Where do History graduates go on to work?
The University of St Andrews maintains a database of information about its graduates, managed by the Development Unit. As well as the names, education details and, where allowed, contact details of alumni, it sometimes also contains information about their job titles and business sectors. When we discovered this, we couldn’t help but wonder: what might this database reveal about the careers of women historians after graduation?
As well as providing a wider context for the individual alumnae profiles elsewhere on this site, it’s an interesting question for the School of History. At open days, prospective students sometimes ask whether a History degree leads to anything other than school-teaching or a low-paid job in the heritage sector, and we try to explain that historians go on to do all sorts of things: we have a Powerpoint slide mentioning law, journalism, finance and management as fields that some recent graduates have gone into.
For the bigger picture, the main source we have is the Graduate Outcomes survey, which asks alumni what they are doing 15 months after graduation. It’s reassuring to see that about 95% are either in employment or doing further study – but it’s also a bit early to be sure that everyone has yet found their niche. Many graduates have a non-linear career journey, and move between sectors and industries. It would be really interesting to see equivalent data from 10 years or 20 years after graduation, but nobody seems to gather this routinely… which is why the Development database sounded so promising.
When we asked, we discovered that there are records for just over 7,000 women who studied some variant of ‘history’, at some level, since 1925 (though the vast majority, over 6,500 of them, had graduated after 1970). We then realised that around 3,000 of these women had actually studied art history, ecclesiastical history, ancient history or some other subject that had ‘history’ in its title but is associated with a different School. That still left us with around 4,000 women History graduates.
Next, we discovered that (surprise, surprise!) not everyone keeps in touch with the University. Some people do write in with updated contact information, or, nowadays, use the University’s ‘review and update’ portal. But for many individuals, the University holds only the information gathered at graduation. It turned out that there were in fact just over 1,200 women History graduates who had job-related information associated with their record.
The (redacted) information that was shared with us by the Alumni Relations team included fields for ‘business name’, ‘business position’ (i.e. job description) and ‘business industry’, as well as geographical location. As we tried to make sense of the data, we found ourselves again and again coming up against its limitations. Admittedly, this happens with historical research all the time: the data you really want may not exist (or have survived), so you have to work with what you’ve got. In this case, this is not a dataset carefully constructed to answer sociological research questions: it is a working tool that enables the Alumni Relations team to keep in touch with alumni, organise reunions, and hopefully encourage alumni to help the University in some way, if they can. (Money is only one form of support: many alumni help by offering mentoring and careers advice to current students, or by using their professional expertise or networks to help the University.)
A key limitation for our purposes is that the job-related information represents only the situation at the most recent moment of contact with the alumna: that might have been last month, but it could equally be a decade or more ago. The job listed may be the first job after graduation, or the pinnacle of a decades-long career. We don’t know what other jobs may have preceded it (and we know from the profiles elsewhere on this site that it’s quite common to change not just jobs but sectors, e.g. from financial services to librarian, from defence consultant to charity trustee). Quite a few of the alumnae are now listed as ‘retired’ without any indication of their previous occupations.
We have focused here on ‘business sector’ and geographical location. (The information listed under ‘business name’ and ‘business position’ was just too varied and inconsistent for easy analysis.)
Chart 1 shows the sheer variety of ‘business sectors’ (i.e. occupations, professions or industries) that women History graduates work in. It is true that ‘Education’ and ‘Higher Education’ are two of the biggest groupings, but it is clearly not the case that teaching is the only option for history graduates.
‘Financial services’ turns out to be the next most popular sector, followed by ‘Publishing, media and the performing arts’, and then by ‘Libraries, galleries and museums’ (which presumably includes many of those working in the heritage sector, though some of them might be in the travel and tourism sector).
It’s very clear that historians go into all sorts of professions: there is obviously no single predictable career route associated with the degree, and History graduates find ways to apply their skills in a wide range of different sectors, from politics and diplomacy to fashion, farming and the armed forces.
We used the insights from this chart to help us select some individuals to interview for our website, showcasing the full range of professions that our graduates have gone into. In a qualitative interview, it was possible to ask about career trajectories, and to get a far more personal perspective on the ways in which History alumnae have used their degree skills in the world of work. You can read these interviews in our ‘Beyond the University’ section.
We also looked at the geographical data (remembering that, like the job descriptions, this only tells us about the location at the last-known point of contact; it may or may not be an indicator of where an individual currently lives or works).
Over 900 of the women in our sample (i.e. two-thirds) have UK addresses. There are just over 160 in north America, and 44 listed in various European countries. And, as Chart 2 shows, there are St Andrews history alumnae in China, Japan, the Gulf States and Australia – but apparently none in south America and only two in Africa.
What we do not know is the extent to which these patterns reflect the internationalism of the St Andrews student body, especially from the 1970s on – were these alumnae simply returning to their country of origin? Or do they represent graduates deciding to move to a new country?
As historians, it is worth noting that the patterns shown here differ from those seen among St Andrews alumni in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as investigated by the University’s ‘Legacies of Empire’ project. In that period, only 16% of St Andrews alumni (then all male) are known to have lived or worked overseas; few of them had been born overseas; and almost all of them worked in regions that were either part of the formal British empire, or within the British sphere of influence. The modern predominance of the USA is quite different from the pattern 150 years ago, and presumably reflects the increased number of US students attending St Andrews – but it may also reflect the attractiveness of the US job market.
The presence of alumnae in various European countries is presumably a consequence of the decades in which free movement for students and workers was easy, when Britain was a member of the EU.
Overall, we feel that it is the business sector information that has been most striking. Staff in the School of History routinely tell prospective students at open days that doing a history degree can lead to all sorts of different careers, not just teaching or the heritage sector – but we sometimes feel that we are not believed… Chart 1 is clear proof that history graduates can do – and have done – all sorts of things!
This article was written by Aileen Fyfe and Mrunmayi Kamerkar in July 2026; Mrunmayi was then a third-year student of International Relations and Modern History. Data was kindly provided (and explained!) by Lauren Baillie of the Alumni Relations team, and visualised by Mrunmayi Kamerkar.