Is the History Major Dominated by the Upper Middle Class?

Here are two top-five lists of college majors. What factor determines the ranking?

On the left, the five college majors whose students come from families with the lowest mean household income; on the right, the five with the highest — from nearly $100,000 for English majors down to two-thirds that amount for law enforcement majors.

Now, the range of incomes is enormous, with one standard deviation ranging from ±$45,000 to nearly $60,000. So you’ll find an Education major coming from a family making nearly three times that of a History major’s. And the median household income for the entire country is about the same as the mean household income for those law enforcement majors.

 But it is nonetheless striking — and dismaying, at least to this history professor — that humanities, arts, and social sciences fields seem to draw so heavily from the upper reaches of the middle class. ...