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Ross Finnie knows what many students think of a liberal arts education: It won’t pay off.

“You won’t get a job, or you’ll be stuck in a low-wage job — the whole barista thing,” says Finnie, director of the Education Policy Research Initiative at the University of Ottawa.

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Universities Canada, which represents the country’s 97 universities, is all too aware of the “misperception” that the economic return from a liberal arts education is substandard.

“Students and parents have been questioning the value of pursuing a degree in that field rather than pursuing science, technology, engineering or math,” acknowledges UC’s president, Paul Davidson. As a result, enrolment in the humanities and social sciences has been falling — at some universities by as much as 30 per cent.

That’s why Finnie’s research is so interesting, Davidson says. It tracked the average annual earnings of 82,000 people who received undergraduate degrees from University of Ottawa students between 1998 and 2010.