The Humanities Are in Crisis: Students are turning to degrees they think yield better job prospects.

The Atlantic ^ | 08/25/2018 | Benjamin Schmidt

[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.

[scrabblehack]

The graphs above show increases in Health, especially Nursing and Exercise Science (which they put in Natural Science). Also it looks like “Linguistics” are up.

[subterfuge]

I don’t much like posters that denigrate FReepers. You?

[publius911]

These are neologisms invented to obscure, not illuminate. They’re corruptions of the language, not refinements. As such, they should be ignored and they’ll eventually go away.

I had to refresh (update?) my grasp of the word "neologism." Words change; language changes, and what used to "up" is now "down," and similar irrationalities abound.

Here is the "now" version :
"Neologism; psychology : a new word that is coined especially by a person affected with schizophrenia and is meaningless except to the coiner, and is typically a combination of two existing words or a shortening or distortion of an existing word."

Easy enough to understand, simple enough to tolerate, so long as the schizophrenics don't resort to lethal unpredictable murderous rage to exorcise their mental devils.

At that point it's either them --- or us.

It's not rocket science.

[publius911]

I don’t much like posters that denigrate FReepers. You?

Not in the slightest.
Without multuralism and the occasional mentally impaired, life would be infinitely boring.

Besides, as a species, we can't afford to allow those "specially gifted" all to run for public office.

[catnipman]

actually, that chart looks mostly encouraging, including both the percentages in each discipline as well as the trends ...

[SauronOfMordor]

Yes, it used to be the case that a liberal arts major was expected to take math and at least 101-level chemistry, biology, maybe physics.

[JoeFromSidney]

I think the issue is incorrectly stated. My undergraduate degree was in physics, with a math minor. However since I attended a liberal arts college, I had to take a lot of liberal arts courses — literature, history, a foreign language, economics — in addition to those for my major and minor. Those courses have served me well over the past sixty years since I graduated.

The issue is not STEM vs. liberal arts. It should be both, not one or the other. Even scientists need to know how the government and the economy work, and they should be familiar with topics such as literature and history. I’m grateful that I had the chance to learn those other things in addition to my technical subjects.

As my high school English teacher used to say, a technical education teaches you how to make a living. A liberal education teaches you how to live. She was right.