 The 10 highest paying liberal arts degrees, that's what we're going to be talking about today but before we get into that make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers and opportunities that are going to lead you to success and we also talk about how you can avoid some of the common financial traps that so many people end up falling for. Now if you're new here and it sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already go ahead hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you'd never miss an opportunity. Now with that out of the way let's jump right into it. I've made several videos on liberal arts degrees. Generally speaking liberal arts degrees don't pay very well and it's pretty difficult for you to get a job but there are some exceptions and I've already talked about what I think the best and the worst liberal arts degrees are and I evaluated them based off of a bunch of different criteria all the way from job satisfaction to pay to you know how much future growth there's going to be to flexibility. But today we are just purely going to be talking about which ones pay the most which ones are going to lead to careers that have higher salaries. So the first one on the list is going to be a history degree. This is one of my favorite subjects I love listening to history podcasts like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Now at this one you can expect to make around $45,000 a year in the first five years after graduating and then after the first 10 years also known as your mid-career pay you can expect to make around $80,000 a year. Now as a historian with a master's level degree you could make $63,000 a year there'd be 3,500 jobs available and it would be growing at 3% which is as fast as average meaning there's only 100 jobs that would be opening up in the next 10 years. Now I'm not going to lie a lot of these liberal arts degrees are going to teach you some really amazing soft skills. This is going to be things like communication, critical thinking, creativity and on top of that I'm really biased here I like history a lot. However I do have to say that there's two things to keep in mind when you're looking at these statistics. One I think a lot of smart people tend to like history and so therefore they tend to gravitate towards getting a history degree and so therefore you probably have quite a few people graduating with a history degree that would have been successful no matter what degree they got or maybe even if they didn't get a degree at all. So you have to ask yourself here is this correlation or causation and the truth is it's probably a little bit of both. On top of that keep in mind that especially when it comes to the college degree and how much you make with that degree with a lot of these liberal arts degrees people do tend to go back and get their masters or their doctorate which means they would be making more money but they also have to spend more time in college and they have to go deeper into debt. So that probably also skews the figures a little bit making it look like it's a better degree than it actually is. So just keep that in mind as we go through this list. Next one on the list is going to be urban and regional planning. So this one is going to be all about designing cities so that they run efficiently kind of like in Sims you know you're going to design a city so that doesn't end up having LA traffic for instance. Now at this degree you're going to end up making forty seven thousand dollars a year right off the bat and then mid-career pay is going to be eighty seven thousand. One career you could go for is becoming an urban and regional planner of course and with a master's degree you can make around seventy four thousand dollars a year. There's thirty nine thousand jobs available. It's growing at eleven percent which is great and that means over the next ten years you're going to have forty four hundred new jobs popping up. Now with this one especially to get your first job you'll likely have to move to somewhere that's kind of a populated city. Urban planners aren't really as needed when it comes to small towns so you're going to have to move to at least a medium or large-sized city. So if you're somebody who doesn't want to have to move this might not be the best one for you. Next one on the list is going to be philosophy. This one is all about studying the nature of knowledge, reality, existence and with this one you can expect to make forty eight thousand dollars a year right after graduating and then mid-career pay is going to be eighty nine thousand. Now one career you could go into is you could end up becoming a philosophy teacher for instance and work at a community college. There's around twenty three thousand jobs available and the mean annual wage would be around eighty two thousand dollars a year. I think this is another one of those degrees where really smart people tend to go for it and so therefore these people would probably be successful no matter what degree that they got so that partially explains why you have such a good mid-career pay. On top of that over fifty percent of philosophy majors end up going to graduate school. Obviously if they go to graduate school they're probably going to be making quite a bit more money and so that also skews those final figures a little bit but if you graduate with a philosophy degree you are going to be a very good communicator and you're also going to have extremely good reasoning skills. You could argue that these types of skills are going to make you successful pretty much no matter what you end up doing. You might not directly be able to get a job from this but indirectly it will likely help you quite a bit. Next one on the list is going to be political science and this is the branch of knowledge that is going to deal with the different systems of government. Now with a political science degree you can expect to make forty seven thousand dollars a year starting out and mid-career pay is eighty nine thousand. As a political scientist with a master's degree you can make around a hundred and twenty two thousand a year. There's seven thousand jobs available that's growing at six percent which is faster than average but that only means there's going to be four hundred new jobs opening up in the next ten years. However there are a ton of different options for you. You can work in a state and local government. You can work for the federal government. You can work for a non-profit. You could work directly for a campaign or a politician. Now with this degree like a lot of other degrees it is moving towards being more of an analytical type degree so it would be a very good idea for you to study statistics and maybe even a little bit of computer programming. Next one on the list is going to be an international relations degree and this one is going to be all about studying global affairs. It's the study of politics, law, and economics on a global level. With this degree you can expect to make around forty nine thousand dollars a year starting out and mid-career pay is ninety six thousand. Now this is another one where you could become a political scientist for instance. With this one I think it could be really good especially if you use this one as a double major with another degree that's even better and it can also be good if you plan ahead really well. You know exactly what career you're going into let's say you want to be somebody who is a consultant for you know Russian businesses that are working with businesses in the United States. You know exactly what you want to do. You know exactly what skills you need to know. You know exactly what career path you have to take in order to get to your goal. This can be a really good one for you. Now you would likely be spending a lot of time in whatever country that you are going to specialize in so you would probably want to either at least learn the culture if not straight up learn the language and make sure to travel to the country and spend quite a bit of time there because when you start working you'll likely be spending even more time. Next one on the list is going to be agricultural economics. So this one is going to be economics but it's going to specialize in the distribution of food. With this degree you can expect to make around $53,000 a year starting out and $99,000 in mid-career pay. This is one where you could become a type of economist for instance and economists with a master's level degree earn about $105,000 a year. There's 20,000 jobs available. It's growing at 14% which is great but unfortunately that's only going to lead to about 2,900 more jobs in the next 10 years. This is one where along with your economics education you're going to want to spend a lot of time you know working with spreadsheets for instance working with statistics maybe even learning a little bit of computer programming but it can be a really good one if you plan it out. Next one on the list is going to be government and this one is pretty similar to political science. Government focuses more on the actual structure of the government itself so they're going to look at all the way from the highest level you know the president the executive branch down to the very lowest levels your state your local government and with this degree you can expect to make $52,000 a year and mid-career pay is going to be $103,000. This is another one where you could become a political scientist and with a master's degree you could expect to make around $122,000 a year. This is a very rare degree so realistically speaking these statistics could be way off just because of the fact that there's not enough of a sample size to get a really accurate number. Next one on the list is going to be rhetoric and rhetoric is basically all about the art of persuasion through communication. Usually this focuses on written communication but it can basically just be any type of communication. With this degree you're going to make around $49,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is going to be $104,000. Now there's actually a lot of different career paths you could go down with this you could go into marketing sales all kinds of different things you could also go into copywriting one career path you could go down is becoming a technical writer but it's kind of a copywriting type of writer because of the fact you'd be working in certain industries where they do require kind of high level technical skill when it comes to writing so you have to be able to sell something but at the same time write in a high level technical way. Technical writers make around $72,000 a year there's 58,000 jobs available and it's growing at 7% which is faster than average meaning over the next 10 years there's going to be about 4,300 jobs that open up. This is another one where there's not that many people graduating every single year with a rhetoric degree with that being said people who do graduate end up doing pretty well. It's a little bit too specific for my taste though I think there would be better options if you want to go into marketing for instance you could get a marketing degree or an MBA degree or even a communications degree would probably be better than rhetoric just because of the fact that if anything goes wrong all three of those types of degrees are going to be much more flexible. Next one on the list is going to be economics which is the study of wealth and how it's distributed within a country. With an economics degree you can expect to make around $58,000 a year starting out and $109,000 in mid-career pay. There's actually a lot of different areas that you can go into with an economics degree it's pretty flexible for instance you could become a financial manager and they make around $129,000 a year there's 697,000 jobs available and it's growing at 15% which is much faster than average and that means there's over 100,000 jobs opening up in the next 10 years. The one thing I will say about economics is you want to make sure that you supplement it with some other skills so I would recommend maybe taking other classes in business, mathematics, statistics, maybe even a little bit of computer programming just to supplement your economics knowledge. It might be a little bit difficult for you to get your very first job after college compared to something like business or technology for instance but once you get that first job you get your foot in the door it's basically going to be smooth sailing after that. Next one on the list is going to be a political economy degree. Now political economy is going to be the study of production and trade as well as the relationship with law, customs and economics and government. With this degree you can expect to make around $58,000 a year starting out and mid-career pay is $125,000. You could end up becoming an economist for instance with a master's level degree making $105,000 a year with 20,000 jobs available and it growing around 14% which is much faster than average. This one is basically just a political science degree mixed with an economics degree and that can be really good depending on what you want to do. The big thing here and this is kind of a common theme with a bunch of these is you need to supplement your knowledge with some math skills or some statistic skills or something along those lines. If you want to check out my personal rankings for college degrees I've been working on this project it's going to be linked in the description down below and if you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and before you leave make sure to check out my other videos right here I made them just for you.