Part III. The Humanities Workforce Section A. Employment in Humanistic Occupations and Settings

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Indicator III-1 Size and Occupational Distribution of the Humanities Workforce

Indicator III-2 Salaries in Humanistic Occupations

What occupations can be characterized as falling within the humanities? The answer to this question is by no means self-evident, especially given that the occupations that draw on and further the humanities are even more varied than the disciplines within the academic field. Nonetheless, some parameters can be set, and, for the purposes of the Humanities Indicators Project, these are broad. Not only do they include occupations that are obviously humanistic in their orientation—writing or teaching history, for example—and that clearly depend on humanistic skills—such as editing books. They also attempt to take into account the myriad occupations, such as those of audiovisual media specialists, that both owe their existence to humanistic institutions and enterprises and support them. At the same time, however, the occupations under consideration in this section of the Humanities Indicators exclude civil servants who administer federal, state, and local government humanities programs because these individuals cannot be identified using the occupational classification system employed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which is the primary source of employment data in the United States and the source of the information on which the indicators in this section are based.

Moreover, although a comprehensive statistical description of the humanities workforce should include both those who work on a volunteer basis—literacy tutors are just one example—and those who are self-employed—as are many writers, for instance—existing data do not permit calculations of the proportion of these types of workers in the humanities workforce to be made. Thus, the first indicator in this section, which concerns the size and composition of this workforce, considers only those workers who are accounted for on the payrolls of U.S. employers and are therefore included in the BLS’s surveys. The challenges of determining their earnings are addressed in the other indicators presented here.

Indicator III-1	Size and Occupational Distribution of the Humanities Workforce
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See the

Most of the employment data presented in this indicator are based on information gathered by the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) Program of the BLS. These data concern only the early 21st century because changes made in 1999 to the occupational classification system used by the BLS make it difficult to draw comparisons with earlier periods and identify historic trends. These data do, however, offer a perspective on the occupational characteristics of the humanities workforce in the contemporary United States (for more on the advantages and disadvantages associated with the use of various federal sources to estimate the extent of humanities-related employment, see Note on the Use of Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Data).

For the purposes of this indicator, the humanities workforce encompasses primary, secondary, and postsecondary humanities faculty; other professionals who work in fields that are not only dedicated to the humanities but also related to them; and support staff employed in a variety of humanistic institutions. Although a comprehensive assessment of the humanities workforce should also include a variety of other types of occupations (such as those done on a volunteer basis) and workers (such as those who are self-employed), data on them are not currently available (see the introduction to this section, Employment in Humanistic Occupations and Settings, and the Note on Employment Data for an explanation of these data limitations). Consequently, although the humanities workforce is broadly conceived, the count provided below still underestimates—probably quite substantially—its true size.

In addition, the BLS data do not measure the size of the humanities workforce directly. These data are not collected from individual workers but from firms that are asked to report the number of people they employ. Thus, the figures cited below should be understood as counts of jobs not workers (some of whom may have more than one job; see the Note on Employment Data).

These BLS data, which are supplemented here with data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), indicate that jobs in humanistic occupations and settings amounted to approximately 2.53 million, or 2% of all employment in the early 2000s.¹ This figure can be broken down further, according to occupational types for which BLS data are available. Depicted in Figure III-1, the occupational categories are described more fully below, where both job counts and proportions of total humanities employment are also given.

Figure III-1, Full Size Supporting Data

Faculty Positions in Primary and Secondary Schools (37% of total humanities employment)

According to the BLS, in 2002 the nation’s schools had 3,733,340 jobs filled by elementary, middle, and high school teachers. Additional information obtained from the NCES’ Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which includes data on the fields of instruction for all the teachers it surveys, makes it possible to estimate that 925,868 of these jobs were in the humanities. In the 1999–2000 SASS administration, 24.8% of all teachers gave their specialization as being within a humanities discipline. While those reporting their field to be “social studies and history” are counted here as teaching humanities, the humanities share of jobs would be substantially greater if the “general” educators who spent a portion of their time teaching English, history, or language skills were included (37% of all teachers described themselves as such). For more data on the characteristics of humanities educators at the primary and secondary levels, see Part I, Section C of the Indicators, Primary and Secondary Faculty.

Faculty Positions in Postsecondary Institutions (4% of total humanities employment)

According to the BLS, there were 1,113,200 postsecondary teaching jobs in the United States in 2002. Of these, 112,900, or about 10%, were in the humanities. This figure, which is for both full- and part-time employment, includes 109,800 positions in the nation’s colleges and universities, as well as several thousand in other institutional settings, such as business firms and government agencies. (For data concerning full- and part-time positions, see Indicator III-11, Traditional versus Nontraditional Humanities Faculty.)

Note: The total employment estimate for postsecondary humanities teaching was arrived at by adding the employment estimates for the humanities disciplines included in the BLS’s surveys—namely, English language and literature, foreign languages and literatures, history, area/cultural/ethnic studies, philosophy, and religion. Another BLS disciplinary category, arts, drama, and music, could not be considered for this indicator because the nature of the data makes it impossible to distinguish faculty positions in humanistic disciplines such as art history from those in the studio and performing arts.

Employment in Humanities Professions (14% of total humanities employment)

Because some of the professional occupations in the humanities can overlap (e.g., those of historians and curators, or of writers and historians) and because employers determine how jobs are designated on the BLS survey, data are not definitive. Nonetheless, the BLS does include employment figures for a variety of professional humanistic occupations, which are designated as follows:

	Librarians 156,920
	Editors (textual, in both humanistic and nonhumanistic institutions and enterprises) 106,520
	Writers/Authors (not including technical writers; journalists are tallied in the section on the Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishing category, below) 41,990
	Archivists, Curators, and Museum Technicians 20,100
	Interpreters and Translators 18,600
	Historians 2,110

Together these occupations encompassed 346,240 positions in 2002.

Employment in Humanities-Related Professions (2% of total humanities employment)

Other professions, although not squarely within the humanities, are sufficiently related in terms of the content of their work or the purposes their work serves to merit inclusion here. The occupations that fall into this category and are covered by the BLS survey are those of:

	News Analysts, Reporters, and Correspondents (including those working in broadcast media but excluding those working for newspapers and periodicals, whose jobs are accounted for in the Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishing category, below) 22,010
	Tour Guides (apart from those whose jobs are in museums; the latter are included in the Museum Staff segment of the Employment in Humanities Institutions category, below) 18,810
	Audiovisual Collections Specialists (who prepare, plan, and operate audiovisual teaching aids for use in education, or who record, catalog, and file audiovisual materials in libraries and museums, as well as a variety of other institutions and enterprises) 9,040

Altogether, these humanities-related professions included 49,860 positions in 2002.

Employment in Humanities Institutions (18% of total humanities employment)

The jobs described here, which involve supporting humanities faculty and professionals, are performed in a variety of institutional settings. The filled positions noted in the BLS survey for 2002 amounted to approximately 460,000 and consisted of jobs performed by the following:

Library Personnel (who perform technical, administrative, and building maintenance functions in academic and public libraries) 258,683

Note: This figure was calculated by the American Library Association using data from the National Center for Education Statistics; it does not include job counts for employment in libraries associated with the federal government, industry, or not-for-profit organizations, for which data do not currently exist.

	Museum Staff (including 3,130 jobs performed by general and operations managers; 7,140 by cashiers; 1,400 by public relations specialists; 6,690 by security guards; 9,760 by tour guides; and many more by a variety of other staff) 100,800.
	College and University Staff (including those whose jobs are in administration, technical support, food service, and maintenance) 102,264

Note: Although the BLS does report detailed occupational statistics for colleges and universities, these data cannot readily be disaggregated by academic discipline. Consequently, arriving at an estimate of the proportion of college and university support staff whose employment is attributable to the existence of humanities departments on the nation’s college and university campuses is difficult. Nonetheless, the job count cited here can provide a useful starting point for thinking about the extent of nonfaculty employment generated by the humanities. According to BLS data, America’s colleges and universities employed 3,204,910 persons in 2002. Of these, 1.16 million were employed in general university-wide areas such as administration, food service, computer network support, security, and construction. The percentage of these 1.16 million jobs that can be attributed to the humanities can be assumed to be commensurate with the humanities’ share of total academic activity. This percentage is not precisely calculable, but it is known that the humanities currently account for approximately 14% of all faculty (see Indicator III-9, Number of Humanities Faculty) and 12% of all bachelor’s degrees in American universities (see Indicator II-1, Undergraduate Degrees in the Humanities). Even though they account for a significantly smaller percentage of the dollars coming into large universities than do the sciences and engineering, which receive the overwhelming proportion of government research funding (see Indicator IV-10, Research and Development Expenditures at Colleges and Universities), it seems unlikely that the humanities account for anything less than 5% of support jobs, or 160,246 positions. Factoring out those humanities professionals counted elsewhere (nonfaculty historians, librarians, other library staff, and archivists/curators—included above under “Humanities Professions”; audiovisual collections specialists and news analysts/reporters/correspondents—discussed above under “Humanities-Related Professions”) leaves 102,264 jobs in academic institutions that rely on and support the humanities.

Employment in Newspaper, Book, Periodical, and Directory Publishing (25% of total humanities employment)

Although eliminating employment generated by directory publishing would be desirable, the way in which employment data are collected by the BLS does not make it possible to estimate employment levels for newspaper, periodical, and book publishing alone. Thus, the figure for the entire industry in 2002 was 705,540 jobs. Subtracting those jobs tallied in Employment in Humanities Professions and in Employment in Humanities-Related Professions, above, leaves 630,290 positions in publishing that are related to the humanities. This figure includes the 39,090 jobs performed by news analysts, reporters, and correspondents working for news periodicals (these jobs together account for 6% of total publishing employment).

Indicator III-2	Salaries in Humanistic Occupations
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In collecting information on employment levels in the United States, the BLS also gathers detailed information on annual salaries and hourly wages. The existence of these data makes it possible, in principle, to construct an index of compensation of those working in humanistic occupations and settings and to demonstrate how they are faring relative to other workers within the broader economy. This index remains under development, however, as Humanities Indicators staff continue to address the many challenges in constructing it, including changes over time in the BLS classifications of jobs, determining which occupations to include, and compensating for significant shifts in the structure of humanistic industries and institutions. This edition of the Humanities Indicators does, however, include salary data for humanities educators. See Indicator I-11, Humanities Teachers’ Salaries and Job Satisfaction, which concerns primary and secondary school teachers, and Indicator III-14, Faculty Earnings, which provides details on salaries of full-time postsecondary faculty.