Promoting History: A Message from History Students to our Educators

Owen Deis and Andrew Kelly

Graphic created by the authors. Statue photo from Getty Images.

Throughout their undergraduate studies, history students are often told two things: that their degree is invaluable and that it will likely lead to unemployment. As a result, prospective and new history students are often unsure what the degree can do for them. As recent graduates with Bachelor of Arts degrees in History from the University of Saskatchewan, we wanted to share insights into what we see as the degree’s real potential.

Throughout our undergraduate studies, our cohort of history majors was fortunate to have professors tell us we had the makings of strong graduates and career professionals. However, when we discussed in more detail what we wanted to do with our degrees, our professors’ tone changed. Many of us wanted to go into graduate or professional school. Others wanted public service roles and to leave the academy. Whichever path we eyed, however, our professors told us to be careful about how we intended to apply our degrees. Sobering statements we heard from our professors include:

 “You will be older, poorer, and less happy than your peers [if you do a PhD].”

 “The job market is paralyzed.”

 “What do you want to do with this degree? Think carefully about that.”

Getting such direct statements from professors we looked up to was hard and rather disheartening. It certainly wasn’t encouraging to be told that a career in academia might be unattainable. In sharing the comments, though, we don’t mean to deride the professors who said them. These comments offer real insight into the academic side of the field. Students pursuing graduate studies do face greater financial and career challenges than their peers. The job market for history graduates in the academy is imbalanced, with more candidates than openings. Academia is not an ideal career path for many. The Canadian Historical Association’s 2022 Task Force on the Future of the History PhD in Canada report affirms these facts.^[1] Our peers also alluded to these issues. The joke in our history group was, and still is, that we are unemployable and that our degree will not matter in the long run. In reality, even vacancies for jobs requiring a Bachelor’s degree have declined sharply in Canada in recent years. Thus, this issue is not confined to just grad students.

We do not want to scare those eyeing history as their major, nor do we want to make new history students second-guess their choice. Instead, we share these comments to prepare new and prospective history students for the comments and questions they are likely to face.  Discussing these difficult but real challenges is also essential for anyone investing time and money in a degree.

Our goal is to offer unsolicited advice to history educators on how to better promote the potential of a history degree to prospective and current students. We urge educators to continue sharing the realities of the field. Let students know about the job market, how tough a graduate degree can be, and how they may not work in the field. However, we also urge educators to emphasize what made us love history. Share with students the positives that studying history can bring and how the critical thinking, writing, research, and related skills they learn are transferable to non-history careers. As the CHA highlights in its literature (linked to every history course in USask’s learning management system), history graduates can get jobs—in and outside of the field. They possess valuable hard and soft skills, from research acumen to effective communication and beyond.

These realities lead us to a core ask: share the unique opportunities your department offers. For instance, the University of Saskatchewan’s history department hosts many unique courses and projects which expand or rethink traditional methods of historical analysis. During our studies, students in our cohort built a board game with Dr. Benjamin Hoy, worked in USask’s historical GIS lab or Co-Lab, and learned from Active History’s Jim Clifford about digital tools that help historians reach new audiences and engage with evolving technologies. These experiences don’t discount the traditional lectures and seminars history undergraduates will become familiar with, which also provide vital skills and are exciting in their own right. Still, they do highlight possibilities for history outside the academy.

Of course, your department’s offerings will differ, but help students make the most of what is available. If you offer a digital history course or game-making course, promote them. Teach students how to make maps with ArcGIS, create a game that is both fun and informative, use LLMs for language processing, text mining, and web scraping, and do anything else that could excite them. Beyond traditional history lectures and seminars, courses like these are excellent ways to find jobs after graduation because they form marketable skills. These applied courses build on the foundation of typically structured courses because they cultivate standout skills students can recognize instantly and feel good about having learned.

We also encourage educators to engage more critically with the public. Events such as workshops or public lectures are a fantastic way to show people how exciting history can be. Involve students as well: create student blogs, host colloquia or symposiums, and encourage students to participate in their student journal. These efforts may not convince everyone that the degree is necessarily employable, but they can show its potential and highlight the skills of those who study it. If people sincerely believe a history degree is useless, as both of us did in undergrad, public engagement like this can show that reading books or watching documentaries doesn’t teach the same skills.

Please also support your institution’s history club. When we first started our undergrads, we felt like we were the only history majors at the University of Saskatchewan. We were wrong; we had access to the History Undergraduate Students’ Association (HUSA). Clubs like HUSA help students dispel jokes about unemployment. They help students build community, meet fellow majors, and start to see professors as people. They also provide opportunities, as ours did, to discuss what grad school is like, to learn about possible career trajectories, and to network with professors and history professionals. Meeting and getting to know professors can lead to research or teaching assistantships, help students gain confidence asking for career advice or reference letters, and more. If your institution lacks a history club, help make one. Support it through your department as much as possible. After all, research shows that students benefit academically and socially from participating in these kinds of extracurricular activities.

History is not unemployable. It is not a useless degree. It is certainly not a boring field. As history educators, you know this. So then, share those exciting opportunities and projects. Highlight areas where the discipline can benefit from collaborative approaches, gamified learning, technological support, public engagement, and similar initiatives. Help students find what makes history special and prove why it matters. Give undergraduate students in particularthe chance to share their research, promote their ideas, and teach others. Encourage students to look beyond the academy. Show students that history is more than lectures and books.

Make a history degree sound as unique as it is, and encourage students, tempered with some good advice, to make the most of the skills they learn wherever they end up.

Owen Deis is an M.A. student at Carleton University and holds a B.A. (Hons) and a Certificate in Peace Studies. His research interests focus on material and visual media in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and post-war Germany. He can be reached at ogdeis@proton.me.

Andrew Kelly is a first-year law student at the University of Saskatchewan and holds a B.A. (Hons) in History. Andrew’s research has focused on Canadian legal history, border studies and historical GIS. He can be reached at aj.kelly@usask.ca.

Resources

[1] An insightful analysis of the graduate school process and the job market is also available in Carly Ciufo, Jenny Ellison, and Andrew Johnston, Employing History: A Guide to Graduate School and Navigating the Job Market (Canadian Historical Association and the American Historical Association, 2020), https://cha-shc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/5fa2c7334b719.pdf.