The humanities most definitely are in crisis at our colleges and universities… and for good reasons.
I tire of the stories about millionaires and billionaires with liberal arts degrees. Those stories are misleading, often pointing to individuals with degrees from Ivy League universities and similarly prestigious institutions. I’ve pointed out before, what you study at Harvard or Yale matters a lot less than what you studied at Cal State Long Beach.
Merely attending Harvard corresponds more with future financial wealth than graduating from a mid-range state university. So, if you’re going to Yale or Harvard, if you’re able to fly off to Oxford or Cambridge, study whatever the heck you want to study. The data suggest you’ll be fine.
But students know, based on their observations, that a social work degree from a small unknown college doesn’t unlock a treasure chest. Nor does a history degree, English degree, or performing arts degree. If you’re a superstar in the arts, by 18 or 19 you’re already on another track.
Studies suggest that students from lower-income socioeconomic backgrounds pursue degrees with traditionally stable economic prospects. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce tracks the relationships between educational attainment and career earnings. Analyses of the data suggest what students know: vocational four-year degrees might be a good return on investment.
If you study English, history, social work, or art, the career paths still might require additional schooling. That’s because the liberal arts are closely associated with teaching and public service jobs that require certifications and credentials beyond bachelor’s degrees.
You can be an engineer with a bachelor’s degree and have a wonderful career. You’ll pay off any debts sooner than peers with liberal arts degrees. You’ll also be done with schooling.
Teaching requires at least another year of higher education in most states. It also helps to complete a master’s degree if you teach. Social workers also end up needing higher degrees. You can see the problem. These aren’t high-paying careers, and you need to keep paying for continuing education.
History professor Benjamin Schmidt argues in The Atlantic magazine that the crisis in the humanities is hyperbole. Not entirely inaccurate, he admits, but he writes that claims of crises are exaggerated and misunderstand the future of the fields.
The Humanities Are in Crisis
Aug 23, 2018Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong.
Benjamin Schmidt is an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University and a core-faculty member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.
People have been proclaiming the imminent extinction of the humanities for decades. A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits, even as Baby Boomers began to flood the English and history departments of new universities. Allan Bloom warned about academics putting liberal ideology before scholarship in 1987; humanities degrees quickly rose. While coverage of individual academic disciplines like musicology, history, or comparative literature often deals with the substance of scholarship, talk of the humanities in general always seems to focus on their imminent extinction. In 2010, Wayne Bivens-Tatum provided a useful walk through the first 50 years of the humanities crisis, until about 1980. Because of this long history, I’ve always been skeptical of claims that the humanities are in retreat.
There are a lot of humanities majors. Overall, the enrollments as a percentage of overall undergraduate majors remained steady well into 2007 or so. And then? Things fell dramatically. The percentage of students seeking history degrees? Down 45 percent. The percentage of English majors? Down by 50 percent. Things were worse in other programs, such as art. The only bright spot was the emergence of “digital humanities,” the field of my MFA (digital media).
Students and parents look around. They worry about debt and read that humanities lead in loan defaults, while STEM majors pay off their debts and earn more money. If I’m a first-generation student, I’m not going to risk life-long debt for an English or history degree.
The emphasis on “investing” in education is not new. In fact, students “invested” in English and history because there was a perceived demand for teachers. There was a high probability a first-generation graduate could go into teaching and have a 30-year career.
Schmidt notes, there was a rapid decline in the percentage of humanities majors during the 1970s. The period of stability from 1985 through 2008 was an extended anomaly. The numbers were steady, but it isn’t as if they rose dramatically. In 2007 or so, the enrollment collapse that had been on hold for two decades resumed.
The most reliable indicators about the humanities in American colleges are reports that all colleges and universities make to the Department of Education. These run back to about 1950. Since then, the humanities have seen three eras. The first ran from 1955 to 1985. As normal schools around the country, set up to educate teachers, transformed into comprehensive universities, men and women alike poured into English and history majors; then, when the economy soured and the growth of higher education slowed in the 1970s, the boom turned to bust, and humanities majors collapsed nationwide. The second phase began around 1985 and ran to 2008. This was a long period of stability; majors in the four largest (and easiest to track over the long term) humanities majors held steady, with modest fluctuations. Since 2008, the crisis of the humanities has resumed, with percentage drops that are beginning to approach those of 40 years ago.
As someone who completed three graduate degrees in the humanities, I can tell you from experience that the classes were small and getting smaller between 2004 and 2017. This wasn’t merely a percentage drop compared to other programs. This decline was in raw numbers. If a 20,000 student campus had grown while English held steady at 500 students, that would be a percentage decline. Instead, 500 became 250 English majors. There’s a real exodus.
Looking at degrees as a share of the entire American 23-year-old population shows the humanities faring better at the turn of the century. But even after adding a raft of fields like ethnic and gender studies, musicology, art history, and religion, a lower share of newly graduated Americans earn humanities degrees today than did so in 1970 or 1990. Even the absolute number is lower than in 1970: The big-four humanities fields—philosophy, history, languages, and English—are at risk of dipping below 100,000 degrees for the first time in almost 20 years.
Where did the students go? STEM fields. They want jobs! They want to earn a reasonable income without having to go on to graduate school.
I had students tell me they were switching from English education to nursing. This makes a lot of sense in Pennsylvania, where the population is declining and schools are closing. Older populations need healthcare. Likewise, there’s a need for engineers within the local energy production industry.
The fields that have risen in the past decade are almost entirely STEM majors, including nursing, engineering, computer science, and biology. Quantitative social sciences like economics and psychology have held steady, while fields in closer proximity to the humanities like political science, sociology, and anthropology have shown declines, especially since 2011.
The data are not uniform. Not all sciences are equally in demand, nor are all humanities fields suffering. Still, it’s clear that certain skills have more value today and those skills are emphasized in STEM disciplines.
Much of that evidence does indicate that humanities majors are probably slightly worse off than average—maybe as much as one more point of unemployment and $5,000 to $10,000 a year in income. Finance and computer-science majors make more; biology and business majors make about the same. But most of the differences are slight—well within the margins of error of the surveys. One analysis actually found that humanities majors under the age of 35 are actually less likely to be unemployed than life–science or social-science majors. Other factors, like gender, matter more: Men with terminal humanities B.A.’s make more money than women in any field but engineering. Being the type of person inclined to view a college major in terms of return on investment will probably make a much bigger difference in your earnings than the actual major does.
I’ve written several times that I wish I had remained in the technology field. Well, it seems today’s students have figured that out for themselves before it’s too late. Computer science now has as many majors as the major humanities disciplines… combined!
As humanities degrees have fallen at elite schools, degrees in computer science have climbed much more quickly than at other schools. In the top 30 universities, according to U.S. News & World Report, there are now about as many degrees awarded in computer science as in history, English, languages, philosophy, religion, area studies, and linguistics put together.
Before the 1970s decline in the humanities, roughly 70 percent of students surveyed suggested that discovering a “personal meaning” was a primary reason to pursue a college degree. Today, 71 percent emphasize potential earnings, and less than 40 percent emphasize personal growth and meaning. The humanities are about meaning, not income. If you can afford to ponder meaning, then statistics show you are more likely to pursue a humanities degree. The wealthier a household, the more likely a student studies the liberal arts.
Schmidt points to the research on this, too.
The drop in humanities majors in the 1970s, Dennis Ahlburg and Evan Roberts show in a soon-to-be-published book, corresponded to a great inversion. In 1970, seven in 10 students thought it was very important or essential to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” through education, while about four in 10 (and five in 10 men) put a priority on using it to “make more money.” By the mid-’80s, these ratios had flipped.
The data don’t improve if we add various social studies fields to the mix. It’s possible that the various “studies” like women’s studies and ethnic studies merely attracted students who would have been in the broader humanities anyway. The history student interested in African-American history and sociology might now be a Black Studies major. There’s no net gain for the liberal arts and social sciences.
Data suggest women and minorities are choosing STEM paths in greater numbers than white males. Concurrently, the percentage of students who are white and male has declined at colleges and universities. Personally, I think this is great. More women and minorities in the sciences can only help broaden the research conducted.
What will happen to the humanities? They will keep shrinking until there’s stability again. I’m not convinced that changing what we’re teaching will stop the decline. Purging old white men, the Greeks, and the Romans won’t attract the women and minorities back to our classes. Not that I oppose adding content and context. We need to revise our reading lists. We need to confront our history more directly and accurately. We absolutely must revise courses to get closer to whatever “truth” exists. Enrollments will still decline.
What comes next will be different. The humanities of the boom years in the ’60s circled around a tightly constrained common core of English and history. At their best, they helped to sustain, re-create, and improve a shared culture that enriched American life; at their worst, they served as a conduit for carefully controlled cultural capital, and ensured that whole classes of people would see that culture as not being for people like them. These fields have not completely abandoned the canon (yes, colleges still teach Shakespeare), but few would still claim they serve as stewards of American civilization.
We need to embrace a future with more double majors, more minors, and more ways to include the humanities in general education. Sadly, the way English departments now survive is to hire a lot of adjuncts or graduate instructors to teach “College Composition.” The tenure-track literature professors hang on, supported by these service courses. Communication departments? They want and need public speaking requirements. The humanities survive by arguing they need to be required.
Some of my colleagues argue that if we taught writing and speech and history better, we’d attract students from STEM while those students were in the general education classes. I know some excellent GE teachers. They don’t convert computer science majors. It simply doesn’t happen.
In the end, college is now about career ambitions and future financial security. That changes what people study, especially students relying on debt to pay for diplomas.
Even as the command of culture becomes less central at elite locations, some humanities may be demonstrating more usefulness than ever to students who seek to better understand culture from outside the dominant perspective. The question is how much space any of the humanities can ultimately take up in a university, when the dominant perspective continues to warn students away.
We will have smaller and smaller departments, serving the necessary number needed to produce the next generation of teachers, a few writers, and some journalists. We won’t vanish. We will diminish.