Washington Monthly - September/October 2021 - 30

Median Earnings for Completers:
Humanities & Liberal Arts
Black/African American
$60K
$100K
$40K
$50K
$50K
$20K
Hispanic
White
(Asian graduates excluded due to small number in database)
Median Earnings for Completers:
Computers, Statistics, & Mathematics
Black/African American
Hispanic
White
(Asian graduates excluded due to small number in database)
Median Earnings for Completers:
Business
Black/African American
$100K
Hispanic
White
(Asian graduates excluded due to small number in database)
$0K
$0K
1
3
5
10
Years After Exit
15
1
3
5
10
Years After Exit
ucation Fund. She says students who struggle with weeder classes
may be denied access to high-level courses in specialized topics
that are prized by leading employers, or they may self-select
into less rigorous elective classes. Their initial difficulties also
can undermine their self-esteem and dissuade them from applying
for jobs with the most highly selective employers.
By contrast, humanities students are generally welcomed
with 100-level classes that, while not always gentle, have not
been intentionally designed to trim the fat from their already
lean departmental enrollments. So humanities students get the
chance to find their feet academically before they encounter demanding
upper-level courses in world literature or rigorous seminars
on modern history. These experiences build confidence
that comes across later in job interviews and in the workplace.
Experts say that humanities classes are also usually smaller,
especially in upper levels, than in other disciplines. This gives
students a chance to get to know their professors, and vice versa.
The open-ended nature of humanities assignments also provides
students with an opportunity to express their own ideas
in ways that are more likely to catch an instructor's attention
than, say, a score of 96 percent on an advanced calculus exam. As
a result, humanities students are significantly more likely to cite
at least one professor who served as a mentor during their undergraduate
years than are students in other disciplines. These
types of mentoring relationships can be deeply beneficial for
all students, but especially for minority students, who may be
struggling academically or who feel out of place. (Black students,
for example, are less likely to have college-educated parents who
can help them navigate the world of higher education.)
" I can speak to that in my own experience, " says Zainab
Okolo, a strategy officer at Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolisbased
private foundation focused on expanding post-secondary
educational opportunities. " A lot of what made me successful as
an undergraduate was finding faculty who took the time to really
learn my passion and challenge me with additional research
30 September/October 2021
15
$0K
1
3
5
10
Years After Exit
opportunities and writing opportunities, " she says. " As I've gone
further in the field of higher ed, and higher ed inequity, I've realized
just how lucky I was to have that. "
Faculty mentoring relationships don't just provide emotional
and intellectual benefits. An engaged faculty mentor can
also provide a meaningful, personalized recommendation for
jobs or grad school, along with informal (but crucial) social capital,
such as tips on navigating job interviews and writing thankyou
notes to recruiters.
The differing experiences of humanities students and their
STEM and business peers become extremely visible during senior
year, when giant tech companies and consulting firms hold
highly competitive recruiting events. Many of these have bakedin
inequities. For example, high-profile employers may refuse to
grant interviews to students who don't meet a minimum GPA
cutoff-so it doesn't matter if your 3.46 GPA reflects your Herculean
freshman-year struggle to catch up after coming to college
unprepared. This disadvantages anyone who comes from an
under-resourced school district, which means it works against
students of color.
Ruthe Farmer, founder and CEO of the Last Mile Education
Fund, says recruiters also may restrict interviews to students
who are active in extracurricular groups limited to specific
majors (such as entrepreneurship clubs or private equity clubs
for business majors) or who have taken certain highly specialized,
highly regarded courses. Students who aren't part of the
departmental " in crowd " may not know that top-paying companies'
recruiters favor a specific professor's section of computer
systems architecture, for example. As a result, Black, brown, and
female students in those majors may miss out on the most lucrative
entry-level jobs, with financial repercussions for the rest
of their careers.
Most humanities grads do not have access to these highly
organized, highly stratified recruitment opportunities. Instead,
they have to lace up their boots, head off to campus, and hustle
15
Median Wages
Median Wages
Median Wages
Courtesy of the UT System
Washington Monthly - September/October 2021

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