Editor's Note: The following letter has not been edited to conform with The Polytechnic's style guidelines and does not necessarily represent the views of The Poly or its members.
STEM prepares you for the “real world” and gets you a job. The humanities are useless because they just teach you about old books and give you “soft skills.” Does this sound familiar to you? In my decade of teaching college literature, this narrative has always stayed the same—despite it being completely, demonstrably untrue.
The myth is easily debunked by the data, which keeps showing the same thing: humanities grads are eminently hire-able. As Forbes reported this summer, “Grads who majored in the social sciences and humanities are proving to be resilient in today’s job market because they gained skills that can be used across multiple industries.” At the same time, according to the same report, the greatest recent drops in hiring have been in engineering, [Computer Information Systems], physical sciences, and business and marketing occupations.
Today, as sociologist John D. Skrentny explains, “well over half of STEM graduates do not work in STEM occupations.” Drastic reductions in hiring is one reason for this. Others are post-pandemic layoffs and automation. Another crucial explanation is that people are leaving STEM en masse. STEM workers “leave at higher rates than those in other fields,” Skrentny shows, and they are doing so “both at the points of graduation and ten years after graduation.”
These departures are partly due to us going all in on STEM without ensuring that there are enough quality jobs for the grads we credential each year. But another explanation is some STEM workers’ dissatisfaction with their jobs. When there is a glut of grads, they can become vulnerable to poor working conditions in certain industries: long hours, unsatisfactory salaries, a loss of quality of life and leisure time that overlaps with declining physical and mental health, and a lack of intellectual and social fulfillment that comes from being a cog in the machine.
When STEM grads are plentiful, employers can overwork them and rest easy since there will always be reserves of new grads to replace them. Skrentny calls this dynamic “burn and churn.” We have more grads than we fully employ in-field, and this can lead to low-quality occupations and a reduced quality of life.
All the while, our society has subscribed to the fallacious logic that humanities grads are unemployable. It’s not that I think the humanities are better than STEM; it’s that we value STEM education at the expense of the humanities. As a result, we’ve made at least two errors—to our students’ and society’s detriment. First, we have over-specialized many grads rather than preparing them for a wider array of potential careers. Second, in so doing, we have deprived generations of students of a richer education and diminished their ability to partake of their human right to culture, which the humanities have historically championed.
None of this is to say you should abandon STEM. Nor is it to say STEM grads cannot still find fulfilling occupations in their fields. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. The STEM/humanities divide has always been a false dichotomy, and it only diminishes our intellectual and social capacities. All education is valuable. Not just because it raises your expected earnings, but because it has innate, nonmarket values that are good for you as an individual and for the society you contribute to: higher cognitive development that enables collective problem solving, greater levels of happiness, and better health in communities with higher aggregate education. If we want a flourishing society, we need STEM and humanities grads. Also: we need new generations of humanistic scientists and STEM-minded humanists.
I think one thing that makes STEM seem safe and the humanities risky (despite evidence to the contrary) is that it’s hard to anticipate what knowledge will be important to you in the future. At RPI, I teach a course on horror fiction and film. How does that possibly relate to a STEM degree? For one, I am hard-pressed to think of a horror film that isn’t informed by our social hangups around gender and sexuality and by (white) masculine fantasies of dominating women, nonbinary, and trans people. If you enter a STEM occupation, you will be implicated in gender and sex discrimination in some way. (That’s the thing about systemic problems: we are all implicated, whether as victims, perpetrators, bystanders, or some combination at once.) If you want to understand, and intervene in, your own future workplace, you can do worse than applying knowledge from this course.
In Spring 2027, I’ll be piloting an INQR class called Bucket List Books. We’ll carefully read great works of literature that, lately, the far-right has become obsessed with, like The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, and Beloved. For something as “useless” as literature, lots of people get super mad when they feel like it’s being taken from them by their perceived political enemies. Now, imagine 10 – 15 years out: you’ve relocated for your dream job in STEM, but it’s somewhere where your child’s school district is considering banning major novels by queer writers or authors of color. Would you want other parents or your government telling you what your child cannot read? And would you be equipped to defend your own child’s education?
I know such potentialities are far off for most college students. But my point is that the humanities equip you with tools for the rest of your life and knowledge to make the most of that life (not just professionally, but emotionally, intellectually, socially, and politically). At the same time, the utopian ideals of the humanities—deep human knowledge, storytelling, creativity, communicating across difference, social justice and equity—these are proving to be the very things that give you broadly applicable competencies and make you more employable.
Job markets, and the types of knowledge construed as socially valuable, fluctuate over time. The humanities bolster you when confronting that flux. But while the humanities will prepare you for your job, they do not view you as a cog whose only purpose is to get that job.
If you want an education for the long-term, then the humanities are your ally. You never know what will be most useful in your job search or what will prepare you for a career move or for the rest of your life. But your humanities professors at RPI have experience with these things, and we are here to help guide you. You can start by taking humanities classes that interest you, rather than whatever happens to fit your schedule, and honing your coursework into a minor. Better yet, you can double major in a humanities discipline that gives you intellectual fulfillment while expanding your competencies and building your resilience.
I believe RPI students are well-positioned to become humanistic scientists and STEM-minded humanists. Not just because that’s how you get a job, but because that’s what our society needs. We need grads who can combine disciplines and synthesize knowledge to build the future. We need climate scientists to make public policy. We need literary and cultural critics to write op- eds in their local newspapers. We need storytellers to script narratives that will influence people’s attitudes toward progressive wealth redistribution. We need equity-minded social scientists to wield budgets as tools for justice. We need doctors who are also activists in the fight for universal healthcare. We need engineers, architects, and other builders to help lead the “Mamdanification” of everything at every level of society. We need all of this and more, like right now.
In our anxiety about our futures, we too often ignore the fact that education is a collective project for the future. In the process, we’ve forgotten that cogs cannot change the world. But RPI grads can.
