There is a question every student of religion gets asked at one point in time or another.
Whether posed by parents or friends, mentors or guidance counselors, it comes in some form of: “What are you going to do with that degree?”
It is, some would say, a reasonable question. We live in an age of majors, metrics and the constant specter of employability. The choice of what to study has become increasingly entangled with the question of what kind of economic life that study will produce.
Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce found that, over the past 15 years, students have increasingly gravitated toward fields associated with higher-paying jobs, with degrees in computers, statistics and mathematics and health care more than doubling between 2009 and 2023.
But even that calculation is becoming harder to make with confidence. In a 2026 Gallup survey, 42 percent of bachelor's students said artificial intelligence had prompted them to think about changing their major, while 16 percent of currently enrolled students said they already changed their field of study because of AI's potential impact.
We are encouraged to choose fields that lead somewhere according to the logics of late-stage capitalism. Increasingly, however, the question is whether we know where that “somewhere” is going to be.
In such an environment, people studying any topic in the humanities — literature or history, philosophy or classics — are often asked to justify themselves by pointing toward a job title.
So, it begs the question, what do you do when you study religion?
