The Practical Value of Philosophy

Knowledge and Skills

In learning philosophy, students are exposed to a wide breadth of other subjects. This is because philosophy, being the oldest field of inquiry, busies itself with pretty much everything. However, the focus of philosophy is on answering important, fundamental questions. Philosophers may ask questions such as: what is evidence?, what is consciousness?, how can we make a just society?, how can we make sense of right and wrong?, and many others. In engaging with these questions, students can expect to learn what the possible answers are, how they are defended, and what the major objections are. Importantly, the pursuit of a degree in philosophy will result in the development of essential skills.

Essential Skills

The study of philosophy enables students to:

• Solve problems, identify the links between related problems, and evaluate evidence.
• Employ powerful arguments and assess the implications of given positions.
• Communicate clearly and simply so as to convey important information to others.
• Manage and organize complex information for effective use.
• Engage with a problem from different angles and challenge entrenched assumptions.
• Seek out and assess new information.
• Analyze tasks, set priorities, and formulate and address questions relevant to the task at hand.

Job Prospects

Contrary to popular belief, those who major in philosophy fare very well on the job market. Philosophy equips its students with skills that are both highly coveted by employers and desirable in a multitude of fields. Additionally, those with degrees in philosophy tend to do well financially.

Salary

• The starting salary of a graduate of philosophy is approximately $40,000, and that grows to about $81,000 by mid-career. In fact, out of the 50 top-earning majors, philosophy lands in 16th place, with its students seeing a staggering 103.5% increase in salary over 10 years. See for yourself!

Marketability

• A degree in philosophy is highly marketable, and that trend is only going up. Across the various fields, demand for philosophers has increased. For example, 76% more philosophy graduates worked in business in 2005-2006 than in 2002. The skills that philosophy instills in its graduates are in high demand. Check it out!

Flexibility

• The broad applicability of the skills philosophy graduates develop provides them with great flexibility when it comes to the job market. Unlike a degree that forces a student to stick down a specific career path, a degree in philosophy empowers you to pick between various career paths and switch when necessary — giving you the power to choose.

Testimonials

We can go on and on about the benefits of majoring or minoring in philosophy, but you should consider what those who have already gotten their degrees have to say. Below are some quotations from a few of the graduates of philosophy.

• Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack Technologies: "Studying philosophy taught me two things. I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings. And when I studied the history of science, I learned about the ways that everyone believes something is true--like the old notion of some kind of ether in the air propagating gravitational forces--until they realized that it wasn't true."
• Katy Tur, Journalist for NBC: "Philosophy majors get a bad rap ... I would argue that for the vast majority of people, an education of teaching you to think critically about the world you are in and what you know and what you don’t know is useful for absolutely everything that you could possibly do in the future."
• Carly Fiorina, prior CEO of Hewlett-Packard: "I learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff, essential from just interesting, and I think that’s a particularly critical skill now when there is a ton of interesting but ultimately irrelevant information floating around."
• David Silbersweig, Professor and Academic Dean at Harvard Medical School: "And what a continuously giving gift philosophy has been. While it seemed impractical to my dentist, it has informed and provided a methodology for everything I have done since. If you can get through a one-sentence paragraph of Kant, holding all of its ideas and clauses in juxtaposition in your mind, you can think through most anything. 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."
• Fiona Czerniawska, Director of the Management Consultancies Association's think tank: "A philosophy degree has trained the individual's brain and given them the ability to provide management-consulting firms with the sort of skills that they require and clients demand. These skills can include the ability to be very analytical, provide clear and innovative thinking, and question assumptions."

Like those above, graduates of philosophy tend to fare well for themselves and firmly believe that their philosophical training was worth the effort.

Well-Known Graduates of Philosophy

• Noam Chomsky (Professor Emeritus, MIT)

• Wes Anderson (BA, University of Texas-Austin)

• Rashida Jones (BA, Harvard University)

• Chris Hayes (BA, Brown University)

• T.S. Eliot (BA, Harvard University)

• Emmanuel Macron (MA, Paris Nanterre University)

• Stephen Breyer (BA, Stanford University)

• Pete Buttigieg (BA, Oxford University)

• Doria Shafik (PhD, Sorbonne University)

• Elizabeth Kiss (DPhil, Oxford University)

• Tamara Keith (BA, University of California-Berkeley)

• Pearl Buck (BA, Randolph-Macon Women's College)

• Erika Nardini (BA, Colby College)

• Alex Mooney (BA, Dartmouth College)

• Angela Davis (PhD, Humboldt University)

For a longer list of popular graduates of philosophy, check out the American Philosophical Association's list on Who Studies Philosophy.

Graduate Exams

If you've read everything on this page so far, then it will come as no surprise to you that those who study philosophy in college are amongst the best performers on all graduate exams.

LSAT: Philosophy majors are some of the best performers (if not the best) on the Law School Admissions Test, and data suggests that they have some of the highest rates of admission to law school programs when compared to other popular majors. See the source!

GMAT: On the Graduate Management Admissions Test, those who studied philosophy in college are amongst the highest scorers, and they consistently score higher than all other humanities majors. See the source!

GRE: You'll find that those who pursue philosophy are top performers on the Graduate Record Exam, clearly dominating the Analytic Writing and Verbal Reasoning sections, and performing quite well in Quantitative Reasoning. See the source!

Data on how philosophy majors perform on the MCAT is sparse since the AAMC groups all humanities graduates together; however, in 1998, 50.2% of philosophy majors who applied to medical school got accepted, which is a considerably higher acceptance rate than biology majors (39.9%) and one of the highest acceptance rates by major. The data is unfortunately a bit old, though there's no reason to believe things have changed considerably since then.

Philosophy and Success

A major, by itself, cannot guarantee success. This is true whether one chooses to major in physics, history, economics, philosophy, or anything else. But the major that you pursue determines which skills you will have an opportunity to develop, and philosophy offers its students the chance to improve upon and master the most essential skills one will need both in one's profession and in one's personal life. With a degree in philosophy, success is attainable.