Back in a 2012 post I relayed a call from Silicon Valley entrepreneur Santosh Jayaram for more English majors. Resources like reusable code are simplifying the engineering portion of new product introductions. The challenge lies in encouraging investment in your idea and in beginning to market to prospective customers—efforts that require storytelling skills. More recently, Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker points out that product proposals at Amazon have to be written out as six-page narratives, because CEO Jeff Bezos believes storytelling encourages critical thinking.
And now, Heather Long at The Washington Post addresses the issue. She cites Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller’s new book Narrative Economics. “The whole premise of Shiller’s book is that stories matter,” she writes. “What people tell each other can have profound implications on markets—and the overall economy."
So should students be advised to major in English rather than STEM subjects? Not necessarily. Back in 2014, Laszlo Bock, who at the time was in charge of hiring at Google, said he preferred a B student in computer science to an A+ student in English. And Long in her Washington Post story acknowledges that entry-level STEM graduates command higher salaries than recent graduates with English degrees.
However, Long cites research by David J. Deming and Kadeem L. Noray of Harvard showing that the STEM pay premium fades quickly. “We find that the initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50 percent in the first decade of working life,” they write.
And Long points out a surprising statistic: “Contrary to popular belief, English majors ages 25 to 29 had a lower unemployment rate in 2017 than math and computer science majors,” she writes.
Perhaps that’s because, as she points out, the percentage of the number of majors in English has declined by 25.5% from 2009 to 2017, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Over that same period, the number of math, engineering, and computer-science majors increased by 55.2%, 67.8%, and 88%, respectively. So it seems that English majors may be looking to fill an underserved niche, whereas STEM majors may face a glut of competition at home and abroad.
