Figure

III-07c: Boost in Median Annual Earnings Associated with Obtaining an Advanced Degree, by Gender and Field of Undergraduate Degree, 2021*

* For full-time workers; that is, those who worked 35 or more hours per week for 50 or more weeks in the previous 12 months. Advanced degree may be in any field. Fields are arranged in descending order of the boost for all full-time workers. The “boost” is calculated as a proportion of terminal bachelor’s degree holders’ earnings.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 American Community Survey Public-Use Microdata Sample. Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).

For the purposes of the American Community Survey (ACS), the source of these data, the U.S. Census Bureau defines earnings as “the sum of wage or salary income and net income from self-employment. ‘Earnings’ represent the amount of income received regularly for people 16 years old and over before deductions for personal income taxes, Social Security, bond purchases, union dues, Medicare deductions, etc. An individual with earnings is one who has either wage/salary income or self-employment income, or both. Respondents who ‘break even’ in self-employment income and therefore have zero self-employment earnings also are considered ‘individuals with earnings’” (from ACS documentation provided at http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions /2014_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf, p. 83).

The ACS permits respondents to specify up to two fields of bachelor’s degree. For the purposes of this analysis, an individual was counted as having a bachelor’s degree in the humanities if the field of either reported degree was within the scope of the humanities as specified by the HI. For an inventory of the specific fields included under the broad field groupings used here, see the ACS-HI Crosswalk.

Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into four groups, each of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (earnings, in this case) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The middle quartile is also known as the median.

In its analyses of the earnings of humanities majors and how they compare to majors in other fields, the HI always reports the median rather than the mean (“average”). This is necessary due to the highly skewed nature of the U.S. earnings distribution; that is, a small share of the U.S. population earns considerably more than the vast majority of Americans. The mean is very sensitive to such extreme values. The median is far less so and is thus a better measure of “typical” earnings.

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