The information presented here is based on an original analysis by the Humanities Indicators (HI) of data from the American Community Survey (ACS), which has been administered by the U.S. Census Bureau since 2005. The ACS replaced the “long form” version of the decennial census and collects information—used to allocate more than $400 billion in state and federal funding—about Americans’ personal characteristics, family composition, employment, income, and housing.

The HI has chosen to focus its analysis not merely on the currently employed but on those college graduates who were employed at any time in the previous five years, because the objective of this indicator is to shed as much light as possible on what humanities majors go on to do in the way of paid employment and how this compares to the occupational outcomes of those who majored in other fields. To consider only the currently employed would be to lose information regarding, for example, the employment experiences of the recently retired or those who have temporarily exited the paid labor force to care for children or an elderly family member or to go back to school.

The ACS permits respondents to specify up to two fields of bachelor’s degree. For the purposes of this analysis, an individual was counted as having a bachelor’s degree in the humanities if the field of either reported degree was within the scope of the humanities as specified by the HI.

Information regarding the (1) specific occupations included in each broad category in the graph and (2) specific disciplines treated as within the humanities for the purposes of this analysis is provided in the ACS-HI Crosswalk.

For additional information on the occupations of those who studied the humanities in college, see “Occupations of Humanities Majors with a Terminal Bachelor’s Degree” and “Occupations of College Humanities Majors with an Advanced Degree.”

For unemployment data, see “The Employment Status of Humanities Majors.”

For data regarding the earnings of humanities majors, see “Earnings of Humanities Majors with a Terminal Bachelor’s Degree,” “Earnings of Humanities Majors with an Advanced Degree,” “Effect of Experience on the Earnings of College Majors,” and “Effect of Gender on the Earnings of College Majors.”

For historical trends in the number of students who have earned degrees in the humanities, see “Associate’s Degrees in the Humanities,” “Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities,” and “Advanced Degrees in the Humanities.”