Is a History Degree Worth It?

Answered

One thing that's important to remember when you look at average salaries is that they're exactly that: averages. People can end up making a lot more (or less) than them depending on the career path they choose out of that major. When I was in college I knew multiple history major pre-meds, as well as people who went into consulting from a history major (which pays super well). In contrast, a lot of history majors go into teaching, which doesn't traditionally pay super well. A lot of them also go to graduate school, where their salaries won't show up in the statistics you're looking up because they're still in school. A lot of them work for nonprofits, which don't pay super well. So the average is going to be lower than something like a hard science or engineering, where most people immediately go into high-paying jobs. Most majors, but especially ones in the humanities, open people up for a multitude of possible career paths (in other words, the popular perception that liberal arts majors are unemployable is really the opposite of reality), and it's up to them to decide what's the right path for them. A lot of people who study those subjects really want to go into things like teaching, nonprofits, etc., which don't pay very highly, so that brings the average down.

What you should look at instead is the salary for the actual CAREER you want to go into—like if you do want to become a curator, that job seems to have a pretty big range based on experience, wherever you end up living, and which museums you end up working for. You'd probably start fairly low, but could end up making six figures eventually. In any case, the base pay for it on sites like Glassdoor looks to be squarely above the median income for US individuals, which means you're still making well more than 50% of people in the country even at the start (for reference, the median income in the US is about $30,000/year).

So, when you say you want to think realistically, what is it you want from your future? A curator job would give you the kind of salary where you'd have stability and a decent level of comfort, but you wouldn't be able to own a million dollar house or drive an expensive car everywhere or go on vacations every three months or buy every new gadget that comes out. If having a lot of money is really important to you, it might not be the best idea. But if you just want to make sure you can live a comfortable life, doing a history major wouldn't make that impossible for you.

And if that weren't enough, you could always change your mind and try to go into consulting, marketing, communications, media, or another field that really doesn't care about your undergraduate major as much as the skills you developed during it. Majors really aren't this thing that locks you into a specific life path, salary future, and career from the start—they're just something you can use to show employers that you committed to something for a substantial period of time, put a lot of work into it, and ultimately succeeded in your studies.

Hope that helps!