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Survey: CSULB history majors earn 7th highest pay of all history graduates

Cal State Long Beach tied for seventh in a national PayScale survey that ranked the best colleges for history majors based on history graduates’ career pay.

CSULB tied with the University of North Carolina and ranked ahead of University of California, Santa Barbara, which came in ninth. University of California, Los Angeles came out ahead with a fourth place ranking, according to PayScale,

an online company that assesses information on salary, benefits and compensation information.

History professors and history majors said they were surprised but happy when they heard that history majors graduating from CSULB earned the seventh highest career pay of all history majors in the nation.

“That’s news to me,” junior history major Joshua Johnston said. “I didn’t think history majors made money … It makes me feel like I can actually use my degree.”

Chicano and Latino studies professor Marisol Moreno said she was glad to hear about CSULB’s ranking.

“I am happy and delighted because the humanities and social sciences are hard to transfer into a job market,” Moreno said.

Moreno said the history department teaches students skills that can be useful outside of history.

“We orient students to become familiar with how the skills they built up are marketable skills, for example a critical thinking criteria. The idea carries over outside of history,” Moreno said. “It’s the ability to gather information out in the world and how to process and categorize information.”

Johnston said he thinks the skills he is learning in class will help him in the future, regardless of the career he pursues.

“I don’t plan on using my degree to go into the history field, but I do know a lot of the skills and tools that I do gain from the education in history are going to benefit me later on in the future, whether it’s analyzing evidence or whatever it may be,” Johnston said.

However, undergraduate adviser of the history department Caitlin Murdock said the department teaches much more basics in the field than a lot of other programs do.

Murdock also said she thinks the payscale.com survey isn’t conclusive enough to determine that CSULB history graduates earn the seventh most career pay of all history majors in the country.

“To be honest, we can’t conclude from it [the survey] that they do,” Murdock said. “From what I can see, it’s possible that they do, but from what I can see, they based the [CSULB] statistic from 14 people and the University of Michigan [statistic] from 27.”

Murdock said, though, that it doesn’t take away from the department’s status.

“The program is respected nationwide,” she said. “Some history graduates have gone on to medicine and law school. One graduate is the official historian of the [U.S.] Navy, and another one is the chief of police in Long Beach.”

History professor David Hood and lecturer Gregory Beirich said they were also pleased to hear about the rankings.

“It’s always been a strong department,” Hood said, “and this is merely a recognition of the strength of the history department.”

Beirich said that the professors in the department have a lot to do with the success of history graduates.

“Professors in the history department are recognized nationally and internationally, and it shows how great this university department is,” Beirich said. “Our history teachers are as good or better than a lot of universities.”

Einar Sevilla contributed to this report. 

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