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What Do We Know About Arts Majors in the Labor Force?. Neil Alper and Gregory Wassall , 3 Million Stories Conference, March 9, 2013. What We’ll Talk About. There are a number of “mysteries” regarding what happens to students who majored in an art form in college after they graduate:
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What Do We Know About Arts Majors in the Labor Force? Neil Alper and Gregory Wassall, 3 Million Stories Conference, March 9, 2013
What We’ll Talk About • There are a number of “mysteries” regarding what happens to students who majored in an art form in college after they graduate: • How many arts majors are there? • Do they work in the arts after graduation? • If not, where do they work? • Does their arts major endow them with higher earnings when they work in their art form? • Does their arts major endow them with higher earnings when they work in some other job? • We will look at some descriptive data first; then we will summarize the results of a statistical analysis we are conducting. • Where does this information come from?
The American Community Survey • It’s an annual survey of the U.S. population, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau • It’s completed by 3 million Americans per year • It collects information on demographic, educational, and labor market characteristics of survey participants • Although it always asked respondents a question about their educational attainment, in 2009 it began asking everyone with a bachelor’s degree to name their college major. More specifically, they could name up to two majors. • To have a more reliable sample size, we have combined the ACS microdata samples for 2009, 2010, and 2011.
Some Things the ACS Doesn’t Cover • There is no way of finding out from what type of school or program a respondent graduated. • It asks respondents for only one occupation, based on hours worked. • It doesn’t ask respondents to break out their earnings based on occupation. • Earnings are bottom- and top-coded; extreme earnings are not directly reported. • Graduate (Masters, Doctoral) degree fields are not identified.
Why Go to College? Differences in Earnings by Education, 2009-11ACS
Why Go to College? Differences in Unemployment by Education, 2009-11 ACS
What Do People Do With Arts Degrees? • Some arts majors seem to lead directly to a specific arts job, like music majors becoming musicians. For other arts majors, such as English Language and Literature, there may be no certain career path. • How often do arts majors actually work at jobs in the arts? • The next several slides show the five jobs that selected arts majors are most likely to have.
How Successful Are Arts Majors? • Certainly there are other measures than earnings that determine success in one’s profession. • Yet we just saw that having a Bachelor’s degree significantly enhances one’s job prospects and lifetime earnings. • What is less well known is that what one does while in college also has an impact on job prospects and lifetime earnings.
Does Having Specific Arts Training Improve Job Market Outcomes? • Some questions not yet addressed: • Do arts majors earn more working in their art form than others do? • Do arts majors earn more working in jobs outside the profession they trained for? • Can non-arts majors successfully penetrate arts professions? • In the next slide, we examine these questions by selecting only those arts majors who have an obvious occupation for which they are training (architecture-architect, music-musician, e.g.). • After this, we address these questions more generally.
Arts Majors and Arts Jobs • In the next table, using regression analysis, we estimate the “premium” in annual earnings that college graduates get when working in each of nine arts occupations. • We do this by regressing annual earnings on a variety of personal attributes that affect earnings, such as age, gender, race, marital status, industry, for-profit/non-profit business and of course education. • In the next table we show the extra earnings that one receives in each arts occupation for having completed an additional degree. • We also estimate the additional premium that any arts major receives when working in these arts occupations.
Arts Majors and Non-Arts Jobs • In the tables that follow, using regression analysis, we estimate the earnings premium that college graduates get when working in each of 13 professional and 12 production and service (non-arts) occupational groupings. • In the aggregate, these groupings contain almost all non-arts jobs. • Then, we estimate the additional premium that any arts major receives when working in the same occupations.
Thoughts, Comments… • What do these observations imply about • Arts education? • Careers in the arts? • Public policy toward artists? • Being an artist?
