No! Who knew that Womyn Studies wouldn’t get you a job?
Today, counselors are discouraging kids from taking challenging courses, "because it could mess up your GPA"......ARRG!!!!!!
It used to be that a liberal arts degree meant that you could read complex material with comprehension, apply logic to analyze positions and come to reasoned conclusions, and then be able to argue your positions persuasively. That education had value.
Modern liberal arts just means you’ve been exposed to leftist propaganda and are able to regurgitate it on command.
The decline in English majors mirrors the decline in grammatical and rhetorical skills in general. Soon we’ll be reduced to grunting and pointing, with an occasional f-bomb thrown in for emphasis.
So there is a decrease in the number of people pursuing degrees in “Pursuits of The Idle Rich.” Figures. Those degrees only benefit people who never need to find a job or move out of Mom’s basement in the first place.
A degree in the humanities from a prestigious university was once an indication that the individual holding that degree had the capacity to think and learn. Today not only have the humanities been redefined but have been dumbed down to reflect contemporary politically correct narratives. Confronted with an individual with a degree in the humanities even from a “prestigious” university, it is a good bet that the person does not think clearly and is not disciplined.
Humanities = Liberal indoctrination courses.
They are political courses, not education.
Liberal arts has been replaced with leftist propaganda.
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.
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.
Most of today’s liberal arts degrees as useless as a basket weaving degree!
IUD’s, Instant Unemployment Degrees, have very little value in today’s job market.
Beside that obvious reality, the IUD programs attract the snowflakes, and those who hate America.
Hiring these people might be like hiring time bombs that could go off and harm or destroy your organization.
While history, English, and the rest have faded, only one set of humanities fields without a foot in the sciences has clearly held its own: the much newer (and smaller) disciplines the statistical agency joins together as ethnic, gender, and cultural studies.
So the only increase in humanities comes from the worst of the worst, the grievance studies majors. Unlike the old joke "how do you get a philosophy graduate off your front porch? Pay him for the pizza." you need a shotgun to get a xxxx studies major off your porch.
I was relatively impressed with the depth of the article. It touched upon the questions I thought of like "was the percentage drop per humanity major purely a statistical artifact from increasing the number of majors?" and "did the number of humanity graduates remain the same but just a lower percentage as total enrollment increased?" On thing it fell short on was its claim that humanities majors at the military academies remained flat. How many of those were in linguistics going into intelligence rather than general humanities?
Time out! Last week the a similar article was published stating that the STEM programs are not getting students. So which is it? Either no one is majoring in Humanities or Engineering, Math, etc.
Look, I’m a high school English teacher, and even I can tell you: we aren’t that valuable. You only need about 4 per 600 kids each year, and if we hang in there for 30 years, that’s 18,000 kids we can teach. So dividing 18,000 by 4 is... what, 4500? So you only need one English major per every 4500 people. A little goes a long way.