What can it do for you?
Valuable Skills
Leave your preconceptions at the door! Philosophy delivers highly marketable, highly transferable skills. If your ideal career requires thinking, talking, or writing, we'll help you prepare. (Like these famous philosophy majors, or these.)
The data suggests that we need more philosophy classes if our students’ employment futures are a prime concern.
Your parents might have worried when you chose philosophy as a major. But graduates in philosophy earned 103.5% more about 10 years post-commencement. (Story. Data.)
To remain competitive, Cuban advises ditching degrees that teach specific skills and opting for degrees that teach you how to think in a big picture way, like philosophy.
"As robots take over routine jobs, we need people who can think creatively, imaginatively, logically, and laterally. Acquiring a narrow 'skillset' of the kind society increasingly demands will, in fact, leave students not equipped for the future, but vulnerable to it."
"What a continuously giving gift philosophy has been... If you can extract, and abstract, underlying assumptions or superordinate principles, or reason through to the implications of arguments, you can identify and address issues in a myriad of fields."
Information is easy to acquire, and much will soon be obsolete. What is valuable is not the content of a major, but rather the ability to think with and through that information.
The discipline teaches you how to think clearly, a gift that can be applied to any line of work.
If you're getting a liberal arts degree, you're actually in more demand than those who are getting finance and accounting degrees.
Figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency show philosophy graduates are in growing demand from employers.
Most of management theory is inane, writes the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.
Courses like "Why Capitalism?" push students to ponder business in a broader context, and address a common complaint of employers, who say recent graduates are trained to solve single problems but miss the big picture.
In an era in which chronic unemployment seems to demand hard skills, some students are turning to an ancient study that they say prepares them not for a job, but for the multiple jobs they expect to hold during their lifetimes.
Big Questions
Ever wondered if God exists? If you have free will? If life has a meaning? Whether abortion/affirmative action/capitalism is right or wrong? What it means to be a person? If you should fear death?
So have we! Believe it or not, we've made progress and we have answers—lots of them—backed up with reasons. Come join humanity's conversation before life gets in the way and you die wondering.
Consider this question: "What Do I Desire?"
Bertrand Russell: "The Value of Philosophy" (pdf)
Timothy Williamson, "The Pain and Pleasure of Philosophy"
Three Common Myths About Philosophy Majors (video)
Pepperdine Philosophy Alumni do great things.
Follow Pepperdine Philosophy on Instagram.
High Scores
Thinking about graduate school? On average over the three sections, Philosophy majors are most exceptional on the GRE. (Data table. Second chart: breakdown by section. Third chart: more majors, smaller font!)
How about business school? Philosophy majors outperform majors in economics, statistics, finance, accounting, etc.
Need that J.D.? Philosophy is a better bet than political science, pre-law, and anything starting with "business."
Philosophers enjoy the best chance of admission to medical school of any major.
Compiled by Tomas Bogardus