Loyola's Career Development Center makes many useful resources available on their Website. See their page What Can I do with This Major? to view a chart of careers open to students who major in Classics and other fields. The charts are licensed from the Career Planning staff of Career Services at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, revised 2007. The page makes several important points: "Study in the Classics develops verbal and analytical skills useful in managerial and executive positions." "Good preparation for graduate study in law and other highly analytical types of work." "Develop excellent writing and research skills." Rutgers University's Career Services lists various "Related Occupations," "Types of Employers" (private, non-profit, and governmental), and specific "Jobs Obtained by Rutgers Graduates" in Classics. WorldWideLearn remarks, "A Bachelor of Arts (BA) in classical studies is an excellent starting point for any of the humanities or liberal arts specialties that originated from the original classical disciplines ... a BA may be sufficient academic training for a variety of careers in the arts, government and politics, communications, and business--positions that require a broad-based education in human institutions. ... If you decide to pursue a career in the social sciences - such as anthropology, archeology, geography, history, political science, or sociology - you'll find the educational standards are among the highest of all occupations." After Skidmore: Jobs in Classics attractively outlines fields of work where training in Classics is especially relevant, and success-stories of Skidmore graduates in very many of them. The Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Creighton University, also presents statistics and testimonials about Classicists and their careers.

On the subject of careers, the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, remarks, "What employers appreciate is that Classics provides mental training in a whole range of different disciplines, and produces graduates of exceptional intellectual flexibility. In our world of rapid social and technological change, it is the capacity to react to new and unforeseen developments with flexibility which employers value most, and it is widely recognized that Classics and related subjects produce just the kind of graduate they are looking for, with an unparalleled capacity to adapt to new circumstances and learn new skills." Some things really never do go out of date!

Craig Scott, in a 2010 article "What to do with a degree in Classics" in The Guardian, remarks, "Studying classics will highlight your ability to learn and comprehend challenging subjects. You will also develop your ability to research, collate and analyse materials and learn to critically evaluate resources in order to formulate arguments, which you can present competently. You will be able to work alone or within a team and to think imaginatively."

And then there's the paragraphs from The Princeton Review that Classics departments everywhere rejoice to quote: "We can't overestimate the value of a Classics major. Check this out: according to Association of American Medical Colleges, students who major or double-major in Classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely in biology, microbiology, and other branches of science. Crazy, huh? Furthermore, according to Harvard Magazine, Classics majors (and math majors) have the highest success rates of any majors in law school. Believe it or not: political science, economics, and pre-law majors lag fairly far behind. Even furthermore, Classics majors consistently have some of the highest scores on GREs of all undergraduates. Shocked? Don't be. One reason Classics majors are so successful is that they completely master grammar. Medical terminology, legal terminology, and all those ridiculously worthless vocabulary words on the GRE (and the SAT) have their roots in Greek and Latin. Ultimately, though, Classics majors get on well in life because they develop intellectual rigor, communications skills, analytical skills, the ability to handle complex information, and, above all, a breadth of view which few other disciplines can provide."

Periodically, news features report other benefits of Classical studies (for example, 11 March 2009, seattlepi.com); they often focus on college admissions, where instruments like the SAT make it easy to quantify Latin students' superior skills (2002 SAT mean verbal scores: Latin students 666, French students 637, German students 622, Spanish student 581, as opposed to a mean verbal score of 504 overall, noted by New Horizons for Learning), but the benefits that underpin successful schooling achieve their real value throughout careers and lives.

Preparing to Pursue a Future within Academia

For some, a branch of Classical Studies is a good career choice. These indexes can help you identify programs in which to acquire the credentials you will need.

• GradSchools.com, Humanities and Cultures, indexed directory: follow links to Archaeology, Area & Cultural Studies - European Studies, Foreign Languages & Studies, History Disciplines, Literature - Classics, etc.
• Index of Academic Programs having something to do with Archaeology, maintained by ArchNet: scroll down under "Academic Departments by Topic" to get to "Classical Archaeology."
• Index of North American graduate programs incorporating Byzantine Studies or Late Antiquity, maintained by the Byzantine Studies Association of North America.
• Graduate Education in Classics, index-page for several 1990s colloquia among professional Classicists concerned with the future of graduate training in the profession - most of which remains apposite in the 2010s.

This page was updated 3 August 2011 by jlong1@luc.edu.