Career Readiness in Philosophy: Challenges and Opportunities

By: Jeremy Proulx

The study of the humanities, including philosophy, has sharply declined over the past few decades. Philosophy majors, once about 0.6% of graduates in 2005, now account for roughly 0.4%. There are lots of reasons for these declines, but pressures on programs to provide marketable skills for their students has played no small part.

Indeed, higher education in the U.S. has increasingly focused on career programs over traditional arts and sciences fields. Liberal arts degrees, dominant in the early 20th century, largely served higher-income families. By the 70s, the trend shifted to career-focused programs, accounting for over 60% of degrees by the mid-80s. Today, career programs still dominate, fueled by a tight job market, rising college costs, and a demand for degrees leading to well-paying jobs.

This means that, for better or worse, philosophy is a de facto part of the career program landscape. At EMU, survey data presented to the Faculty Senate by Darcy Gifford, AVP for Marketing and Communications (March 19, 2025), reveals that EMU students are career pragmatists, prioritizing clear paths to employment. This suggests that many students are likely considering philosophy based on its career utility, and marketing this utility could attract more students and improve outcomes.

This in turn poses a dilemma: How do we appeal to the career pragmatism of our students without reducing philosophy to mere career skills?

Prima facie, highlighting ‘career readiness’ seems promising. Research shows that philosophy majors tend to earn more money and that graduates are in demand. Even Mark Cuban says philosophy is great! Yet this approach risks compromising the integrity of the discipline, particularly at smaller institutions like EMU. 

Here I raise a few questions to help bring this issue into focus, and along the way, I propose a method for incorporating career readiness learning outcomes into the background of courses in philosophy.

1) Is a career focus in philosophy a threat to the discipline?

Quite possibly. At least as far back as Plato’s debates with the sophists, philosophy has opposed an instrumental approach to education. Philosophy aims to develop a student’s rational capacities to determine for themselves what’s worth pursuing, rather than catering to preconceived career goals. Presenting philosophy as career training could thus abdicate our responsibility to educate students in favor of giving students whatever they want in the pursuit of tuition dollars.

This presents significant risks. Offering courses in the development of certain desirable skills risks accommodating students as clients, which is contrary to the way we think about philosophy. We also run the risk of needing to justify everything we do in terms of career outcomes. But the purpose of, say, reading Kant, is not reducible to career outcomes, even if those outcomes are significant.

And perhaps most seriously, philosophy needs to be taught by philosophers. But philosophy qua career training does not train philosophers. Setting philosophy up as a career skills program thus undermines the viability of the discipline and therefore the utility that philosophy brings to career programs.

2) Can career readiness coexist within our disciplinary traditions?

I hope so. Instrumentalism is a problem only when it’s the sole measure of philosophy’s value. Following an argument all the way through is a transferable skill, for instance; we cannot do philosophy without it. But you can only teach it in philosophy by teaching students how to do philosophy. So how can instructors do this?

One approach involves a two-part assignment that ‘bookends’ the course with introductory and concluding reflections. Students read material on the utility of studying philosophy and its connection to a set of career competencies from NACE, then comment on what stands out to them and their expectations for the class.

This sets up students to see what they’re doing in terms of a set of skills they’re building. As the class progresses, I have found that I can refer to these career competencies in feedback and in class discussions. So even though this is not a significant part of student evaluation, it frames the course nicely, gives us all some shared language, and gets students thinking reflectively about what they’re doing in class and how it’s all preparing them for the future..

A concluding assignment asks students to reflect on their initial comments, identifying what they learned from the class and how they think they’ll be able to utilize it in the future.

In a single semester (across 5 courses, 180 students), the assignments yielded promising results. Depending on the class, 45-70% of students commented positively on the connections to career readiness. Most of the comments were generically positive, but several explicitly noted the benefits of embedding career readiness into a General Education course. One student even remarked that the class might offer more value than her experience as an assistant manager.

Of particular note is that comments also suggest that students seem to easily recognize the connection between more abstract academic skills like critical thinking and problem solving and the very practical skills involved in career preparation. Given the concerns I raise above, this is an especially promising result. We do not need to convince students that studying Nietzsche builds valuable skills. We only need to be transparent about the goals of the class.

So philosophy can clearly be a beneficial part of programs for even the most career-pragmatic students. All that’s required is for instructors to find ways of incorporating these outcomes and for administrators to support these programs with the resources they need to be able to thrive as the disciplines that can provide them.