Posted on 08/26/2018 6:19:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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.
But something different has been happening with the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. Five years ago, I argued that the humanities were still near long-term norms in their number of majors. 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. Student majors have dropped, rapidly, at a variety of types of institutions. Declines have hit almost every field in the humanities (with one interesting exception) and related social sciences, they have not stabilized with the economic recovery, and they appear to reflect a new set of student priorities, which are being formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I am an engineer. When I turned 50, I started teaching at Ivy Tech Community College in Evansville, IN. Now I manage the industrial technology program. We graduate people who will start in the mid $20s per hour and work into the mid $30s per hour.
Our enrollment is up 17% this year.
As an aside, the English department did a study this summer and discovered that technology students averaged better grades in English class than any other major.
Science is evil! Save Womyn Studies...Ban STEM degrees!
After 17 years in the oilfields (good money) it crashed and burned in 1983. Sold my house and airplane and went back to university a second time. I became a pharmacist. I knew I would have a good paying job the day I graduated. It was worth the effort. It is just plain damn common sense to pursue a degree that pays well.
Liberal arts degrees used to mean such as English or History. Now it has come to mean an explosion of useless majors that contain the words Studies, Women, or Black.
Also there's this dude who's somewhat of a contrarian, his name is Mike Rowe. Hear him out...
You say that like it's a bad thing. When I was teaching at a local university, I had 152 students in my 2 intro econ classes. A full prof in History had a total of 9 students in all four of his classes. Since he was a tenured full prof, he was making about 25% more in income than I was. Part of the reason for the low enrollment was his field, but most was because he was a horrible teacher. The university did everything they could to get him to quit, but he refused.
The Humanities was always fighting to take more resources away from us (College of Business) because we always had more majors. Their concept was a static pie and the only way to get more was to take it away from someone else (...sorta like Democrats). With idle capacity, growing enrollments made everyone's resource base grow even if your share of the pie remained fixed. They never understood this...(Democrats: Economic growth is good; a rising tide lifts all boats.)
This article was written by, presumably, a humanities (history) major, and so it is noteworthy that it is actually written quite badly.
Good! Once they collapse, the rebuild can begin.
Not a nice way to talk about David Hogg!!!
“You just described science programs, not liberal arts.”
Many computer science programs have apparently degerated into producing byte mechanics, not thinkers. The very last thing that CS classes in college dealt with was actual coding when I was in school. Now, it seems to be the primary goal. This is similar in concept to automotive engineering students spending shop time changing ball joints.
And, I enjoy pointing out to them that the first computer programmers were humanities majors. IBM would hire everyone from St. Johns that they could get their hands on.
As was said in the time when I was pursuing a degree in Aeronautical Engineering:
“Liberal Arts degrees earn you an excellent chance at flippin’ Ol’ Bessy moo-cow with a slice of cheese for pay, but ‘air-o-plane’ degrees earn you the chance to buy Ol’ Bessy’s steaks!”
Two reasons as I can see it
1) cost benefit analysis. Its just not there for the humanities. I say this as someone who was a history major. I went on to get two grad degrees which are useful but the BA in history was only useful in serving as stepping stone to something that was. If I had it to do over again, I would not have been a history major.
2) Left Wing Ideology has infested the humanities in particular ever since the 60s radicals started their long march through the institutions. It became especially noticeable in the late 80s with Political Correctness. I noticed history in particular became more about indoctrination rather than education. PC Revisionism is now the order of the day and if you are a grad student and aspiring professor, woe betide you if you do not toe the PC Revisionist line of thinking. You can kiss your job prospects or tenure goodbye. Other disciplines like women’s studies, African studies etc have been complete jokes from the start.
My daughter parlayed her 4-year English degree into a law degree. Been a lawyer now for several years. She’s often the go-to person in her office for proofreading other’s work (as a favor). Heck...I even try to send grammatically correct text messages to her because I fear the red ink...but she takes it easy on this old man.
How did you make that leap? Those are pretty different.
Most of today’s liberal arts degrees as useless as a basket weaving degree!
That’s funny, I have a liberal arts degree and I find free republic to be just about the only place to which I can present a logical argument and receive a reasoned response.
“The very last thing that CS classes in college dealt with was actual coding when I was in school. Now, it seems to be the primary goal.”
Some colleges probably are that way but I know several that are not. In fact, they get complaints that their courses don’t focus enough on programming.
As a freshman and sophomore getting my first degree, I was knocking out most of the humanity and social science core classes. I somehow got tagged as a high flyer of some sort for political science. A polisci and a Spanish professor called me into a meeting and made a pitch to me to switch to a polysci major. Offered a scholarship plus a 2 semester study abroad fellowship at a Mexican university. I figure if I had taken them up on the offer, my career path would have been something like the state department or a 3 letter agency.
Am an Annapolis graduate in engineering, though I enjoyed the core and elective humanities courses I took. A related and favorite anecdote from the military humor feature in Reader’s Digest:
A Naval Academy midshipman wrote in his English class that “Sancho Panza always rode a burrow.” His professor wrote back: “B-u-r-r-o is an ass. B-u-r-r-o-w is a hole in the ground. As a future naval officer, you are expected to know the difference.”
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