THE SECRET LIVES OF ENGLISH MAJORS.

• Author: Austin, Elizabeth

Unlike their STEM peers, Black and white humanities graduates earn about the same. How did that happen?

For decades, optimistic liberals believed that by sending more students of color to college, the United States could dismantle systemic racial income disparities. But in recent years, research has made it abundantly clear that's simply not the case. Even when minority students from impoverished backgrounds earn college diplomas, they make substantially less than their white peers. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, for example, found that Black college graduates earned 22.5 percent less than their white counterparts in 2019, up from 19.2 percent in 2007 and 17.2 percent in 2000. Other researchers have found similarly large gaps, even among the graduates of top-tier universities.

Those entry-level inequities can snowball over time. In a groundbreaking study of students' long-term earnings, the University of Texas system found that white graduates in computers, statistics, and mathematics earned a median entry-level wage of $53,100, compared with a median of $50,000 for Black graduates and $45,000 for Latinos. Fifteen years after graduation, the salary gaps had increased dramatically: White students were making a median of $112,000, compared with $83,500 for Black students and $68,200 for Latinos. Graduates in engineering and business saw similar salary inequities.

But when officials at UT dug into their data set, which combined university records of almost 550,000 students who attended nine UT system institutions from 2002 through 2018 with 15 years of wage data from the Texas Workforce Commission, they unearthed some unexpected findings. As they sliced the data by student major, gender, race, and family income, they found that Black, brown, and female alums are often massively underpaid compared with their white male peers in many high-wage career paths, such as computer science, engineering, and business. But they also found that students of color who majored in education, health, and the humanities tended to earn roughly the same amount as these disciplines' white graduates, both right after graduation and 15 years out.

The humanities data is perhaps the most surprising. Unlike education and health majors, who tend to cluster in professions with more transparent pay scales that support wage parity, humanities grads work everywhere. That's in part because humanities" encompasses a long list of majors, from American studies, anthropology, Asian cultures and languages, classical studies, and English through geography, history, linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, and women's and gender studies. UT's data set is robust, including 37,266 humanities graduates, of whom 4,231 identify as Black and 28,814 identify as Hispanic. In the first year after graduation, the median incomes of all humanities students regardless of race and gender clustered just below $30,000; that relative wage parity remained durable 15 years after commencement, when white graduates earned a median wage of $60,000 and Black and Latino graduates made a median wage of $58,000.

How is it that UT humanities majors overcome the racial earnings gap? There's no one clear answer. But there seem to be multiple possible explanations that could help students...