Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, was an English literature major.
So to answer your question (and to follow up on many other answers here): a humanities major can do ANYTHING

Humanities teaches you to think and question and review material.

I now run my own business, it has helped me every day in making decisions.

Agree about the consulting opportunity. That is an extremely narrow funnel.

The chance of making it through from initial screening to job offer at MBB is literally 1%. Highly qualified from a target school? Maybe 10%. If you are lucky. Regardless of what you studied.

Tossing out consulting as a highly likely path for a history major is not helpful. That said, I do believe the critical thinking and written communication, and interpersonal skills can translate to a number of fields. Particularly if the candidate was strategic about internships and added a practical minor.

Reality check for the "just do consulting" posters: that's only for the top n% GPA wise. I was third quartile in my class, as were most of my friends. I am a low level NGO administrator (at, to be fair, an extremely prestigious organization). Of the people I keep up with who were humanities majors and didn't go to law school, their jobs are teacher, teacher, nonprofit admin, nonprofit admin, academic editor, school principal, professor. The lawyers are much more successful though.

Anonymous wrote:I think to be successful as an Ivy humanities major, though, you have to be extremely self-directed. You’re often not succeeding because you got on some cookie-cutter path but because you were able to envision and create your own path to success.

That is true but I think most people have to forge their own paths. Sure you can be a doctor but almost anything else is going to require that you take ownership of finding and creating opportunities. Most fulfilling careers are not the result of staying on a predefined path. I graduated from an Ivy, changed careers 3 times in my 20s and now make $1M a year in a job I love as an expert in something I did not know existed 12 years ago.

Putting the study of humanities aside for a moment, I don't believe the majority of Ivies compare with, say, UIUC for the study of engineering.

Ethics department at Lockheed Martin

I think to be successful as an Ivy humanities major, though, you have to be extremely self-directed. You’re often not succeeding because you got on some cookie-cutter path but because you were able to envision and create your own path to success.

My most successful friend was a French literature major at Harvard. She’s made millions in private equity. She got into HBS but decided that she didn’t need to go to continue her career.

Some go to med or law school, others go into management consulting (as long as they have a few math/stats classes to show they can handle numbers), others go to do something creative. My most successful college friend from the Ivy I attended is now very successful in Hollywood (not Mindy Kaling but similar career).

Get a job at an AI company. Anthropic hires humanities majors.

The people who graduated from an Ivy with a humanities degree were still in rarefied air. Now education and AI has opened fields to students with every background. It's tough to say that the medieval studies major from Yale will still be in demand in a few years.

I majored in medieval studies (at a top private university, non-ivy). I am a college professor. My husband has a degree in history from the same school. He was a CTO of a tech startup and is now an independent consultant. His advancement into management was entirely due to his superior communication skills, especially in writing.

I’m an Ivy humanities major and now a C-suite exec at a global publishing company. I worked my way up in the field and started at modest pay, but my comp started taking off about 10-15 years in. I now make 7 figures and didn’t have to go to grad school to get here. I love my work.

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