People always asked Linta Kunnathuparambil what she was going to do with her degree once she graduated. If her family wasn’t asking, friends or other adults who were simply looking out for her asked. They didn’t know what she could do with a bachelor’s degree in Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations.
She didn’t know either, until she found out about information studies halfway through her college career. Kunnathuparambil graduated in 2014 and is now a library assistant at the Getty Research Institute, where she started working as an intern the summer after she graduated.
Pressure to graduate from college, get a job and pay back any student debt incurred in the process have discouraged some students to study the humanities in recent years, but some alumni and UCLA professors assert that studying the humanities prepares students well for post-graduation life.
After the 2008 recession, the University of California permanently reduced the humanities division’s budget by $2.4 million, said the Division of Humanities Assistant Dean Reem Hanna-Harwell.
The number of UCLA students interested in the humanities has similarly dipped since then. About 2,900 students were enrolled under the division in the 2009-2010 academic year, an increase from about 2,400 in the 2003-2004 academic term.
Enrollment in the College of Letters and Science has grown since 2009 by about 3,000 students, but the number in the humanities division has decreased, numbering about 2,600 in the 2013-2014 academic year, Hanna-Harwell added.
David Schaberg, dean of humanities, said he thinks many students prefer to do undergraduate work that is clearly connected to careers later in life rather than pursue the humanities.
He added that he thinks students who have to contend with the high cost of attending UCLA with less assistance, such as international students, face pressure to get an education based in the sciences and transition into a career as smoothly as possible.
Kunnathuparambil entered UCLA as a chemistry student before deciding to become a psychobiology student, all the while telling her parents she was on the pre-med track to make them happy. She decided to study the humanities after taking a class about Egypt that convinced her to ditch south campus and head north.
Matt Long, a UCLA graduate, said he thinks many people have the misconception that people studying the humanities have limited options after graduation. Instead, he thinks the breadth of the humanities actually allows students to customize their skill set and pursue their interests from a broader range of careers.
“People think the humanities don’t prepare you for the job you get, but that’s because the humanities are inherently non-vocational,” Long said.
He graduated with a degree in classical civilization in 2014 and is now an administrative assistant at the UCLA Health’s geriatrics division, where he uses skills from his digital humanities minor to manage the division’s online marketing and web and graphic design.
Of the students who participated in the UCLA Career Center’s 2011 UCLA First Destination Survey, students graduating with humanities degrees reported average salaries that ranged from about $26,000 for former art history students to $60,000 for former linguistics students.
Schaberg said while student interest in traditional fields like art history and English have remained steady, interest in fields like linguistics has increased at UCLA.
The average salaries are comparable to other alumni from the College of Letters and Science, whose average reported salaries ranged from about $22,000 for ecology, behavior and evolution students to about $66,000 for sociology students.
Kunnathuparambil said she thinks students in the humanities are lucky they’re able to focus on the subjects they’re passionate about.
“Even when I started to doubt myself and think ‘What if this is just a hobby?,’ I just went back to class and everything felt right again,” she added.
When people think the humanities are limited, it’s because they don’t realize they have options, Kunnathuparambil said. The humanities are so big, she said she sometimes feels lost in it.