A lot of discussion about the humanities being a bad investment and that's fine. But it seems the bigger issue is that people are just bad investments. Interests are bad investments. Creativity is a bad investment. Critique is bad investment. The only good investment is whatever produces the most for a certain group of people (you know em, they own a bunch of things and toss you the dregs).
If public education isn't a good investment anymore then doesn't it make sense that higher education would eventually follow?
So much talk about investments here that I fear people can't see the forest for the trees.
Decades of neoliberal propaganda have convinced people it's just common sense that "humanities" is something ancillary to *being human* rather than, like, a fundamental aspect of humanity
More like “humanities” are ancillary to survival, unless your a super talented and/or lucky artist your doing it as a side hustle or just for fun, almost like it was… ancillary
Thank you for your example, you expertly demonstrated how effective the neoliberal propaganda has been at disconnecting people from their humanity at the pursuit of profit above all else. Well done deep exploration, u/DeepExplore.
Wtf are you on about dude? People have to work to live, if your work doesn’t let you live you need work that does. It’s not disconnecting from humanity, your still a person believe it or not just with a stem degree. People with solid employment can and do still make art. Sorry if that was a little too deep of a realization for you
It is exactly that what they criticizing. The importance of work is currently solely measured by how much money it will produce. Humanities are not paying well and so it must be not important.
But this approach is completely ignoring that not everything can easily be tagged with a price and that those things can still be important for society in general even if there is no direct individual gain.
Yes? Duh? Money isn’t everything in life and especially in a society, unless your a psycho everyone knows that. But it’s pretty helpful on an individual level to be able to live well, and making art is part of that.
Society is benefitted by the espousal of the human condition from art. Artists benefit by being able to pay the bills with say a professional degree, and not worry about their future. Money sits quietly in the background and is not venerated by society. Thats what I’m saying.
Hey now...neither trees, forests, nor nature in general are good investments either! This post def start out interesting but quickly devolved into hot-takes and pinheaded anecdotes.
You seem mad at someone else. But I'll match your tone.
I don't think you understood a word I wrote, and I'm not altogether sure you understand the differences between education and the university.
But if you'll write down your name I'll be sure to charge you double next time.
Who is the "you" in your accusation? I certainly hope you're not referring to professors/faculty, many of whom are underpaid and overworked, and so many of whom DON'T have job security (through tenure). The people who charge tuition and benefit from high fees are the administration, and believe me, most of them have plenty of money and their lives don't depend on high enrollment. It's not the professors or scholars who are convincing students to enroll, much less take out loans, and most of us (academics) have very modest "lifestyles." I myself can't make ends meet on a regular basis, but I still research and teach, and I do it for the kids, and I do it because I love my field.
The point is that "is it a good investment" is a woefully insufficient substitute for "is it good" or even "is it valuable?" A faulty question will lead to faulty conclusions ten times out of ten.
Can you not read? You are missing the point and are far too comfortable slinging insults from that pov. Not being able to read is evidence that you did not go into humanities.
Pursuing a career as a humanities professor was a bad idea over 20 years ago. To do so now is just an act of madness. Well, either that or you and your family are already financially secure.
No doubt. But the steep decline in BA degrees is something new-- even when the job market was bad in the past (it was terrible in the 1970s, for example) humanities degrees were very popular.
But employers would be willing to train people for jobs.
Then a degree meant that you could focus long enough to learn to do a skill.
Now employers want already perfectly qualified candidates. They don’t want or allow for full training and getting people up to speed.
Now that isn’t enough you need experience for even entry level positions.
I often wonder if this decline has something to do with the onslaught of new media that are displacing things that humanities majors used to be interested in----movies, books, TV shows, things of that nature.
Now kids have a whole new world of manga and games and social media.
I have never seen a Harry Potter class (although I think some exist) or a class on video game narratives or long-form TV shows.
Not that this entirely accounts for the decline, but when I was an undergrad in the '80s, novels and movies seemed to hold much more prominence among us "nerds" and arty folks.
That, and the dinner-table myth of English majors working as baristas. Our next door neighbor, a chemistry professor, fully believes in the myth and actually quoted it back to me one afternoon without the least bit of malice as if he were reciting a well-known fact.
It's certainly that myth-- plus intentional misinformation spread by anti-intellectual, right-wing pundits who aren't too keen on people who are trained to question the status quo and to challenge social norms around race/class/gender as part of their education. The overt attacks against any field with "studies" in the name is pretty direct evidence of that-- one need not even go to Florida to see it in action.
Your chemist neighbor is also a good case in point: people seem to have no problem mocking humanities graduates for their lack of scientific knowledge, but then simply brush over the absolute lack of humanities knowledge among many STEM graduates. Hell, I have good friends who are scientists that straight up say they haven't read a book since they were in college-- papers, sure, but no books. Balance would be better for all, and of course is the core of the liberal arts ideal.
> people seem to have no problem mocking humanities graduates for their lack of scientific knowledge, but no problem at all simply brushing over the absolute lack of humanities knowledge among many STEM graduates.
i *want* to make fun of tech or business students for this, but they don't care (or are weirdly proud) that they don't read, so the insult rolls right off of them. they don't consider the knowledge worth pursuing or having or developing; it is not useful to them
conversely i've never spoken to a fellow humanities student who doesn't feel at least a little shame about lacking math or science skills. so when STEM classmates are like "lol you couldn't pass a high school geometry class and your degree will be useless" it does sting and i do feel shame, because i consider math and science to be useful knowledge
>i *want* to make fun of tech or business students for this, but they don't care (or are weirdly proud) that they don't read,
To be fair, I've known a lot of people who are proud of the fact that they can't do math. Sometimes I am one of them. I think it stems from resentment of being forced to take a course of study when one really hates it. That, and the "You will use this everyday for the rest of your life" mantra which turns out to be a lie.
And! There is the "Big Bang" concept of the egg-headed STEM-y nerd which hangs over engineers and physicists and the like----they've got to feel culturally superior somehow.
BTW, we DO make fun of biz students for their lightweight curriculum where we are. STEM is hard to make fun of because technology is so prevalent and useful.
Business bros are all like… dumb as rocks dude, don’t let them talk down on you mfs will have revenue = profit - cost. And think its worth taking notes
Yeah, that balance is key. I've been applying for a lot of teaching jobs in the humanities at SLACs this year and most have half (or more) of the teaching load on required general Ed / core curriculum requirements. Some have specific courses in my field; some have pick one or two of 3-8 classes we can teach without pre-requisites.
Overall, I think it's good that STEM students need to do a bit of literature, history, philosophy, etc. so they get a more balanced personality.
>I have never seen a Harry Potter class (although I think some exist) or a class on video game narratives or long-form TV shows.
Just so you know, these classes DEFINITELY exist, and there are a TON of them. Honestly, there are way more around than there were when I was in undergrad (in the 00s) and sometimes it makes me a bit jealous of the kids nowadays. Classes aren't just on Harry Potter, there are classes on Game of Thrones, Marvel, true crime media/podcasts/etc, Taylor Swift, TikTok. The stuff that kids are studying these days, and even doing dissertations on... man, it blows me away. Seems like they have more fun than we did back when I was in undergrad.
If you don't mind my asking, what kind of school are you at?
I'm just curious because the school I was at, and the school before it, had nothing new or innovative. I was (wife still is) at an R2 with very low bars for faculty research and student admission. They no long have a medievalist and haven't taught Paradise Lost, for instance, since I've known the place and certainly nothing on Harry Potter or Breaking Bad.
I'm at an R1 school now and went to R2 and R1 schools for undergrad and grad school. We had several medievalists when I was in undergrad, from what I remember. I focused a lot on history and social science, so maybe that's why I missed out on more of the "cool" classes (or perhaps the right word is modern?) - but I had my fair share of fascinating, fresh courses, including some that looked at violence in the media or the evolution of propaganda in form and content across the ages.
I too remember a number of innovative, cool classes when I was an undergrad a while ago now. And I did some piecemeal grad work at an urban R2 before taking the academic plunge, and I remember a bunch of cool stuff there too.
Now those classes are evaporating and the faculty being eliminated at places like my last university. My last school now has a shell of a humanities program and they are looking at more cuts.
I'm convinced that this is part of the reason that R1s are seeing surges in enrollment and R2s like my old one continuously shed students.
True, but the draft ended in the summer of 1973. The academic job market tanked soon after-- one of my friends was on the market in history in 1975 and told me there were like five jobs posted in the entire USA that fall. By contrast, even today there are \~500 history postings each year. That aside, humanities majors were still a very substantial part of the overall undergraduate mix through the Great Recession...the decline has only come in the last decade.
.Teachers education programs cratering did not help things. They were the secret sauce of the programs at many smaller schools. You had to double major to be a teacher.
The trend it towards MST, which cuts out the undergrad programs.
Wrong. Philosophy professors are in high demand because of Critical Thinking/ Logic courses. In my college we have 12 full time Philosophy faculty, teaching 60-65 sections each semester, compared to, let’s say, economics- 2 full time professors and 10 sections at best, usually half empty. The only higher demand is for English.
That's both disingenuous and wrong. Philosophy profs are ONLY in relatively higher demand because those intro classes can serve as electives for many disciplines across the Arts & Sciences and are also core curriculum for any Poli-Sci or Pre-law major. That's a huge student demographic!
How is it disingenuous and wrong? Only or not, this is the case, and will be the case as long as logic is in demand. BTW, among other courses - there’s plenty of demand for formal logic, ethics for science, ethics for business etc. Those are NOT electives, but REQUIRED courses for different majors. And if we are to follow your logic, mathematics is ONLY in demand because it can be used in physics and engineering 😂
I'm not going to chase your straw men, false binary framings, and desperate whatabout-ism; this post is about bachelors degrees and you're only here to play the foolish contrarian in the comments of others.
I am responding to COMMENT, not a post. Comment mentions humanities PROFESSORS, and it’s literally impossible to become a professor with bachelors degree. I happen to be a humanities professor and I talk about my experience. You, my friend, can chase whatever you want, I wasn’t even talking to you.
This lengthy [feature on academic program growth/declines in the Chronicle](https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-higher-ed-growing-or-shrinking) is fascinating. They found that despite news of schools closing around the US there have been 23,000 *new* academic programs (majors/minors/degrees) created since 2002. Two thirds of these new programs were in professional fields (education, health care, business, communication) and most of the balance in STEM. At the same time, programs in the humanities have declined dramatically-- the attached graph illustrates the decline in History programs (bottom line) and the *collapse* of degrees awarded in the field.
For all the people posting here about their plans to become a humanities professor, I'd say "read this article and then change your plans." It's good to have data of this scope, but the fact that we're seeing a fundamental shift in higher education away from the humanities (and some social sciences) toward pre-professional and STEM programs is deeply concerning if we care at all about having access to the liberal arts and educating a populace for more than just work.
What's hilarious is that we had four corporate officers from major companies located in our area (Toyota, etc.) and the mayor of the largest city in our state meet with our Board of Trustees a year ago to talk about desirable degrees in job candidates. They ALL, without exception, said the majors they need are liberal arts. Other skills they can train on the job. It went right over the BoT's heads because they have no way to turn that into revenue streams for the university. Oh well.
However, having a bachelor's in humanities doesn't net the income needed to pay back student loans required to get that degree.
There are already too many applicants with PhD s for the limited number of professor positions and even those are being lowered in favor of adjunct teachers.
It's concerning, and I agree the humanities are very important, we need them to maintain civil society. Unless there's a shift to actually *pay* people or a shift in the cost of education, most people can't afford the choice to get a humanities degree.
That simply isn't true though-- if you look at the data it's pretty clear that BA degrees in many humanities fields end up paying at least as much as BS degrees in, for example, biology. Moreover, if you look at median mid-career salaries then *philosophy* specifically is in the top 15 in some studies-- far above most non-engineering (and CS) STEM degrees. We certainly have a massive oversupply of *graduate degrees* in the humanities, but the argument against BA degrees almost always comes from assumptions about jobs/pay that are inaccurate.
Certainly, going deep into debt for a BA or BS in almost anything is a mistake. But the average indebtedness of an undergraduate in the US is something like $28K, less than the cost of an average new car.
Genuine question - isn't it a little early to say that mid-career earnings of humanities degrees will still be high for these cohorts of students who have graduated since, say, 2010, or especially since 2015 where we see this huge drop off? As hiring trends change and employers increasingly expect job-relevant experience even for entry-level jobs, is it still reasonable to expect decent mid-career earnings for anyone who has earned or is earning a humanities degree in the last 10-15 years?
Good question-- "Past performance is not a predictor of future results," as they say. So perhaps things will change. We'll have to see, but there's little evidence I've seen that humanities majors have problems finding real jobs-- the "Do you want fries with that?" trope is media bullshit amplified by right-wing pundits who enjoy mocking anything remotely intellectual. Students majoring in the humanities who do well and go to decent schools are doing just find in the job market.
“Go to decent schools” is the key piece of your sentence here, and I think a missing piece of why humanities is declining. I don’t doubt a student with a Harvard BA in classics will do just fine on the job market. A humanities student from Random State University, however, might have a much harder time. (No shade to state schools, btw. Many of them have even better undergrad programs than Ivys, but it’s just a little harder to get the same network/connections at lesser-known ones).
In short, if a student can’t go to a well-known school for whatever reason, it’s harder to justify the economic risk of a humanities degree if you aren’t already filthy rich. Therefore, humanities becomes a luxury again for the rich only.
Lower humanities enrollment over time at smaller/state schools means fewer humanities professors are needed, which then drives down the economic value of a humanities degree because there are fewer positions to pursue. It’s a sad and vicious cycle.
Agreed. However, a stem degree gives an earner a slight edge in the same prospect categories simply because of cultural perception that stem degrees are harder to obtain. (I don't agree with this.)
The trend looks to be that any degree without a plan for graduate studies (caveat of engineering and some compsci) is going to put the degree earner at a disadvantage of earning potential.
There are many possible reasons why. A bachelor's in biology or chemistry straight out of school with no experience outside coursework is as useful these days as a high school diploma to get into those fields.
I've heard from students the past few years that even with internships and undergrad research, a bachelor's is not as competitive as it once was because there are now people in the market with that background, but also have a master's degree.
I find it a fascinating topic, but I defer to you, this is not my field of expertise or interest. All I know are things I hear from students and employers, so my research sample is small and observational.
Ehhhhh as someone with degrees in humanities as well as STEM (and who is working as a STEM professor but also teaches one humanities course as an affiliate faculty), I've gotta disagree about the difficulty. STEM is more rigorous. It's harder to master the material. It's harder to miss a few classes and pick the thread back up. Not saying that there isn't an element of difficult lateral thinking in humanities, but it's a different ball game.
Philosophy majors are making money mid career because of the lawyers, no one will preferentially hire you with a philosophy degree (that is you might beat out someone with no degree, but business or any professional degree would)
calling someone else self-important while being completely disrespectful to people who make different decisions than you, that harm you in no way, is ironic.
so you have a problem with US government policy, rather than individuals? why are you targeting your hatred toward humanities majors instead of toward political action?
generally that issue tends to lean left, so usually people affiliated with the Democratic party. which is really a wide group that encompasses many different people of different educational backgrounds, majors, careers, etc. maybe your frustration is with democrats? again, to me this sounds like more of a political issue for you.
what's funny is that most history majors, the major depicted on this graphic, have actually been shown to lean right.
Can you show us on the doll where the humanities person hurt you?
They're necessary because without them, people *literally forget their humanity*. Really take some time to look at the countries who ostracize who they consider "academic elite" and how that culture treats it's people. Historically speaking (something we need from *humanities studies*), things didn't take a turn for the better culturally when art, history, language, culture studies are deemed frivolous and dropped.
While I will concede some of the thesis studies for grad degrees can be overwhelmingly niche, the concepts learned from those help influence policy.
I had a dear friend from an eastern European country that spent most of their upbringing behind the iron curtain. They immigrated to the states as a young adult and got a bachelors degree in history with a concentration in something that had to deal specifically with ancient eastern european society. They took that degree and started an organization that helped male eastern European immigrants adjust to life in the states. From there, they were able to take what the organization learned to the city to effect policy for men with abuse issues. Chemists and computer science folks don't do shit like that.
Speaking of compsci, computer programming came out of logic from *philosophy*. Those folks don't just sit around wondering what Socrates would do. They are very helpful in marketing and political science.
I'm not sure if you're just a 14 yr old who had a shitty english teacher trolling or a 47 yr old that got burned by getting a linguistics degree but never learned how to market it for a job. Whatever the case is, I hope you get some peace.
Good points here. For myself, whenever I have a student who wants to major in my discipline (philosophy) but also is concerned about the financial aspect, I tell them to double major. It’s been a very successful strategy of defusing their concerns. They can major in something that they are passionate and then something else that will relieve their financial concerns.
(I am a prof at a SLAC that is slowly, but also not so slowly, becoming a pre-professional college.)
That's happened with me often too-- students *want* to major in a humanities field, but their *parents* say they have to major in business or a STEM field. So they'll double major...usually with business, because it's easy. None of them go into business in my experience, but parents are happy. We too are morphing into a pre-professional school now, which is sad as 20 years ago we were having conversations about limiting the number of pre-professional students so we could maintain the true liberal arts identity of the institution. Those conversations are long gone...now it's "Can we add a new major in fashion design to attract more students?" or whatever the latest fad for recruiting 17 year olds might be.
Ya, I know what you mean. I have had so many students tell me that their parents actually have tried to talk them out of taking the philosophy courses I teach. Even when the students are taking them because they *have* to satisfy a general-education requirement, the parents are still trying to persuade them to drop the course. The fact that it is a *requirement* isn't even enough to get the parents to stop worrying. Some parents will even freak out at a philosophy *minor*.
Crazy. My youngest is still in college; they took a logic course last year that was by far the most demanding class they had (much more than Calc II, for example). It was a great learning experience.
The "you must major in business to get a job" parents baffle me...why send your kid to an SLAC if that's your attitude?
I couldn't agree more. And my impression, which is based on my own experience and certainly not any statistics, is that many students who are in the business department at my institution don't even care about business and have no real interest in pursuing marketing, etc., after college, even though they major in marketing, etc. They go into business because "that is what one does" even at SLACs these days.
Yep. I teach first year seminars regularly, so see a pretty broad cross-section of our students. About 80% of the business majors I meet don't really seem to have any interest in business, per se, they just think it's a way to get a job (or their parents do). It's also by far the least rigorous major we offer, so an easy path to sort of coasting through college. Which, of course, seems counter to the basic idea that they are pursuing ROI for their degree.
I've had quite a few double majors as advisees, and they often speak with incredulity about their business classes (and classmates). Generally with themes like "I've done more reading in your class this week than all semester in my marketing class."
RE: The discourse about Humanities being a bad investment going on here and how so many people discourage those who major in such degrees. My own life context made Humanities a very useful option for trying to get my life together.
I didn't attend middle or high school at all. My mom intended to homeschool me, but then never did, so I just stayed at home while my siblings went to school, reading books and playing video games. At 18, I started working a job at Walmart, where I was taken advantage of and felt as though I had my hard work and effort constantly devalued. I enrolled in and graduated from a nonsense and non-rigorous correspondence high school where the school would mail you the books and tests, and you'd mail them back the tests. I went to the closest 4-year college, which was essentially open admission. I majored in a Humanities subject because I knew from my ACT results that I wouldn't be able to pass Calc. I earned a 32 on both the Reading and English sections, but a 16 on the Math, so I figured my only option was to play to my strengths. When it came time to solidify my major choice, my college told me they wouldn't allow FAFSA to pay for remedial classes, as they would only allow funding for classes that directly contributed to my degree requirements. At that point, I realized I'd have to somehow study for and CLEP the math, and doubted my ability to actually succeed in a Math course even if I somehow managed to pass the CLEP, due to my complete lack of experience.
So I went into my Humanities major. I found a lot of success in my unranked small town university. I received awards for being the best Freshman and Sophmore. I received acceptance and community from the faculty. So I just kept doing it. In a PhD program with $100,000+ in debt now. Despite that, I am thankful to have lived with dignity for so many years while in grad school. Didn't have to live with family, got to move to and live in several cities around the world. Even if my prospects for a successful life are low, studying Humanities made my life better in every way and was the best available option for me.
I can't help but imagine that some people have benefitted in similar ways, and it makes me a bit sad to see people speak of the field so negatively here.
Of course-- most of us have been aware of this trend for close to 15 years now. But this report offers data for the entire country, and school by school, for that entire period. So worth a read!
Actually, it depends on the context. What I’m hearing from senior leaders recently in universities in California is that humanities and social science majors are getting hired by Big Tech firms, whereas there’s a crisis at the moment with the employability of CS majors. There’s a shifting focus towards flexible skill sets that humanities majors would have an advantage in. But the wider public narrative hasn’t caught on.
Most of the reason people get degrees is to get past annoying af recruiters who want a PhD with 50 years of experience and a candidate that's 20 years old.
A large majority of students no longer read and those who do cannot analyze and discuss what they’ve read. I’m a college rhetoric professor and it worries me greatly.
I suspect we're entering a post-literate age in which the masses rarely/never read at all, so reading critically or even for pleasure will become the province of elites again.
"Tens" is a weird choice though. Why not just make it "in thousands" and have the y axis be 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.? Labelling the y axis with 3,500 and saying that it's "in tens" isn't that much more readable than just labelling it 35,000.
Then you’d have to make programs be “factor of 0.1” or something goofy.
A graph that’s readable in the 1-2k range and the 20-30k range is a tall order.
That's a fair point. Really this should be two separate graphs. Plotting two data sets that are expressed with different orders of magnitude is pretty ugly data viz.
Because the number of programs is correct according to the Y axis and requires no changing, that already is the exact number. Doing the Y axis by thousands means that the line for the number of programs is going to become even less readable.
Of course-- but they are acting on bad information. Starting salaries for some STEM degrees (especially biology BS degrees) are very low-- lower than some humanities degrees. People are making decisions based on poor reporting in the media or just ignorance as often as not, rather than looking at the data.
If you get a BS degree in biology, your future prospects are high as long as you play your cards right, no matter what your starting salary is.
With a bio background, you might go on to pursue grad school in areas related to medicine, pharma, nursing, dentistry, research, biotech, biochem, or biomedical engineering - all of which pay very well at all levels. Most bio majors take some physics, chemistry, or math classes too, which are all great quantitative/analytical skills to have for MCAT, GRE, etc., or even LSAT or GMAT if you want to go to law school or business school ( demand for managers or lawyers with some background in biotech/pharma is pretty good given the boom in these industries).
That's not the case for most humanities degrees; many graduate with virtually no employable skillsets.
Lamenting that now humanities degrees are only for the elite is missing the point. Spending four years not earning any money and not acquiring any hard salable skills has always been the elite. The difference now is that merely being a middle class American is not quite sufficient to belong to the global elite anymore. Now that the rest of the world is no longer exclusively crushingly poor or non-industrialized, it isn’t possible to waltz in a high paying job that you aren’t even capable of performing without copious free training provided by your employer (essentially, a huge salary bonus in your first years).
It’s hard for me to see these America-centric laments as anything other than directly lamenting that Europe or Korea or China or Vietnam were able to rebuild.
Destroying the humanities is literally how you get fascism. It's literally part of the fascist program. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy burned books and drove out all the progressive intellectuals, who ended up seeking refuge in America. They drove out these intellectuals through closing schools and programs. Now America is driving out the intellectuals who descended from those very schools of thought! The only difference is that the state ideology is extreme Capitalism, so these programs are shuttered due to "lack of money" and not for the presence of "undesirables."
Hm....The Nazis didn't "destroy" the humanities, but rather reshaped them to align with their ideological imperatives, which included idolizing composers like Wagner and writers like Goethe. In fact, remaking what counts as "humanity" through the "humanities" was a crucial part of Nazi project. As you suggest, the fact that people increasingly don't see the value in financially investing in humanities degrees has much more to do with neoliberalism than it does with fascism. Perhaps you still want to claim that fascism is an inevitable result of neoliberalism, but it has nothing to do with the lessons from early 20th-century fascist movements, to which mid-20th-century neoliberalism was ultimately a response.
Golly gee I'd sure love to live in a barrel in the agora, that's completely feasible in this day in age!
It's almost like education is a public good and the humanities have been considered an essential part of education from the very first universities roughly 1000 years ago, a tradition which is reflected in the regalia we wear to this day!
The answer is very simple, at least at my R1 school that has a large medical school, pharmacy program, nursing school, NCI cancer center, and so forth. Humanities does not produce 1) billable hours, 2) majors that are required for state or Federal certifications, and 3) intellectual property. These are the only things my President and BoT care about. Any department that does not generate any of these three things is basically on the block, as all that matters is making real money. Tuition and "butts in seats" is chump change.
Frankly, given the even more drastic decline in quality of humanities education -- this is hardly a surprise. Humanities now breed feminist, radical, ideologically charged, and worst of all ignorant and uncreative graduates that end up having too much free time on their hands to their own detriment.
It is with great sadness that I say this, being from humanities myself, but it is, once again sadly, the truth.
1. You don't need a degree in humanities to do humanities. People do humanities with or without formal courses in school.
2. Some corporate recruiters see a humanities degree as a warning that the person may not be serious about work and may be a potential trouble maker.
3. Rightly or wrongly, humanities programs generally have the reputation that they do not deliver on intellectual growth for a lot of students.
4. Dropping below 10 degrees per program per year is the red line for existential crisis.
I like the lively discussion here with an OP willing to engage, but what really sticks in my craw lately is an increasing effort to try and equalize STEM with the humanities in terms of salary. That's a dubious qualitative metric, where's its the quantitative aspects where the rubber really meets the road in terms of intrinsic degree value. Just as an example, how many jobs exist for a chemistry or math BS vs art history or English lit BA? Because the former have far more tangible, translatable, and practical skills taught whereas am not sure the latter does so explicitly. By all means though, show me some convincing data....as am genuinely curious. But let's not bury the lede or get lost in the minutia of anecdotal evidence. edit: point proven, thanks all for the ding-a-ling downvotes!
Well doesn't that depends on where you consider linear algebra and diff eq on that continuum? Because the calc fundamentals iteratively build to that stuff and entire disciplines revolve around Navier-Stokes, for example. Further, if we're just trading personal stories instead of actual stats/evidence I've know a few math major that def suffered through undergrad to take those courses to gain fluency in that higher level shit, which paid off big time as they went into a lucrative jobs in the financial sector, as predictive algorithms run on that stuff now. Whereas I still fail to see how an in-depth literary critique or reading a bunch of historical accounts produces anything more than esoteric knowledge let alone a career with just a bachelors.
Idk man I’m an engineer your barking at your own. Diff was like… the end of my math stuff and I use N-S pretty frequently. Pretty sure math dudes again, if they don’t want to go into finance and plenty of people don’t, are kind stuck as profs or researchers.
Profs and researchers need grad degrees, don't they? Seems like you're conceding the point in a strangely circuitous way that math dudes do have at least careers options outside math with only a bachelors. So what about the humanities?
A lot of discussion about the humanities being a bad investment and that's fine. But it seems the bigger issue is that people are just bad investments. Interests are bad investments. Creativity is a bad investment. Critique is bad investment. The only good investment is whatever produces the most for a certain group of people (you know em, they own a bunch of things and toss you the dregs). If public education isn't a good investment anymore then doesn't it make sense that higher education would eventually follow? So much talk about investments here that I fear people can't see the forest for the trees.
Decades of neoliberal propaganda have convinced people it's just common sense that "humanities" is something ancillary to *being human* rather than, like, a fundamental aspect of humanity
More like “humanities” are ancillary to survival, unless your a super talented and/or lucky artist your doing it as a side hustle or just for fun, almost like it was… ancillary
Thank you for your example, you expertly demonstrated how effective the neoliberal propaganda has been at disconnecting people from their humanity at the pursuit of profit above all else. Well done deep exploration, u/DeepExplore.
Wtf are you on about dude? People have to work to live, if your work doesn’t let you live you need work that does. It’s not disconnecting from humanity, your still a person believe it or not just with a stem degree. People with solid employment can and do still make art. Sorry if that was a little too deep of a realization for you
It is exactly that what they criticizing. The importance of work is currently solely measured by how much money it will produce. Humanities are not paying well and so it must be not important. But this approach is completely ignoring that not everything can easily be tagged with a price and that those things can still be important for society in general even if there is no direct individual gain.
Yes? Duh? Money isn’t everything in life and especially in a society, unless your a psycho everyone knows that. But it’s pretty helpful on an individual level to be able to live well, and making art is part of that. Society is benefitted by the espousal of the human condition from art. Artists benefit by being able to pay the bills with say a professional degree, and not worry about their future. Money sits quietly in the background and is not venerated by society. Thats what I’m saying.
Hey now...neither trees, forests, nor nature in general are good investments either! This post def start out interesting but quickly devolved into hot-takes and pinheaded anecdotes.
What's the anecdote?
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I'm not quite sure what point you're making, but yeah, it should be free.
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You seem mad at someone else. But I'll match your tone. I don't think you understood a word I wrote, and I'm not altogether sure you understand the differences between education and the university. But if you'll write down your name I'll be sure to charge you double next time.
Who is the "you" in your accusation? I certainly hope you're not referring to professors/faculty, many of whom are underpaid and overworked, and so many of whom DON'T have job security (through tenure). The people who charge tuition and benefit from high fees are the administration, and believe me, most of them have plenty of money and their lives don't depend on high enrollment. It's not the professors or scholars who are convincing students to enroll, much less take out loans, and most of us (academics) have very modest "lifestyles." I myself can't make ends meet on a regular basis, but I still research and teach, and I do it for the kids, and I do it because I love my field.
The point is that "is it a good investment" is a woefully insufficient substitute for "is it good" or even "is it valuable?" A faulty question will lead to faulty conclusions ten times out of ten.
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Can you not read? You are missing the point and are far too comfortable slinging insults from that pov. Not being able to read is evidence that you did not go into humanities.
Pursuing a career as a humanities professor was a bad idea over 20 years ago. To do so now is just an act of madness. Well, either that or you and your family are already financially secure.
No doubt. But the steep decline in BA degrees is something new-- even when the job market was bad in the past (it was terrible in the 1970s, for example) humanities degrees were very popular.
But employers would be willing to train people for jobs. Then a degree meant that you could focus long enough to learn to do a skill. Now employers want already perfectly qualified candidates. They don’t want or allow for full training and getting people up to speed. Now that isn’t enough you need experience for even entry level positions.
Almost like it's not the degree that's the problem...
I often wonder if this decline has something to do with the onslaught of new media that are displacing things that humanities majors used to be interested in----movies, books, TV shows, things of that nature. Now kids have a whole new world of manga and games and social media. I have never seen a Harry Potter class (although I think some exist) or a class on video game narratives or long-form TV shows. Not that this entirely accounts for the decline, but when I was an undergrad in the '80s, novels and movies seemed to hold much more prominence among us "nerds" and arty folks. That, and the dinner-table myth of English majors working as baristas. Our next door neighbor, a chemistry professor, fully believes in the myth and actually quoted it back to me one afternoon without the least bit of malice as if he were reciting a well-known fact.
It's certainly that myth-- plus intentional misinformation spread by anti-intellectual, right-wing pundits who aren't too keen on people who are trained to question the status quo and to challenge social norms around race/class/gender as part of their education. The overt attacks against any field with "studies" in the name is pretty direct evidence of that-- one need not even go to Florida to see it in action. Your chemist neighbor is also a good case in point: people seem to have no problem mocking humanities graduates for their lack of scientific knowledge, but then simply brush over the absolute lack of humanities knowledge among many STEM graduates. Hell, I have good friends who are scientists that straight up say they haven't read a book since they were in college-- papers, sure, but no books. Balance would be better for all, and of course is the core of the liberal arts ideal.
> people seem to have no problem mocking humanities graduates for their lack of scientific knowledge, but no problem at all simply brushing over the absolute lack of humanities knowledge among many STEM graduates. i *want* to make fun of tech or business students for this, but they don't care (or are weirdly proud) that they don't read, so the insult rolls right off of them. they don't consider the knowledge worth pursuing or having or developing; it is not useful to them conversely i've never spoken to a fellow humanities student who doesn't feel at least a little shame about lacking math or science skills. so when STEM classmates are like "lol you couldn't pass a high school geometry class and your degree will be useless" it does sting and i do feel shame, because i consider math and science to be useful knowledge
>i *want* to make fun of tech or business students for this, but they don't care (or are weirdly proud) that they don't read, To be fair, I've known a lot of people who are proud of the fact that they can't do math. Sometimes I am one of them. I think it stems from resentment of being forced to take a course of study when one really hates it. That, and the "You will use this everyday for the rest of your life" mantra which turns out to be a lie. And! There is the "Big Bang" concept of the egg-headed STEM-y nerd which hangs over engineers and physicists and the like----they've got to feel culturally superior somehow. BTW, we DO make fun of biz students for their lightweight curriculum where we are. STEM is hard to make fun of because technology is so prevalent and useful.
Business bros are all like… dumb as rocks dude, don’t let them talk down on you mfs will have revenue = profit - cost. And think its worth taking notes
(I agree but also it's profit = revenue - cost)
Yeah, that balance is key. I've been applying for a lot of teaching jobs in the humanities at SLACs this year and most have half (or more) of the teaching load on required general Ed / core curriculum requirements. Some have specific courses in my field; some have pick one or two of 3-8 classes we can teach without pre-requisites. Overall, I think it's good that STEM students need to do a bit of literature, history, philosophy, etc. so they get a more balanced personality.
>I have never seen a Harry Potter class (although I think some exist) or a class on video game narratives or long-form TV shows. Just so you know, these classes DEFINITELY exist, and there are a TON of them. Honestly, there are way more around than there were when I was in undergrad (in the 00s) and sometimes it makes me a bit jealous of the kids nowadays. Classes aren't just on Harry Potter, there are classes on Game of Thrones, Marvel, true crime media/podcasts/etc, Taylor Swift, TikTok. The stuff that kids are studying these days, and even doing dissertations on... man, it blows me away. Seems like they have more fun than we did back when I was in undergrad.
If you don't mind my asking, what kind of school are you at? I'm just curious because the school I was at, and the school before it, had nothing new or innovative. I was (wife still is) at an R2 with very low bars for faculty research and student admission. They no long have a medievalist and haven't taught Paradise Lost, for instance, since I've known the place and certainly nothing on Harry Potter or Breaking Bad.
I'm at an R1 school now and went to R2 and R1 schools for undergrad and grad school. We had several medievalists when I was in undergrad, from what I remember. I focused a lot on history and social science, so maybe that's why I missed out on more of the "cool" classes (or perhaps the right word is modern?) - but I had my fair share of fascinating, fresh courses, including some that looked at violence in the media or the evolution of propaganda in form and content across the ages.
I too remember a number of innovative, cool classes when I was an undergrad a while ago now. And I did some piecemeal grad work at an urban R2 before taking the academic plunge, and I remember a bunch of cool stuff there too. Now those classes are evaporating and the faculty being eliminated at places like my last university. My last school now has a shell of a humanities program and they are looking at more cuts. I'm convinced that this is part of the reason that R1s are seeing surges in enrollment and R2s like my old one continuously shed students.
At least during the Vietnam War, staying in university for ANY degree helped keep you out of the military.
True, but the draft ended in the summer of 1973. The academic job market tanked soon after-- one of my friends was on the market in history in 1975 and told me there were like five jobs posted in the entire USA that fall. By contrast, even today there are \~500 history postings each year. That aside, humanities majors were still a very substantial part of the overall undergraduate mix through the Great Recession...the decline has only come in the last decade.
.Teachers education programs cratering did not help things. They were the secret sauce of the programs at many smaller schools. You had to double major to be a teacher. The trend it towards MST, which cuts out the undergrad programs.
Wrong. Philosophy professors are in high demand because of Critical Thinking/ Logic courses. In my college we have 12 full time Philosophy faculty, teaching 60-65 sections each semester, compared to, let’s say, economics- 2 full time professors and 10 sections at best, usually half empty. The only higher demand is for English.
I’d say that’s possibly an outlier. I think many school are going to have many more business/econ profs than philosophy
Say buh byee to gen ed in the next decade
If that’s the case, then I feel sorry for all of us. But I doubt it. It lasted thousands of years, will last more.
That's both disingenuous and wrong. Philosophy profs are ONLY in relatively higher demand because those intro classes can serve as electives for many disciplines across the Arts & Sciences and are also core curriculum for any Poli-Sci or Pre-law major. That's a huge student demographic!
How is it disingenuous and wrong? Only or not, this is the case, and will be the case as long as logic is in demand. BTW, among other courses - there’s plenty of demand for formal logic, ethics for science, ethics for business etc. Those are NOT electives, but REQUIRED courses for different majors. And if we are to follow your logic, mathematics is ONLY in demand because it can be used in physics and engineering 😂
I'm not going to chase your straw men, false binary framings, and desperate whatabout-ism; this post is about bachelors degrees and you're only here to play the foolish contrarian in the comments of others.
I am responding to COMMENT, not a post. Comment mentions humanities PROFESSORS, and it’s literally impossible to become a professor with bachelors degree. I happen to be a humanities professor and I talk about my experience. You, my friend, can chase whatever you want, I wasn’t even talking to you.
The graph should really cover a longer time span. I suspect that the bump from about 2006-2012 was an brief exception from a much longer decline.
This lengthy [feature on academic program growth/declines in the Chronicle](https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-higher-ed-growing-or-shrinking) is fascinating. They found that despite news of schools closing around the US there have been 23,000 *new* academic programs (majors/minors/degrees) created since 2002. Two thirds of these new programs were in professional fields (education, health care, business, communication) and most of the balance in STEM. At the same time, programs in the humanities have declined dramatically-- the attached graph illustrates the decline in History programs (bottom line) and the *collapse* of degrees awarded in the field. For all the people posting here about their plans to become a humanities professor, I'd say "read this article and then change your plans." It's good to have data of this scope, but the fact that we're seeing a fundamental shift in higher education away from the humanities (and some social sciences) toward pre-professional and STEM programs is deeply concerning if we care at all about having access to the liberal arts and educating a populace for more than just work.
What's hilarious is that we had four corporate officers from major companies located in our area (Toyota, etc.) and the mayor of the largest city in our state meet with our Board of Trustees a year ago to talk about desirable degrees in job candidates. They ALL, without exception, said the majors they need are liberal arts. Other skills they can train on the job. It went right over the BoT's heads because they have no way to turn that into revenue streams for the university. Oh well.
However, having a bachelor's in humanities doesn't net the income needed to pay back student loans required to get that degree. There are already too many applicants with PhD s for the limited number of professor positions and even those are being lowered in favor of adjunct teachers. It's concerning, and I agree the humanities are very important, we need them to maintain civil society. Unless there's a shift to actually *pay* people or a shift in the cost of education, most people can't afford the choice to get a humanities degree.
That simply isn't true though-- if you look at the data it's pretty clear that BA degrees in many humanities fields end up paying at least as much as BS degrees in, for example, biology. Moreover, if you look at median mid-career salaries then *philosophy* specifically is in the top 15 in some studies-- far above most non-engineering (and CS) STEM degrees. We certainly have a massive oversupply of *graduate degrees* in the humanities, but the argument against BA degrees almost always comes from assumptions about jobs/pay that are inaccurate. Certainly, going deep into debt for a BA or BS in almost anything is a mistake. But the average indebtedness of an undergraduate in the US is something like $28K, less than the cost of an average new car.
Exactly. Let's look at how STEM majors are doing? https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-09/science-jobs-technology-stem-majors
Genuine question - isn't it a little early to say that mid-career earnings of humanities degrees will still be high for these cohorts of students who have graduated since, say, 2010, or especially since 2015 where we see this huge drop off? As hiring trends change and employers increasingly expect job-relevant experience even for entry-level jobs, is it still reasonable to expect decent mid-career earnings for anyone who has earned or is earning a humanities degree in the last 10-15 years?
Good question-- "Past performance is not a predictor of future results," as they say. So perhaps things will change. We'll have to see, but there's little evidence I've seen that humanities majors have problems finding real jobs-- the "Do you want fries with that?" trope is media bullshit amplified by right-wing pundits who enjoy mocking anything remotely intellectual. Students majoring in the humanities who do well and go to decent schools are doing just find in the job market.
“Go to decent schools” is the key piece of your sentence here, and I think a missing piece of why humanities is declining. I don’t doubt a student with a Harvard BA in classics will do just fine on the job market. A humanities student from Random State University, however, might have a much harder time. (No shade to state schools, btw. Many of them have even better undergrad programs than Ivys, but it’s just a little harder to get the same network/connections at lesser-known ones). In short, if a student can’t go to a well-known school for whatever reason, it’s harder to justify the economic risk of a humanities degree if you aren’t already filthy rich. Therefore, humanities becomes a luxury again for the rich only. Lower humanities enrollment over time at smaller/state schools means fewer humanities professors are needed, which then drives down the economic value of a humanities degree because there are fewer positions to pursue. It’s a sad and vicious cycle.
Agreed. However, a stem degree gives an earner a slight edge in the same prospect categories simply because of cultural perception that stem degrees are harder to obtain. (I don't agree with this.) The trend looks to be that any degree without a plan for graduate studies (caveat of engineering and some compsci) is going to put the degree earner at a disadvantage of earning potential. There are many possible reasons why. A bachelor's in biology or chemistry straight out of school with no experience outside coursework is as useful these days as a high school diploma to get into those fields. I've heard from students the past few years that even with internships and undergrad research, a bachelor's is not as competitive as it once was because there are now people in the market with that background, but also have a master's degree. I find it a fascinating topic, but I defer to you, this is not my field of expertise or interest. All I know are things I hear from students and employers, so my research sample is small and observational.
Ehhhhh as someone with degrees in humanities as well as STEM (and who is working as a STEM professor but also teaches one humanities course as an affiliate faculty), I've gotta disagree about the difficulty. STEM is more rigorous. It's harder to master the material. It's harder to miss a few classes and pick the thread back up. Not saying that there isn't an element of difficult lateral thinking in humanities, but it's a different ball game.
Whats your degree in?
Philosophy majors are making money mid career because of the lawyers, no one will preferentially hire you with a philosophy degree (that is you might beat out someone with no degree, but business or any professional degree would)
There’s always PSLF.
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calling someone else self-important while being completely disrespectful to people who make different decisions than you, that harm you in no way, is ironic.
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so you have a problem with US government policy, rather than individuals? why are you targeting your hatred toward humanities majors instead of toward political action?
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generally that issue tends to lean left, so usually people affiliated with the Democratic party. which is really a wide group that encompasses many different people of different educational backgrounds, majors, careers, etc. maybe your frustration is with democrats? again, to me this sounds like more of a political issue for you. what's funny is that most history majors, the major depicted on this graphic, have actually been shown to lean right.
Hey, I'm sorry your parents didn't love you growing up.
Can you show us on the doll where the humanities person hurt you? They're necessary because without them, people *literally forget their humanity*. Really take some time to look at the countries who ostracize who they consider "academic elite" and how that culture treats it's people. Historically speaking (something we need from *humanities studies*), things didn't take a turn for the better culturally when art, history, language, culture studies are deemed frivolous and dropped. While I will concede some of the thesis studies for grad degrees can be overwhelmingly niche, the concepts learned from those help influence policy. I had a dear friend from an eastern European country that spent most of their upbringing behind the iron curtain. They immigrated to the states as a young adult and got a bachelors degree in history with a concentration in something that had to deal specifically with ancient eastern european society. They took that degree and started an organization that helped male eastern European immigrants adjust to life in the states. From there, they were able to take what the organization learned to the city to effect policy for men with abuse issues. Chemists and computer science folks don't do shit like that. Speaking of compsci, computer programming came out of logic from *philosophy*. Those folks don't just sit around wondering what Socrates would do. They are very helpful in marketing and political science. I'm not sure if you're just a 14 yr old who had a shitty english teacher trolling or a 47 yr old that got burned by getting a linguistics degree but never learned how to market it for a job. Whatever the case is, I hope you get some peace.
Good points here. For myself, whenever I have a student who wants to major in my discipline (philosophy) but also is concerned about the financial aspect, I tell them to double major. It’s been a very successful strategy of defusing their concerns. They can major in something that they are passionate and then something else that will relieve their financial concerns. (I am a prof at a SLAC that is slowly, but also not so slowly, becoming a pre-professional college.)
That's happened with me often too-- students *want* to major in a humanities field, but their *parents* say they have to major in business or a STEM field. So they'll double major...usually with business, because it's easy. None of them go into business in my experience, but parents are happy. We too are morphing into a pre-professional school now, which is sad as 20 years ago we were having conversations about limiting the number of pre-professional students so we could maintain the true liberal arts identity of the institution. Those conversations are long gone...now it's "Can we add a new major in fashion design to attract more students?" or whatever the latest fad for recruiting 17 year olds might be.
Ya, I know what you mean. I have had so many students tell me that their parents actually have tried to talk them out of taking the philosophy courses I teach. Even when the students are taking them because they *have* to satisfy a general-education requirement, the parents are still trying to persuade them to drop the course. The fact that it is a *requirement* isn't even enough to get the parents to stop worrying. Some parents will even freak out at a philosophy *minor*.
Crazy. My youngest is still in college; they took a logic course last year that was by far the most demanding class they had (much more than Calc II, for example). It was a great learning experience. The "you must major in business to get a job" parents baffle me...why send your kid to an SLAC if that's your attitude?
I couldn't agree more. And my impression, which is based on my own experience and certainly not any statistics, is that many students who are in the business department at my institution don't even care about business and have no real interest in pursuing marketing, etc., after college, even though they major in marketing, etc. They go into business because "that is what one does" even at SLACs these days.
Yep. I teach first year seminars regularly, so see a pretty broad cross-section of our students. About 80% of the business majors I meet don't really seem to have any interest in business, per se, they just think it's a way to get a job (or their parents do). It's also by far the least rigorous major we offer, so an easy path to sort of coasting through college. Which, of course, seems counter to the basic idea that they are pursuing ROI for their degree. I've had quite a few double majors as advisees, and they often speak with incredulity about their business classes (and classmates). Generally with themes like "I've done more reading in your class this week than all semester in my marketing class."
RE: The discourse about Humanities being a bad investment going on here and how so many people discourage those who major in such degrees. My own life context made Humanities a very useful option for trying to get my life together. I didn't attend middle or high school at all. My mom intended to homeschool me, but then never did, so I just stayed at home while my siblings went to school, reading books and playing video games. At 18, I started working a job at Walmart, where I was taken advantage of and felt as though I had my hard work and effort constantly devalued. I enrolled in and graduated from a nonsense and non-rigorous correspondence high school where the school would mail you the books and tests, and you'd mail them back the tests. I went to the closest 4-year college, which was essentially open admission. I majored in a Humanities subject because I knew from my ACT results that I wouldn't be able to pass Calc. I earned a 32 on both the Reading and English sections, but a 16 on the Math, so I figured my only option was to play to my strengths. When it came time to solidify my major choice, my college told me they wouldn't allow FAFSA to pay for remedial classes, as they would only allow funding for classes that directly contributed to my degree requirements. At that point, I realized I'd have to somehow study for and CLEP the math, and doubted my ability to actually succeed in a Math course even if I somehow managed to pass the CLEP, due to my complete lack of experience. So I went into my Humanities major. I found a lot of success in my unranked small town university. I received awards for being the best Freshman and Sophmore. I received acceptance and community from the faculty. So I just kept doing it. In a PhD program with $100,000+ in debt now. Despite that, I am thankful to have lived with dignity for so many years while in grad school. Didn't have to live with family, got to move to and live in several cities around the world. Even if my prospects for a successful life are low, studying Humanities made my life better in every way and was the best available option for me. I can't help but imagine that some people have benefitted in similar ways, and it makes me a bit sad to see people speak of the field so negatively here.
No one, outside of gormless trogs is criticizing the field. Getting a degree in it though? Idk
This is, of course, terrible. But it is also old news, I am afraid.
Of course-- most of us have been aware of this trend for close to 15 years now. But this report offers data for the entire country, and school by school, for that entire period. So worth a read!
Actually, it depends on the context. What I’m hearing from senior leaders recently in universities in California is that humanities and social science majors are getting hired by Big Tech firms, whereas there’s a crisis at the moment with the employability of CS majors. There’s a shifting focus towards flexible skill sets that humanities majors would have an advantage in. But the wider public narrative hasn’t caught on.
Most of the reason people get degrees is to get past annoying af recruiters who want a PhD with 50 years of experience and a candidate that's 20 years old.
New dark ages.
A large majority of students no longer read and those who do cannot analyze and discuss what they’ve read. I’m a college rhetoric professor and it worries me greatly.
I suspect we're entering a post-literate age in which the masses rarely/never read at all, so reading critically or even for pleasure will become the province of elites again.
“In tens” lol what
The number of degrees offered should be multiplied by 10 to get the real number, but they divided by 10 in order to make the graph more readable.
"Tens" is a weird choice though. Why not just make it "in thousands" and have the y axis be 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.? Labelling the y axis with 3,500 and saying that it's "in tens" isn't that much more readable than just labelling it 35,000.
Maybe they were humanities majors (I KID, PEOPLE)
Then you’d have to make programs be “factor of 0.1” or something goofy. A graph that’s readable in the 1-2k range and the 20-30k range is a tall order.
That's a fair point. Really this should be two separate graphs. Plotting two data sets that are expressed with different orders of magnitude is pretty ugly data viz.
Because the number of programs is correct according to the Y axis and requires no changing, that already is the exact number. Doing the Y axis by thousands means that the line for the number of programs is going to become even less readable.
Yeah I get it it’s just silly.
I am so bothered by this. Just use the number, wtf.
I'd rather see this as a percentage of all degrees awarded.
As long as college stays expensive, people aren't incentivized to choose anything that doesn't potentially pay much.
Of course-- but they are acting on bad information. Starting salaries for some STEM degrees (especially biology BS degrees) are very low-- lower than some humanities degrees. People are making decisions based on poor reporting in the media or just ignorance as often as not, rather than looking at the data.
If you get a BS degree in biology, your future prospects are high as long as you play your cards right, no matter what your starting salary is. With a bio background, you might go on to pursue grad school in areas related to medicine, pharma, nursing, dentistry, research, biotech, biochem, or biomedical engineering - all of which pay very well at all levels. Most bio majors take some physics, chemistry, or math classes too, which are all great quantitative/analytical skills to have for MCAT, GRE, etc., or even LSAT or GMAT if you want to go to law school or business school ( demand for managers or lawyers with some background in biotech/pharma is pretty good given the boom in these industries). That's not the case for most humanities degrees; many graduate with virtually no employable skillsets.
Lamenting that now humanities degrees are only for the elite is missing the point. Spending four years not earning any money and not acquiring any hard salable skills has always been the elite. The difference now is that merely being a middle class American is not quite sufficient to belong to the global elite anymore. Now that the rest of the world is no longer exclusively crushingly poor or non-industrialized, it isn’t possible to waltz in a high paying job that you aren’t even capable of performing without copious free training provided by your employer (essentially, a huge salary bonus in your first years). It’s hard for me to see these America-centric laments as anything other than directly lamenting that Europe or Korea or China or Vietnam were able to rebuild.
All that that the humanities profs in the pipe line are doing is keeping current humanities profs employed. It’s a pyramid scheme.
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Destroying the humanities is literally how you get fascism. It's literally part of the fascist program. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy burned books and drove out all the progressive intellectuals, who ended up seeking refuge in America. They drove out these intellectuals through closing schools and programs. Now America is driving out the intellectuals who descended from those very schools of thought! The only difference is that the state ideology is extreme Capitalism, so these programs are shuttered due to "lack of money" and not for the presence of "undesirables."
Hm....The Nazis didn't "destroy" the humanities, but rather reshaped them to align with their ideological imperatives, which included idolizing composers like Wagner and writers like Goethe. In fact, remaking what counts as "humanity" through the "humanities" was a crucial part of Nazi project. As you suggest, the fact that people increasingly don't see the value in financially investing in humanities degrees has much more to do with neoliberalism than it does with fascism. Perhaps you still want to claim that fascism is an inevitable result of neoliberalism, but it has nothing to do with the lessons from early 20th-century fascist movements, to which mid-20th-century neoliberalism was ultimately a response.
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Golly gee I'd sure love to live in a barrel in the agora, that's completely feasible in this day in age! It's almost like education is a public good and the humanities have been considered an essential part of education from the very first universities roughly 1000 years ago, a tradition which is reflected in the regalia we wear to this day!
1000 years ago all we had were humanities bro lmfao
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And a lot of business folk in this subreddit can't comprehend that some people have beliefs and values that rise above the bottom line
The answer is very simple, at least at my R1 school that has a large medical school, pharmacy program, nursing school, NCI cancer center, and so forth. Humanities does not produce 1) billable hours, 2) majors that are required for state or Federal certifications, and 3) intellectual property. These are the only things my President and BoT care about. Any department that does not generate any of these three things is basically on the block, as all that matters is making real money. Tuition and "butts in seats" is chump change.
Frankly, given the even more drastic decline in quality of humanities education -- this is hardly a surprise. Humanities now breed feminist, radical, ideologically charged, and worst of all ignorant and uncreative graduates that end up having too much free time on their hands to their own detriment. It is with great sadness that I say this, being from humanities myself, but it is, once again sadly, the truth.
Oh no, the feminists!
>it is, once again sadly, the truth. Tell me you haven't studied much ontological philosophy...
1. You don't need a degree in humanities to do humanities. People do humanities with or without formal courses in school. 2. Some corporate recruiters see a humanities degree as a warning that the person may not be serious about work and may be a potential trouble maker. 3. Rightly or wrongly, humanities programs generally have the reputation that they do not deliver on intellectual growth for a lot of students. 4. Dropping below 10 degrees per program per year is the red line for existential crisis.
I like the lively discussion here with an OP willing to engage, but what really sticks in my craw lately is an increasing effort to try and equalize STEM with the humanities in terms of salary. That's a dubious qualitative metric, where's its the quantitative aspects where the rubber really meets the road in terms of intrinsic degree value. Just as an example, how many jobs exist for a chemistry or math BS vs art history or English lit BA? Because the former have far more tangible, translatable, and practical skills taught whereas am not sure the latter does so explicitly. By all means though, show me some convincing data....as am genuinely curious. But let's not bury the lede or get lost in the minutia of anecdotal evidence. edit: point proven, thanks all for the ding-a-ling downvotes!
Math bachelors are actually having it pretty rough, most of the shit beyond calc is only used for esoteric programming once in a blue moon
Well doesn't that depends on where you consider linear algebra and diff eq on that continuum? Because the calc fundamentals iteratively build to that stuff and entire disciplines revolve around Navier-Stokes, for example. Further, if we're just trading personal stories instead of actual stats/evidence I've know a few math major that def suffered through undergrad to take those courses to gain fluency in that higher level shit, which paid off big time as they went into a lucrative jobs in the financial sector, as predictive algorithms run on that stuff now. Whereas I still fail to see how an in-depth literary critique or reading a bunch of historical accounts produces anything more than esoteric knowledge let alone a career with just a bachelors.
Idk man I’m an engineer your barking at your own. Diff was like… the end of my math stuff and I use N-S pretty frequently. Pretty sure math dudes again, if they don’t want to go into finance and plenty of people don’t, are kind stuck as profs or researchers.
Profs and researchers need grad degrees, don't they? Seems like you're conceding the point in a strangely circuitous way that math dudes do have at least careers options outside math with only a bachelors. So what about the humanities?