A new report from the Open University Wales, the Learned Society of Wales and History UK responds to a powerful UK-wide narrative about the financial value of higher education, which tends to label arts and humanities degrees as ‘low value’.

The report captures the findings from a meeting held in Cardiff in April 2024, attended by academics, university leaders, students, graduates, representatives from think tanks, colleagues from employer bodies, and colleagues from the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales.

It demonstrates the comparable employment rate that arts and humanities graduates have with peers from other subjects, the valuable transferable skills they develop, and their broader value to the UK economy. Furthermore starting salaries between arts and humanities graduates and those from other areas show little difference once ‘a handful of selected disciplines that offer particularly high salaries at the outset (e.g., economics, medicine) are factored out’.

The report concludes that arts and humanities’ disciplines need to do a better job in ‘telling their story of value’ to policy-makers and the public alike.