I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, “Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future” (freely available as a PDF). I found some but not too much of the usual unrealistic sloganeering about how useful the humanities are to society, and a lot of pretty sobering statistics. In the following note that the typical basic degree in Sweden is the MA. I translate:
“… among those with a basic degree as highest qualification, humanities graduates clearly have the lowest annual incomes in 2008 … Humanities graduates with basic degrees have seen a markedly worse salary development than any other group with basic degrees between 1989 and 2008. … Among PhDs as well the humanities graduates have lower annual incomes than any other specialisation … humanities PhDs have worse annual incomes than business majors, physicians, engineers, dentists and lawyers with basic degrees. … relatively fewer humanities PhDs have very low salaries than other PhDs.” pp. 52-56
“We have compared humanities PhDs with basic-degree humanities graduates … we find that a PhD does lead to a higher annual income as expected, but the difference is less than 4%.” p. 56
“… annual income of PhDs in various subjects … the most notable change is that the annual incomes of social scientists, which were previously [1989] on about the same level as for the humanities, now [2008] have risen visibly. … This is another indication that humanities graduates have lagged behind in their incomes.” p. 57
So the good news is that if you do a PhD in the humanities, then chances are you will not become one of the country’s absolutely worst-paid PhDs. But then, nor will you be able to compete with the income of a generic MBA suit.