Conducted every two years, the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) gathers detailed education, occupation, and earnings information from a sample of individuals drawn from the larger pool of all those identified via the American Community Survey (ACS) as holders of a baccalaureate degree. The National Science Foundation makes NSCG data available to researchers and the general public via downloadable data files and its online data analysis tool, SESTAT.

Given the size of the NSCG sample, reliable estimates are available only for broad academic fields. For the NSCG disciplinary categories included in each of the field-of-degree categories employed by the Humanities Indicators, see the provided crosswalk.

This earnings indicator is based on NSCG data, but similar items included in the Humanities Indicators rely on data from the ACS. Due to marked differences in how the NSCG and ACS classify academic fields, the contents of the field-of-degree categories used for this indicator are not identical to those used for the ACS-based Indicators III-4e and 4f. (For more information on the contents of the categories used for the ACS analysis, see the pertinent crosswalk.)

An even more important difference between this indicator and the ACS-based earnings indicators is that the master’s degree recipients considered here are those whose master’s was in the humanities (irrespective of the field of their undergraduate degree). The ACS does not collect data about the field of advanced degrees. The ACS-based indicators thus describe the earnings of undergraduate humanities majors who went on to pursue advanced degrees, regardless of the field of that degree.

See also “Occupations of Master’s Degree Recipients in the Humanities.”

Occupation and earnings information for bachelor’s degree recipients can be found under the topics “Occupations of Humanities Majors with a Terminal Bachelor’s Degree” and “Earnings of Humanities Majors with a Terminal Bachelor’s Degree.” (These earnings estimates are based on data from a different source, the American Community Survey, and are thus not strictly comparable to the estimates presented here. Please click the “About the Data” button below the graph for further explanation.)

For information on humanities Ph.D.’s, see “Occupations of Humanities Ph.D.’s,” “Earnings of Humanities Ph.D.’s.,” and “Job Status of Humanities Ph.D.’s at Time of Graduation.”

For a comparison of the humanities with other major academic fields with respect to unemployment among majors, see “The Employment Status of Humanities Majors.”

For trends concerning the number and type of master’s degrees conferred over the past 60 years, see “Advanced Degrees in the Humanities” and “Disciplinary Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities.”