Degree students up and down the country are finishing their final assessments before seeking to enter the workplace. Among them are thousands of arts and humanities students whose employment destinations will be many and varied. And that’s a good thing.
HEPI’s recent report The Humanities in the UK today: what’s going on (2023) is therefore very timely. Significantly, it emphasises the conclusions of the British Academy report Qualified for the Future (2020), which revealed that arts and humanities graduates have more career options and greater resilience within the workforce than those of many other disciplines.
We welcome these findings at The Open University (OU), where over 15,000 students are currently studying arts and humanities subjects. Our own internal research confirms that there is little difference between the career prospects of arts and humanities graduates compared to those qualifying in other subject areas. What disparity does exist, is largely the result of certain high-earning careers, such as medicine and associated professions, skewing the data for STEM subjects as a whole.
