The Humanities Are in Crisis

The article sites the financial crisis and post-crisis job market as the catalyst for students taking a more pragmatic approach to choosing a major; however, it was a realignment that was probably overdue.<p>For decades in the US we have largely avoided the debate over whether college should be primarily vocational (income securing) or educational. We avoided the debate because for a long time having any degree served both purposes. Just going to college set you apart and raised your income regardless of what you studied (it still does statistically, but not as significantly as before).<p>The middle class was sold on college in the US largely on the promise of more income. Even if students in the 60s and 70s said income wasn’t important to them personally, certainly very few of their WWII generation parents would have ponied up the money without the promise of more income or security for their kids.<p>I don’t necessarily see this is as a crisis, kids really passionate about humanities will always pursue the humanities. The net effect of this is those classes will have fewer kids just there for their degree. This isn’t a bad thing. Better to graduate 100 kids really interested their fields than 1000 just there in hopes of landing a higher paying job.<p>If you time traveled back to 1980, when nurses were underpaid, but advertising, magazines, and newspapers were hot industries, and told them in fifteen years you’d make more money as a nurse than you would with an English degree they wouldn’t believe you. That’s not the world we live in anymore.

Not really the point of the article, but I want to address this:<p>&gt;The only bright spot is linguistics, the rare field that directly bridges the humanities and the sciences directly.<p>In my experience, the fact that linguistics is a humanity is just a historical quirk, and the fact that it does not pattern with the other humanities just shows that students are not blindly following the collages org. charts.<p>When I was in college, I added a linguistics minor because I wanted to have a science in addition to my math and computer science majors. I (and most of my class) was surprised when we learned that the linguistics was part of the College of Arts and Humanities. The linguistics classes I took in college were the clearest examples of what science looks like that I have had in my academic career.

The article seems to want to reduce the root cause of the phenomenon to economic incentives.<p>I believe that&#x27;s only a part of the equation: a number of students are starting to realize that the quality of what is being taught in US college humanities department is so bad and so politicized to the left that they&#x27;re better off picking other subjects.<p>In other words, it&#x27;s not just about bad economic value, it&#x27;s about bad value overall.

Learn to be a well rounded informed citizen in high school when it’s free. If you’re going to go $100k into debt, it had better help you get a job.

I have a hard time thinking this is a bad thing. While people should be free to study whatever entertains them, I think most of these majors contribute little to making the world a better place or making us better people.<p>Two exceptions, in theory, are History and Philosophy, because knowledge in these areas has the potential to improve the quality of thought and discourse. However, the views of most people on these subjects seem to be so guided by partisan identities that it&#x27;s not clear that mere education can overcome that. People refuse to reason well because they want to fit in with their friends and family.

I&#x27;m not sure I agree with the article&#x27;s main warrant for its core argument (i.e., the &quot;but they&#x27;re wrong&quot; part):<p><i>&gt; But there’s an extremely important caveat: Students aren’t fleeing degrees with poor job prospects. They’re fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they think they have poor job prospects. If the whole story were a market response to student debt and the Great Recession, students would have read the 2011 census report numbering psychology and communications among the fields with the lowest median earnings and fled from them.</i><p>IME Psychology and Communications attract students who are looking for an easy degree. Humanities majors are typically more rigorous than the Psych or Comm majors.<p>Psych&#x2F;Comm attracts a lot of students who hate reading&#x2F;writing and math equally.<p><i>&gt; Or they would have noticed that biology majors make less than the average college graduate, and favored the physical sciences.</i><p>Again, IME, most of those bio majors are planning on med school, nursing, grad school, or teaching.

The politicization of the humanities means there is one right answer and the humanities are just figuring out how to work backwards through the material selectively to create a matching narrative.

I suspect it will regress to the mean as people realize that those &quot;tech&quot; majors were not long term winners. You have to skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.<p>By the way the snobbery can run both ways: when I decided to go to MIT several of my high school classmates sneered that I&#x27;d chosen a &quot;trade school&quot; instead of a &quot;real school&quot;. And indeed I got a degree in...humanities, like most of my HS classmates.

As someone with a degree in Economics (from long ago) if I could do it over, I would definitely pick a STEM field. (Way more useful).<p>I haven’t really bought the propaganda that the humanities provides unique value, beyond a general education.<p>I have to admit now though, when I observe the appalling lack of reasoning and critical thinking skills in the general public, that perhaps there is more value than I thought in having members of society educated in these apparently impractical areas of knowledge.<p>Just anecdotally speaking.<p>As a simple example of the kind of perspective I think we need more of, in the field of politics, having more citizens with backgrounds in sociology, history, psychology, government, philosophy might provide more sophisticated populace, who could bring helpful perspective to everyday political discourse.<p>Just a thought.

&gt; &quot;But since then, I’ve been watching the numbers from the Department of Education, and every year, things look worse. Almost every humanities field has seen a rapid drop in majors: History is down about 45 percent from its 2007 peak, while the number of English majors has fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s.&quot;<p>Less people with a strong sense of history?<p>Less people with a strong sense of words &#x2F; communication?<p>While I hate to feel like I&#x27;m parroting MSM hyperbole, it&#x27;s not the humanities that are in crisis. It&#x27;s the culture&#x27;s socio-political foundation that&#x27;s faultering. Perhaps this is why (faux) outrage has replaced discourse?

What I took away from the article is that the number of people enrolled in humanities appears to be a proxy for how healthy the workforce (both current and future) perceives the economy to be. And that by that metric, we&#x27;re not doing well at all.

So very many things have changed in the world, it seems a little silly to try to pin this shift on any one thing. And if you want do that, why not pin it on the rise of tablets and smart phones?<p>We get just enormous access to so many things, all in the palm of our hand from almost anywhere. We can read, engage in meaty debate, watch movies, etc. all on a smart phone. Even a super cheap one.<p>Online forums allow for rigorous debate that previously was only found in colloquium at extremely elite colleges, like the tiny humanities school I wanted to attend but never applied because I didn&#x27;t have enough foreign language to qualify.<p>On Hacker News, people routinely demand that you cite your sources. There are other forums with similar practices.<p>Meanwhile, that mostly doesn&#x27;t seem to suffice for STEM subjects. I was one of the top three math students in my graduating high school class. I don&#x27;t bother to identify as one of the mathy people on HN. Math discussions seem to be harder to have here than other subjects.<p>I don&#x27;t know why that is. That&#x27;s just my impression and I can&#x27;t prove it.<p>Some subjects seem easier to soak up via online resources than others. And the STEM subjects are increasingly critical to making our internet infrastructure function and that infrastructure is increasingly part and parcel of other infrastructure. Department stores are dying as we increasingly shop online. You can&#x27;t ignore the internet for most businesses these days.

I doubt that things will end well for people who choose STEM for the money, rather than for the love of it. Me, I love doing engineering, and would do it even if it was a low pay major. It paying well is just a nice bonus.<p>I&#x27;ve known too many engineers who did just enough to get buy. They&#x27;re always the first to get laid off, outsourced, etc.

Without humanities you just presume you are. We see in discussion people talk about social and political issues without any context of history, as if our lives and societies just are, without any context of the processes and how things came to be.<p>Look at the perspectives and quality of discussion on the other. These are complex human societies with a rich history and context for their current reality just like any other country or region. And without a study of history, philosophy, sociology, a lot of the humanizing factors and a huge chunk of human societies and their evolution gets lost.<p>Things like the the change from feudalism to capitalism, the experiments with communism all have massive historical context and without at least a slight familiarity with that context its nearly impossible to have informed discussion.