Studies Show that Arts and Humanities Jobs are Harder to Find
Twenty million U.S. undergraduate students have recently returned to their college classes from spring break. Right about now, most of them are thinking short-term. They are thinking about reaching the end of the school year. They are thinking about summer.
For seniors, however, graduation day means going into the workplace. American schools have about 70,000 undergraduate students in the visual arts, so about a quarter of them are in those graduation shoes. Although the statistics for art jobs are not optimistic, if anyone can outsmart the trends, it might be the art students. They are to be the future members of the “creative class” in society.
They begin their careers with some glum data, however. One recent study found that recent undergraduate degrees in architecture and art rank highest for the unemployed: 13.9 percent for architecture (because of the housing industry collapse) and 11.1 percent for the arts. Every “soft” field of study (that is, everything in college that is not science, technology, engineering, or math) shows a tougher job market. Recent graduates with any kind of humanities degree show a 9.4 percent unemployment rate, according to Census data analyzed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
Clearly, college graduates with science degrees or who entered fields of growth—such as healthcare, business, education, or engineering—are most likely to find a career-related job right out of college. Unemployment for students with recent degrees in health or education, for example, is just 5.4 percent.
These employment numbers can be looked at in many different ways, of course. For example, about 89 percent of college art students have found a job—not too bad, though the employment obviously mixes good and bad pay and jobs unrelated to art. Art students are not too much worse off than all recent college graduates, who report an average unemployment of 8.9 (a bit worse than the national average). What is more, college graduates still have a great advantage over the rest of the population. Americans with a recent high school diploma are 22.9 unemployed; high school dropouts are at 31.5 percent.
The dour employment news is not hurting art’s popularity, it seems. College study of the various visual arts is among the more popular of 173 majors, according to Census surveys. Commercial art and graphic design rank 21 of the 173. Other art majors rank this way: fine arts (22); architecture (33); art and music education (48); film video and photographic arts (54); art history and criticism (81). Enrollment in the most popular fields of college study vastly outnumbers the others, since they offer guaranteed job tracks, such as the degree in accounting (4 of 173 in popularity).
Art popularity does circumvent the problem of studying science, which by consensus continues to be the hardest of college studies. Some students simply have the science-and-math gift, or they have early school training that makes college science easier. The vast majority of college students find science to be very challenging. At the same time, many in the arts clearly feel they have a gift, too, but it’s in artistic ability. So why study science when the instinct flows elsewhere?
Perhaps the only reason not to follow the art instinct is the cost of college. Every one must now think of college as an investment. Students need a job quick to pay off student debt, which today averages from $20,000 to $40,000.
At this point, even the art student needs to remember that education is also about human development—that is, life skills. True enough, surveys of students show that the highest motivation for college (77 percent) is to make good money. There once was a time when students believed that paying for college was like a guaranteed ticket to a job. Students are more skeptical now, but college enrollment continues to rise. Meanwhile, student surveys also show that the second highest priority for college students (47 percent) is “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”
Among art school educators, human development usually has been as important as the skills. Robert Milnes, an art professor at the University of North Texas and president of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), recently told fellow art college teachers that the “whole person” is what they are trying to address. “Our job, like that of a coach, is to train young students to be professionals on one hand and to help them become better people on the other,” he said, using a sports analogy in his fall NASAD address for this school year.
The rate of college art grads who give up art and design within five to fifteen years is very high, Milnes said. But as in sports, the picture is mixed: “Some [grads] will become quite wealthy, maybe right out of school even, but the great majority of our art and design students will, like college athletes, go on to fulfilling lives in which their major art or design activity during school may or may not be the most significant issue or their primary source of income, though they may always value their experience.”
The odds of making it big as an artists are tough, though there is nothing that blocks college art grads from having a productive life. “The time we have with the students is about their development as well as expertise at a particular practice,” said Milnes, emphasizing that brighter side of what every art student can achieve. “Life values and decision-making skills have to be a good part of what we teach.”
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