 So the reason that you clicked on this video is because you want to know whether getting a history major or history degree is going to be worth it. Is it going to be worth going $40,000 in debt on average and spending four years of your life in college? Well we are going to be answering that question in this video and we're actually going to be ranking this degree in four different important categories. But before we get into that and after you've gently tapped the like button in order to defeat the evil youtube algorithm, first we have to make sure that we define what exactly a history degree is. History is basically understanding what happened in the past, what events happened, and what we can learn from that so that we don't make the same mistakes in the future. Now history is actually one of my personal favorite subjects. I love reading books about history, you know historical fictions by James Michener or Leon Uris. I also love listening to podcasts about it. I enjoyed Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast for instance and I also think that there is a lot of value in understanding history and all of the skills that it's going to teach you. Being able to look at the successes and the failures of the past, model that, and then figure out how you can either recreate the successes or avoid the failures is extremely valuable. And a lot of people are passionate about it and that's why so many people graduate with this major every year. In fact, one of the most common majors at 22,000 graduates per year here in the United States with bachelor's degrees. Now this is honestly one of those majors where there's not a lot of career paths that people go down with a degree, but a few that I can mention would be museum worker, teacher, history professor, or a writer, or an author. Now when it comes to salary or earning potential, you can expect to make around $45,000 a year starting out and $80,000 in mid-career pay with this degree. You can compare that to a high paying degree and a low paying one and you'll see that it's on the lower side, but surprisingly the mid-career pay isn't bad. It's not amazing, but I was surprised that the mid-career pay was decent. It's better than I thought it was going to be. Now if we look at specific careers, you can see that archivists, curators, and museum workers are paid around $49,000 a year and that's $23 an hour. Another relatively common career path would be a writer and they're paid around $63,000 a year or $30 an hour or maybe you become a high school teacher and they're paid around $61,000 a year and since that's salaried it's not by the hour or a historian that makes $63,000 a year which is $30 an hour and also just throw up a few other career paths that are somewhat related to this one and you could potentially end up going down. But overall when you look at a lot of these career paths, they aren't super high paying okay, they're decent but they're not amazing. Now liberal arts degrees in general will make around $2.1 million over a lifetime compared to the average for all college degrees and all different types of careers which is 2.4. That's according to the latest US Census Bureau which is, you know, a lifetime of work is around 40 years or so so that's the last 40 years so who knows what's going to happen in the next 40 years it could be completely different. Another thing to note here is it's much more common to go back to school and get a master's or a doctorate with a liberal arts degree just because of the fact that it's pretty tough to find a job with just a bachelor's. So in many ways this is an apples to oranges comparison just because of the fact that obviously you're going to make more money if you get a doctorate or a master's. But with that being said overall when it comes to salary this one is not amazing I'm going to give it a 6.5 out of 10. Next we're going to be talking about satisfaction and this is basically how much you enjoy doing your job which would be job satisfaction as well as a second part which arguably is even more important which is meaning and that is how much do you think your career is going to positively impact the world. Now depending on the person one of them might be more important than the other but when it comes to meaning you can see that history degrees are going to have about a 46 percent meaning score and you can compare that to a good one and a bad one and you'll see that it is on the lower side. Now it's pretty tough to become a historian especially in the traditional sense which would be getting a master's or a phd which is going to take a lot longer and probably cost a lot more however if you are able to become one you'll see that the meaning score goes up to 63 percent which is a little bit higher than average if you can compare that to a really good one and a bad one. On top of that you see that the job satisfaction is 77 percent which again if you compare it to the top and the lower one you'll see that it's above average. So history is one of those things that's a lot of fun especially if you're someone who enjoys history however when it comes to meaning it's a little bit questionable how much you're positively impacting the world. Next we're going to talk about how much your degree is regretted and zip recruiter did a survey on this and it showed that social science degrees are the fourth most regretted type of major and the main reason was because they're too general and practical hard to find a job without further studies. Now I'll keep this brief but one thing I always like to say here is this section and honestly this entire video is going to be relatively subjective depending on the person. It's going to have a lot to do with your personal strengths what you want to do with your life what you enjoy your passions and then also it has a lot to do with the people you work with the company you work for industry you work in the place in the world that you live there's a lot of different things that are going to go over there's a lot of different things that are going to affect how much you enjoy your job and how much meaning you get from it. However with that being said and I might be a little bit biased here I think this one is going to have an eight out of ten score when it comes to satisfaction. Next we're going to be talking about demand and this is probably the most important out of all of them just because of the fact that this is the one that influences every other type of statistic. So for instance if a skill is high in demand that means there's going to be lots of companies that are going to want to hire you for that it's going to be competition for you and then they're going to have to raise their prices and they're also likely going to treat you quite a bit better. So for an archivist curator or museum worker there's around 37,500 jobs available right now and over the next 10 years it's expected to grow at 11 percent which is much faster than average meaning there will be 4200 new jobs created. For writer or an author there's 131,000 jobs available right now however it is declining at 2 percent over the next 10 years. There's over a million jobs available for high school teachers and it's growing around average at about 4 percent and for historians it usually is going to require a master's degree or a doctorate and so there's only 3,500 jobs out there and it's only growing around 3 percent. Now one good sign is when you look up history degree on monster.com you'll see that 48,000 job listings pop up so that means 48,000 different people who posted jobs decided to put history degree in the job description somewhere. That's a pretty good sign and you can compare that to a degree that's really high in demand and one that's low in demand and you'll see that it is on the higher side. Now interestingly enough a lot of the time businesses are surveyed at what types of college degrees they're looking for and someone that they would potentially hire and almost always the ones that are going to be on top are going to be business and engineering so you see in this survey for instance it's around 80 percent for both of them and then you see social science and humanities which this one sort of falls under either of those depending on the way you look at it is only around 19 percent and 5 percent so not that many businesses are actively looking for people who have social science liberal arts and humanities degrees. That doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't going to hire you though they're just not actively looking for people. Now I do think the skills you learn from history are extremely valuable but it is a relatively general degree that isn't going to directly help you get a job unless you're going for a very specific career like historian. So overall all things being equal I'm going to give this one a 6.5 out of 10 when it comes to demand. Next we're going to be going over x factors and that's basically anything else that's important that I didn't already mention. Now history does fall under the category of liberal arts as well as social science and you see that social science degrees make 2.5 million over a lifetime whereas liberal arts degrees will make 2.1 million. Both of these are around average or slightly below average when you compare them to all other degrees. It's also good to mention here that a lot of people who get liberal arts and social science degrees end up going back to school getting a master's or a doctorate so it's kind of like comparing apples to oranges in many cases because obviously you would make more money if you get a master's or a doctorate but at the same time you also have to spend more time in school and take out more student loans. But with that being said when you go down the list with a liberal arts degree you're going to see that some careers are going to make more than others. So for instance if you learn some leadership skills and go into management you can make around 3 million over a lifetime which is pretty good. However if you go into production, transportation and moving you'll see that it only makes around 1.6 million. Now when you look up the skill itself of history of course it doesn't pop up on zip recruiters skill index because it's just too general and to be honest with you it's not really a skill that anybody is going to be looking for unless it's an extremely niche career. But something like post-secondary education for instance you'll see that the skill index has that at 26 out of 100. Now I don't necessarily agree with that. I think that it is more valuable than that but this index mostly just measures how much people are willing to pay on the open market for these types of skills. Now you can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one and you'll see that it's definitely on the lower side. And that kind of makes sense. I mean history is extremely interesting. I think it has a lot of value but that value doesn't necessarily directly show. So it's sort of intangible value that will probably improve your life in many ways but it isn't necessarily going to directly help you make money. And that becomes a huge issue when you consider the cost of a college degree here in the United States of America. Now one thing that's great about history degrees is it will teach you skills that are not very likely to be outsourced. And if you are able to secure a job as a historian again that's not going to be able to be automated or outsourced very easily. So for instance if you became a curator there's only about a 0.7 percent chance of being automated according to willrobotstakemyjob.com. Now when it comes to the skills in general it will teach you a lot of soft skills that are going to be valuable to you like communication, being able to give speeches, being able to read a vast amount of information and understand it, being able to formulate an argument and then present it. All of these things are extremely important when it comes to critical thinking and they'll probably help you in other areas of your life maybe even financially it's just that they won't directly help you. So overall when it comes to x factors unfortunately I have to give this one a 6.5 out of 10. So when you add all those up and divide by four you're going to get an overall score of 6.875 out of 10 and that's one of those where it's kind of in the gray area if you have a really good plan going in you know exactly what you're trying to go for it could work out for you. I could be wrong about this but I think this is similar to philosophy and a couple other degrees where a lot of smart people end up majoring in this and that might change the statistics on this just a little bit so it might be a little bit less about correlation and more about causation or vice versa depending on what degree you're talking about. So you could argue that with many of these degrees when it shows how much a person makes it's not necessarily because they got the degree itself it's just because they're smart and they probably would have been successful regardless of what degree path they went into. Now when I do research on these videos I like to look at a bunch of different YouTube videos and forums from people who have gotten these degrees just to figure out the general idea of what is going on. Now some degrees there's a lot of positivity other degrees everybody's like absolutely do not go into this degree path and history was unfortunately one of those where many people recommended to not go into it. So for instance there was one comment I read on Reddit where they said I have a bachelor's in military history and a master's in Byzantine history because I withdrew from my PhD program before reaching ABD. I also have an MPA 20 years of work experience and I'm in law school now. A history major alone is not worth the cost it won't get you a job and unless you're very good go to a very good school network like hell and get very lucky the PhD university route is a one-way ticket to adjunct hell. Teaching high school is far more competitive for the humanities than for STEM majors so you'll likely only be able to find a job in a rural area and even if not money will always be a worry. This is just one man's advice but unless you already have a job lined up i.e. you're working with a dad when you graduate regardless of your degree or your career plans involve law school, med school, military, something else that isn't degree picky do not get a history degree unsupported. If you want one get it as part of a double major and make damn sure the other degree will help you get a job. Accounting engineering, search engine optimization something very dry very boring and very likely to get you hired when you graduate. I don't usually include people's comments in these videos but this one was so well constructed that I had to include it and I pretty much agree with everything that he has to say. If you're interested in history if it's your life passion don't let someone like me tell you that you can't do it however you need to absolutely make sure that you know exactly what you're getting yourself into. For me personally history was one of my biggest passions and I chose to just keep it as a hobby. I think a lot of the time if you try to make one of your passions into a career you're going to end up resenting it just a little bit because you're going to have to end up doing things with that passion that you don't necessarily enjoy. So for instance when I took certain history classes I realized that I was having to write essays and I was having to read about time periods that I'm not necessarily interested in and then on top of that they made me memorize dates like they made me memorize exact dates and that's not something that I'm interested in either. It's a lot of work and then you just end up forgetting the date right after the class so in my opinion it was a waste of time. For me it's much more enjoyable just to listen to podcasts, read history books and I went into a career path where I make pretty good money and I have a lot of free time so I can do that pretty much as much as I want. If you're dead set on taking classes in history I would recommend considering minoring to just taking extra classes studying it on the side or maybe double major in it and then major in something else that's a little more practical. Additionally you can consider either not going to college at all or going to college and doing something else and then starting some kind of side hustle that's related to history. Something like starting a YouTube channel, a blog, becoming a writer, starting a podcast, something along those lines where you know it is going to take some time but eventually you could make a full time income. If you did that for four years you'd probably learn a lot more practical skills when it comes to history than if you went to school for four years and you'd have a much better chance of being able to do it professionally. But that's just my two cents you know that I try to be as honest as possible with you guys and give it a fair assessment. Now if you want an easier time doing research on these different college degrees and trying to figure them out I did create a college degree ranker which I put in my description and my patreon down below and you can check that out it'll make the whole process so much easier. If you haven't done it already go ahead and gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video. Sharing the video helps quite a bit and before you leave check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.