 years out.
The humanities data is perhaps the most surprising. Unlike
education and health majors, who tend to cluster in professions
with more transparent pay scales that support wage parity,
humanities grads work everywhere. That's in part because
" humanities " encompasses a long list of majors, from American
studies, anthropology, Asian cultures and languages, classical
studies, and English through geography, history, linguistics, philosophy,
rhetoric, and women's and gender studies. UT's data set
is robust, including 37,266 humanities graduates, of whom 4,231
identify as Black and 28,814 identify as Hispanic. In the first year
after graduation, the median incomes of all humanities students
regardless of race and gender clustered just below $30,000; that
relative wage parity remained durable 15 years after commencement,
when white graduates earned a median wage of $60,000
and Black and Latino graduates made a median wage of $58,000.
How is it that UT humanities majors overcome the racial
earnings gap? There's no one clear answer. But there seem to
be multiple possible explanations that could help students, instructors,
institutions, and employers everywhere-and across
all disciplines-reduce pay discrimination.
T
o understand what's going right in the humanities, it
makes sense to start at the outset of students' college careers.
One of the key differences between humanities students
and their counterparts in science, technology, and math
shows up in the first year of college. That's when many STEM,
business, and pre-med students are herded through notorious
" dropout " or " weeder " classes-big, required courses with extremely
challenging curricula that are purposely designed to cull
any students deemed less prepared to withstand the rigors of
their chosen majors. " The failure rate, especially for minorities
who come into the sciences, is pretty high, " says the physicist
Walter Massey, president emeritus of the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago and of Morehouse College, and the former head
of the National Science Foundation. " Within the humanities,
there's not that sort of weeding out. "
By itself, that doesn't explain the earnings gap, which measures
the incomes of students who do make it through weeder
courses and graduate with degrees in high-wage fields. But it
turns out that the stresses of these courses can damage the career
prospects of students who stick it out, especially if they arrived
at college from underperforming high schools (as many
students of color do). " In their first year, they need to make this
really hard choice-to try to simultaneously catch up in calculus
and take Computer Science 101 or take remedial calc, which
delays graduation by an entire year, " says April Christina Curley,
the engagement and partnerships manager at the Last Mile EdWashington
Monthly 29
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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