
Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities - benbreen
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2018/07/mea-culpa-there-is-crisis-in-humanities.html
======
seibelj
I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about
grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what
she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university.

The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant
about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on
sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people would read if she was lucky,
but was essentially required to do it. And how ignoring my CS degree for Latin
was insanity, and her money problems, and on and on.

Additionally, I had a young associate professor who I became close with, had a
degree from Harvard, and was essentially the definition of the future of Latin
instruction. She told me she was going to leave the university to go to law
school because she made basically nothing and had to work crazy hours.

When the professors themselves tell you not to bother, you know it’s a
terrible idea!

~~~
woodruffw
I received the same rant/incredulity from several of my own professors (in
Philosophy). It was incredibly disheartening to see academics essentially give
up on any sort of robust future for their field.

~~~
rdtsc
Isn't it better they are honest rather than set unrealistic expectations that
students will regret years later.

~~~
woodruffw
It's one thing to be realistic about the economics of pursuing a field, and
another to be defeatist or outright dismissive of the idea itself.

Edit: I should say that my professors came off more as defeatist than
dismissive. I was never told that I _couldn 't_ study Philosophy at the
graduate level.

~~~
xigma
The thing is, when you are young and idealistic, you will say to yourself
things like "I don't care about the money!", which is probably what these
people told themselves.

These people are disillusioned and so will _the future you_ be, but your
_present you_ has to make the decision. It's incredibly valuable that they're
being honest to you and to themselves.

------
donbright
You know what's funny is how many topics on 'hacker news' are basically
questions of sociology or anthropology or economics or psychology. If you
could make some kind of AI that would color the comments here based on what
academic discipline they were most closely linked to, I think it would just be
a sea of colors that fall under the 'humanities' or 'liberal arts' umbrella.

It's not that people aren't deeply interested in these topics. It's just....
maybe academia's current model doesn't work so well anymore. Woudln't be the
first time scholarship as a profession adapted to changing society. I hate
that it will happen, I hate what we are losing... but I feel like the
fundamentals are strong in the long term. You can go to a book store or
library ... the books that have staying power represent the ideas that have
staying power, and software products that have a life time of 7 years (which
is what a lot of classes selling themselves as STEM actually teach) do not
make the long term cut in the marketplace of important ideas.

~~~
chongli
The biggest difference between STEM and everything else is the issue of
externalities. Heck, even within STEM you see a spectrum based on
externalities.

What do I mean? Major in biology and do life-saving research. Unless you can
translate that into a biotech patent (or better yet, a biotech company) you
won't see much in the way of compensation. The same goes for the humanities
and much of the social sciences. Unless the work you do can be directly
captured and used to generate profit, you won't be compensated adequately. The
positive externalities you produce that benefit society come right out of your
own pocket.

On the opposite end of the spectrum you have people doing CS and mathematical
finance working as quants for banks like Goldman Sachs or people studying geo
engineering and working in oil/gas/mineral exploration. There you are
capturing everything for your employer and pushing the negative externalities
on society. Little wonder that those happen to be some of the most lucrative
opportunities for STEM grads.

~~~
WalterBright
Are you saying that engineering has no benefit to society?

~~~
wolfgke
> Are you saying that engineering has no benefit to society?

Surely it has. But you are compensated for it, because it has a financial
benefit for some company.

------
InTheArena
I think every engineer or applied scientists should be expected to take a
reasonable "liberal" education subset - including history, literature and law.
I know that this is very much not in vogue with the latest group-think in
college, but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic
calculus. Not because you may need to do a differential or integral, but
rather because it teaches you to think differently.

The thing that scares me more then anything else is that my view is that The
anti-intellectual authoritarianism has spread even to college campuses, where
liberal educations are now viewed as tools of oppression rather then as the
minimum expectation for a well-informed citizen.

~~~
scythe
>I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus.

I agree that mathematics is underappreciated by most people who work in the
humanities. But I _strongly disagree_ that they should learn calculus.

In fact, I would argue that _calculus is the problem_ with the perception of
math in the social sciences. There are plenty of types of math that could
potentially be applied in sociology and its variants, particularly
mathematical logic and graph theory. Statistics needs no introduction.
Calculus by contrast deals with continuous changes in well-defined quantities,
which are not like anything a sociologist encounters.

I suspect that the reason that many sociologists believe that most of
mathematics is basically an extended version of calculus -- as seen in this
essay:

[https://www.edge.org/conversation/rory_sutherland-this-
thing...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/rory_sutherland-this-thing-for-
which-we-have-no-name)

\-- is because a social scientist's primary interaction from math is by way of
economics, who _do_ use calculus to track nearly-continuous changes in well-
defined quantities.

However, economics is unique among the social sciences in that the phenomena
it seeks to describe can be readily quantified. This leads to the mistaken
belief, evident in the article, that mathematics is only able to contribute to
the study of things which are easily quantifiable, _which is not true at all!_

Students in sociology should really be taught statistics and discrete math,
with special attention to any techniques that may be useful in describing
human behavior.

~~~
throwawaymath
_Statistics needs no introduction. Calculus by contrast deals with continuous
changes in well-defined quantities, which are not like anything a sociologist
encounters._

Calculus comprises the foundation of statistics. Without calculus you can
learn to apply statistical experiments, but you can’t really understand what’s
going on. That makes for brittle insight. Just because the set of all humans
is strictly finite doesn’t mean the underlying continuity in statistical
theory ceases to exist.

A two semester sequence of single and multivariable calculus is really not a
lot to ask in return for delivering a robust understanding of statistics. It’s
not like demanding knowledge of analysis, topology, and measure theory before
learning rigorous probability theory.

~~~
glup
I feel like I would have been a lot more interested in calculus in high school
if I had first understood how statistics could be used for inference, and how
calculus was vital for understanding statistics.

------
cncrnd
Honestly, the majority of humanities students I've interacted with have been
uninspired and unmotivated. I took a good deal of humanities classes and more
often than not comments were uninformed and presentations poor quality.

And what do you expect? These students come in at 18 years old, straight out
of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work
possible. And since it's all papers, there is not an objective minimum for the
work. With grade inflation, a poor quality paper can still pass you. By
contrast, with engineering there are objective minimums. The program has to
compile and tests have to pass. You have the structure that a young person
needs out of high school, and the work ethic develops during this time.

Maybe about 1% of the humanities students actually cared about what they
studied, their output reflected that in the form of papers and
internships...when it came time to graduate a couple of the motivated students
were Rhodes scholars or otherwise working in their field of study. Everyone
else was either not doing much or working in another area.

Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for
whatever field, and those in humanities couldn't give less of a shit about
what they're studying as long as there's a degree at the end.

~~~
analog31
I taught an engineering course for one semester at a Big Ten university with a
prestigious engineering school, many years ago. And I also work with young
engineers who have recently graduated from college.

I'm not sure that all of my students and / or colleagues cared very much about
the actual subject matter that they were studying, e.g., the math and theory.
There was a conventional wisdom shared amongst students, that those topics
were just a hoop to jump through, that they would never need in the "real
world."

When they do arrive in the "real world," they get so busy with CAD, trial-and-
error design, troubleshooting, and bureaucracy, that they forget most of their
math and theory within a few months. I'm not sure if this is voluntary or not:
Had they been given a work environment with more time to think and to continue
learning, would they have retained their interest?

The few who keep those skills are the ones who are devious enough to guard
their time, effectively giving themselves time to think. And they volunteer
for the jobs that involve theory, which nobody else wants.

Another factor that may affect humanities students is the fact that some
majors are harder to get into, and to stay in, than others. Nobody changes
majors from <redacted> to chemical engineering because <redacted> is too hard.
;-) And it's a one way street too. Once you interrupt the train of
prerequisites in most STEM majors, it's very hard to get back on your horse.

~~~
cncrnd
I agree that most engineering students don't care much either, but they
generally have to put more work in and leave with some practical skills as
well as a nice signing bonus + job at the end of the program. Humanities
majors can just end up lost, no better off than after high school, and
spending their 20s 'exploring.'

Take this with a grain of salt, I recently graduated so these are just my
thoughts. Maybe in 10 years when I'm 30 I will say it's better to spend your
20s exploring. But probably not :)

~~~
analog31
I think there are a couple things happening here. First, "everybody
graduates." There has to be a path to graduation for everybody, or the
parents, donors, and policy makers get quite annoyed. For this reason, there
have to be "fluff" majors at every college.

Second, engineering has always had a public mission that is not shared by the
humanities. Employability, and providing a minimal level of skill, are the
_purpose_ of engineering. Engineering says: "We will make you employable in
spite of yourselves."

The humanities have not adopted that mission, and say: "You will make yourself
employable if you take full advantage of what we offer here." You end up with
a mixture of students, some are working barely hard enough to graduate, and a
few are turning themselves into the next generation of thinkers.

Of course every field wants to sell itself as a gateway to employment: The
world still needs "critical thinkers" and all that.

------
yedava
In countries like India you would be laughed at if you aren't rich and take an
arts degree. It is because in a country with limited earning opportunities, it
doesn't make any sense to invest in a degree that has virtually non-existent
employment opportunities.

Seems like the majority of US population has now become poor enough that
taking getting a humanities degree is risky.

~~~
groby_b
Given that an arts degree in the US easily costs a quarter million (at least
at a decent art school) these days, I think "poor" isn't the word I'd use for
people who don't take it.

Just "not willing to be in debt for the rest of their lives".

~~~
gowld
[https://www.campusexplorer.com/college-advice-
tips/E58F762A/...](https://www.campusexplorer.com/college-advice-
tips/E58F762A/How-Much-Does-Art-School-Cost/)

says $160K including residential living expenses (which you'd pay even if you
weren't at scool.). $80K for the education part.

~~~
groby_b
That example they chose is Pratt. IIRC, Pratt has a BA, not a BFA. It's also
not even in the top20 art colleges.

And you know, $160k debt in a profession that has $35k salaries... paying that
off will easily take 20-30 years. How's that not indentured servitude?

------
yazan94
I think the 'crisis' can be distilled to a simple concept - with rising costs
of living not many people want to invest in a degree which has relatively few
options for comfortable living compared to other options. If the humanities
are really so important for our culture, then the public needs to invest in
making them practical options for someone to invest in. Otherwise, why bother
lamenting about the lack of people studying humanities when there are limited
job options in the humanities? Can you really blame them?

~~~
andromeduck
I think what's changed is that the humanities have become so easy to access
that degreess are no longer required for people with just a passing interest
and since the degree itself isn't worth as much as the skills it develops; is
more effective to get a higher value degrees and persue those interests in
other ways.

------
cs702
Indeed. Instead of seeking a broader understanding of the world and a greater
ability to question and think critically about it, more students are seeking
knowledge of a more practical nature that can lead to better employment
opportunities in the near term. It's understandable.

On the whole, I don't think this is good... but this has been coming for a
long time, due to many reasons, including:

* a broken funding system that saddles a majority of students with life-altering debt, effectively keeping many of them from studying what they love and forcing them instead to study what will land them a decent job;

* the slow-motion takeover at many universities and colleges by professional managers who use financial and other metrics to measure the "success" of and decide on the funding for different academic departments;

and last but not least,

* the gradual takeover of liberal arts faculties at many colleges and universities by individuals whom I can only describe as _very ignorant_ \-- uneducated, really -- in mathematics, the hard sciences, modern technologies, and the ways of business.[a] Perhaps the smart kids don't want to study with these ignorant individuals?

[a] As C. P. Snow wrote about these people in 1959 in his famous _Two
Cultures_ lecture: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of
people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly
educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their
incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been
provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second
Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was
asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of _Have you read a
work of Shakespare 's?_ I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler
question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the
scientific equivalent of saying, _Can you read?_ —not more than one in ten of
the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So
the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest
people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their
neolithic ancestors would have had."
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures))

~~~
dqpb
> _Instead of seeking a broader understanding of the world and a greater
> ability to question and think critically about it_

I would argue that education in Math, Physics, Science, Engineering, etc, give
you this ability far better than humanities do.

~~~
coldacid
I would argue that without both, one is crippled in their ability to do so.
Both are needed, but most people are sadly lacking in one or the other.

~~~
dqpb
I agree

------
Naga
I majored in History in university. I graduated, was discouraged from grad
school by my professors (one of my professors stressed that when he was doing
his PhD probably ten years before our conversation, he was so poor he had to
literally fish to feed himself), and went back to school for accounting. As
someone who went through it and can honestly evaluate the return on investment
for my history degree, I don't believe it has paid back yet five years out. I
did not learn practical skills, which are important for getting a career after
exiting school. That's why my accounting degree was necessary. I will say
though that I believe I learned a lot of important soft skills in the
humanities, which I believe make me 1) a better person in general and 2) a
more attractive candidate for jobs, since the skills I have (critical
thinking, writing, etc) are not learned in business. They try to teach it in
some courses, but it takes the leisure of taking a full humanities degree to
properly learn it. It put this into perspective, writing an essay is taking a
firehose of data, analyzing it and presenting a critical opinion on it. Most
people who I was in business school with struggled because there is no right
answer, and there is no answer key. A well reasoned argument based on the data
given makes a good essay and good grades.

I will also say that in the professional accounting designation program, they
are emphasizing that these are necessary skills for accountants to have now. I
watch people studying for exams worrying about the same things. The exams are
graded based on giving a 'competent' (their buzzword) answer based on the
information given, which many people struggle with. I, on the other hand, find
it very easy and do not have to study nearly as hard as my peers to succeed on
the exams.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, and I do not think I am better than everyone
else. I think that my time spent in the humanities has really benefited me in
my career, but only after learning practical, 'hard' skills. Would I do it
this way again, if I had the chance to start over? Probably not. Would I
recommend someone going back to school for a humanities degree, after taking
business/STEM? Maybe not, but there is definitely value in them.

------
tragic
This topic is fairly personal to me, since - after I got bitten hard by the
continental philosophy bug at the age of 18 - I really did aspire to go into
academia and teach it. But I got to the point of applying for PhDs and
something of the reality started to dawn, not least that there would be
another three years of genteel poverty to endure before there was any hope of
a steady job. I had the good fortune to take to programming at that time.

The student loan situation is not quite so bad here in the UK (although it is
worse now than when I was going through the system). Yet it clearly puts the
humanities at a disadvantage. You don't need to have read Toqueville or
Heidegger to see that taking on a six figure debt for the slender possibility
of a poorly paid and stressful job later is a really bad idea.

Add in the 'other' relevant numbers - "how many papers have you published this
year?" and friends - and frankly I'm surprised that anyone is left to teach
today's students. It sounds miserable, and also -from the student's point of
view - must reduce engagement with the material.

------
neom
I'm 32, my parents studies humanities and strongly discouraged me "because in
the future there are no well-paid jobs in the humanities". I presume I'm not
alone?

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I'm 34 and my parents suggested I get a degree just to get one. The problem is
that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't making the right
moves while you're there, or know where you're going before you start. So now
I have a diploma saying I spent 4 years studying history before I went back to
school to train at a polytechnic to get a job.

~~~
dorchadas
> The problem is that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't
> making the right moves while you're there, or know where you're going before
> you start.

I've experienced/am experiencing this same thing myself. A degree itself, STEM
or not, does no good if you don't utilize your time at university to do
something afterwards.

------
randcraw
A quarter of a million dollars for a degree in spanish; no job prospects;
followed by 20+ years of loan repayment...

Is there any wonder that such degrees are unpopular?

None of the humanities majors improves your employment prospects, while all
could be reproduced for free by reading maybe 20 books at your leisure. That
makes the humanities more like a form of entertainment than a preparation for
life, which is what most of us expect from college.

~~~
endisukaj
Even a non-humanities major can be reduced to reading 20 (technical) books at
your own leisure.

~~~
bo1024
Much, much, much easier said than done.

------
fossuser
My hypothesis would be that in times of economic instability (70's energy
crisis, 2008 financial crisis) - people bias towards more obviously reliable
fields for income and work (Nursing, engineering, etc.).

It's also probably easier to major in CS (or some other technical subject) and
take some humanities classes you find interesting rather than major in
humanities.

~~~
nostrademons
The graph certainly seemed to support that - humanities degrees fell
precipitously in the 70s, started gaining in the mid-80s through 90s, fell
again during the dot-com boom, held steady during the 2000s, and then fell
precipitously after the financial crisis.

A slightly more accurate model might be that demand for humanities degrees
dries up when either students feel that they _must_ get a
STEM/professional/trade degree for economic survival, or that they _should_
get a STEM degree to take advantage of a recent technological change. That
accounts for the drop during the dot-com boom and during the mobile/crypto/AI
boom that followed the financial crisis. At this point in time it's probably a
stupid idea to get a humanities degree when all the jobs are in technology,
and college students are simply responding to that.

This would also predict that as recent tech markets get saturated and
stabilize, then assuming we don't have a major economic crash, you'll see
humanities enrollment trend upwards again. Basically stability is good for
humanities, but either too little or too much growth pushes people into STEM
fields.

~~~
chillacy
There have been a lot of top-down initiatives to get people into STEM fields
as well, like presidential speeches by Obama. And ultimately it's something of
a zero sum game (total college participation can still grow, but not as easily
as shifting existing applicants).

------
quotemstr
When I look at the problems of today's academy, e.g. extreme ideological bias,
replication difficulties, p-hacking, salami-sliced publication --- I can't
help but wonder whether the root cause is the pay structure not properly
taking into account the value of a high-quality academic ecosystem. It feels
like there's a market failure here here.

Due to disgracefully low wages, we're selecting people for academic life who
want to be there for all the wrong reasons, be it a sense of being trapped on
a bad career path, an opportunity to relish in sanctimony, or some kind of
obsolete notion of the dignity of living a life dedicated to knowledge, which
academic now seldom produces and which we seldom prize.

College administration costs are going through the roof. Would it hurt to
redirect some of this spending toward efficiency wages for faculty? Money
brings prestige, and prestige generates all sorts of benefits.

------
panic
Given the current cost of rent/food/health care/raising children (especially
in the US), I can understand making life decisions purely around money, but it
also makes me sad. Wouldn't it be better if people could do what they feel is
useful instead of fitting themselves into often-pointless jobs just because
they're well-paying? Even if you think humanities research is useless, does
the world really need more lawyers and accountants?

~~~
kcmp
It's true though. I just got a job at a FANG company right out of college and
if I wanted my own 1 bedroom apartment it would look like a repurposed motel
from the 50s.

I make over six figures but can't help but feel guilty when I have to tell my
parents, who are below poverty line, that I can't afford my own apartment.

------
will4274
What if the problem is that the humanities are getting worse? The ancient
definition of a liberal arts education was language (typically ancient Greek),
mathematics, literature (often poetry), physical sciences, and history. During
my time at University, I found that students in STEM were required to take
classes in literature, language, and history. At my University, it was 8 of 40
classes - 20% of the work over four years, including 2 at a second year level
of above. On the other hand, the humanities majors had to take only a tiny bit
of math and science (just 3 classes), without any level requirements and
humanities students often delighted in taking STEM classes without any real
rigor. Advocates of the humanities and a liberal arts education often claim
that humanities majors are more likely than STEM majors to be well rounded,
but my experience has typically been the opposite - I often have interesting
conversations with software engineers about history and politics, but I can't
recall an interesting conversation with a humanities major about machine
learning / AI or economics.

~~~
yontherubicon
In the article, there was a graph that indicated that degrees
Interdisciplinary studies were actually increasing.

TBH, I think you've identified the real problem here: Having a degree in the
Humanities no longer means a well-rounded educated individual. It simply means
a person who can't do math.

------
zfrenchee
Seems like rigorous data science on the statistics of people graduating with
humanities degrees. Doesn't that seem just a little bit ironic?

------
jessaustin
Maybe this is more an indictment of universities than of the humanities? Is it
possible that university study in general is on borrowed time, and the future
is simply here earlier for the humanities? It's not as though the Classics
will be forgotten, nor will writers, artists, connoisseurs, or critics
disappear. Professors haven't ever been [EDIT:] _a vital_ part of this.

~~~
nugget
As we transition from a pedigree-based to a skills-based economy, it would
make sense that the humanities would be an earlier casualty than many other
fields.

~~~
wonderbear
I would argue we're just as pedigree based as ever. Just look at any list of
the wealthiest (whatever demographic) people in the US. Inheritance and
connections dominate it.

It's the wage-earners competing in a pseudo-meritocracy, just like fifty or a
hundred years ago. The difference now is that our skilled trades require more
formal education.

~~~
gowld
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth)

In the top 10, 2 are 1st-generation trust-fund babies (The Koch brothers), 7
are tech company founders, and 1 is self-directed investor. Certainly most of
these enjoy great upper-middle-class opportunity and privelege, but these
founders did not get their wealth from pedigree-appointed positions at Daddy's
company after drinking their way through a Political Science degree.

Then come 3 more trust fund babies (The Walton kids), a self-made casino
founder, and another tech company founder.

------
gdubs
“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology
married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the
results that make our heart sing.”

\- Steve Jobs

------
mxwsn
I was curious what sort of relationship there might be between recent trends
in international students (who I expected would more frequently major in STEM
than humanities than the typical American population) and the article's noted
decrease in humanities majors.

In [0], the share of college students that is international rose from ~3% in
2010 to ~5.5% in 2017. And from the table in [1], in 2017, about 2% of
international students majored in "Humanities" by the strictest definition,
though that expands to 10% if you include "Intensive English", "Communications
and journalism", "Humanities" and "Legal studies and law enforcement".

The low share, though, definitely suggests that American college students are
choosing humanities majors less.

Interestingly, Harvard in particular is focusing a lot on boosting its
engineeering programs, including a $1 billion science and engineering campus
expansion set for 2020. [2] So looking at recent stated major intents from
Harvard applicants is expected to have a trend towards STEM.

[0] [https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-
studen...](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-students-
united-states#EnrollmentTrends)

[1] [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/us-
universiti...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/us-universities-
report-declines-enrollments-new-international-students-study-abroad)

[2] [https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/24/engineering-
har...](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/24/engineering-harvard-seas-
students/)

~~~
arthurjj
I think the Harvard trend is probably too little to late on their part. Having
worked on both coasts in a variety of companies I didn't even know Harvard had
an engineering dept.

~~~
realitygrill
Harvard didn't have an engineering department until a few years ago (might be
year 5 or 6 now).

~~~
gowld
You're off by over 150 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_John_A._Paulson_School...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_John_A._Paulson_School_of_Engineering_and_Applied_Sciences)

Harvard invented one of the first computers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I)

What you might be misremembering is that

> In February 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers voted for the
> _Division_ of Engineering and Applied Sciences to change its name to the
> _School_ of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

~~~
Agathos
realitygrill is probably thinking about the new SEAS campus that mxwsn
mentioned. I think they started planning the campus around the time of that
renaming.

------
sonnyblarney
University used to be for the elite, or roughly.

Now, regular folk, who don't come from wealthy families, have to do that as
part of their education, and cost is a big deal.

It's natural that people tend towards practical educations and it's not all
that bad.

As an Engineer, I was overwhelmed with technical bits and in retrospect I wish
we could all have taken a full year of liberal arts type stuff.

~~~
gowld
In USA, most degree programs require a year's worth of liberal arts
"distribution" or "general education" courses.

------
c3534l
Maybe the humanities need to change and that's the problem, but looking at
those graphs in the article it seems that the answer is "it's the economy,
stupid." When I was in High School we were all told that it didn't matter what
you majored in so long as you got into a good college. Maybe kids now just
have a little reality built into them, that jobs don't come free with a
college education, that it's possible to take on more student debt than you
can afford with your job opportunities. And maybe what's happening is just
that fewer kids are getting duped into digging themselves into debt expecting
they'll have a career at the end of it because they followed their passion
like everyone told them was how you get successful.

------
klodolph
It would be interesting to see the graph of degrees in these majors as a
percentage of the entire population, rather than as a percentage of total
degrees.

~~~
strainer
I think its essential context to the 'of degrees' graphs. By population there
was a large dip from 1975-85, mostly in English degrees. A recovery and
relative stability since 1990. I notice this info was included in the authors
previous blog post. Its also here:

[http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/blog/posts/373/career-
value-...](http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/blog/posts/373/career-value-of-
humanities-and-liberal-arts/)

------
intended
This is going to accelerate.

Indians/Chinese live in a world exactly like this - where all degrees MUST be
STEM or you are a useless waste/burden to society.

I dont know what America is doing, but people left my country specifically
because there was a better life and more vibrant educational culture in the
States.

But ever since no child left behind, and the collapse of jobs which support a
wide form of intellectual pursuits, America seems to be recreating the same
intellectual ecosystem collapse you see here.

~~~
maxxxxx
Agreed. It seems pretty unhealthy long term if we have a society with only
lawyers, engineers and MBAs.

------
mathattack
I think humanities are a great combination degree but worthless on their own.

A finance major who knows history can anticipate how inevitable big market
swings are.

Philosophy pairs great with computer science.

A mathematician or physicist that speaks French or Russian has access to much
more information.

And for what it’s worth, the breakout high school classmate of mine was an
English major. And Economics.

I would never suggest someone get a PhD in it though. There are better ways to
enjoy and share the humanities.

------
intothemild
I started a humanities degree. Two years in I realised it wasn’t worth the
paper it was printed on (what we call a toilet paper degree in Australia).

I then proceeded to change degrees and universities, I never looked back. This
was back in like 2004-2005, a couple years before the financial crisis
started. People then we’re talking about not doing those degrees because they
are a waste of time and money.

------
gillesjacobs
I studied Spanish and English literature and linguistics undergrad in
W.Europe. I made the conscience choice to move into STEM during my postgrads.
Now I am pursuing a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning.
The tuition fee was about 900USD avg. per year so there was no financial
pressure on me to change academic careers: the choice was ideologically
driven.

Allow me share you my experience at the humanities faculty:

I had always enjoyed the arts and literature but from year two I noticed
ideological and methodologically harmful trends in the humanities: the staunch
rejection of empiricism, the politicization of academia and near universal
adoption of radical left-wing ideology. Researchers more often see themselves
as activists at the cost of scientific methodology. Theories were completely
divorced from social or natural reality. Established professors did not know
how to do basic statistical tests, and have no problem getting published
anyway.

------
singingfish
I have a fairly hardcore PhD in social sciences (where I produced some really
useful work on how to better understand technology driven social phenomena
which are difficult to define, and near-impossible to parameterise). In fact
my PhD was awarded in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences.
Which is the problem. The business faculties have eaten large amounts of the
social science faculties. And in substantial parts of the business faculties
the quality of academic work is dreadful (e.g. have a look at how marketing
students are taught statistics - or consider in these faculties, Economics is
the most rigorous of the disciplines argh!).

So with that PhD, what do I do? I'm a jobbing programmer currently doing
ecommerce stuff - i.e. I tell computers what to do. It's good money,
interesting work and they mostly leave me alone to get on with it, so on that
level, no problem.

------
mannykannot
It might be informative to see how the average debt burden, in terms of years
for humanities graduates to pay off, has changed over the period in question.
At several points, the author notes a downwards inflection point around 2011,
a time when then-recent economic events might have been expected to bring the
issue to the fore.

------
foxyv
I wonder what the correlation is between the price of a university degree and
the percentage of humanities majors. I imagine it's much easier to justify an
education in English Literature when it doesn't cost $70,000 or more.

At the same time, I know people who majored in English who ended up working as
security guards and package sorters. There just aren't many jobs that require
that skillset anymore, thanks to the internet. Not many editors, copywriters,
or reviewers are necessary when there are millions of people willing to do it
almost for free online. Digital publishing has made writing into a free for
all. Almost all that is left is teaching which requires separate credentials
and very low pay for long hours.

------
coldtea
> _Back in 2013, I wrote a few blog post arguing that the media was
> hyperventilating about a "crisis" in the humanities, when, in fact, the long
> term trends were not especially alarming. I made two claims them: 1. The
> biggest drop in humanities degrees relative to other degrees in the last 50
> years happened between 1970 and 1985, and were steady from 1985 to 2011; as
> a proportion of the population, humanities majors exploded. 2) The entirety
> of the long term decline from 1950 to 2010 had to do with the changing
> majors of women, while men's humanities interest did not change._

Who cares for the number of degrees? The quality of humanities studies has had
a huge decline. Compare the humanities titans of most of the 20th century to
the meagre, derivative, and self-absorbed production of the last 30 or so
years...

~~~
notafraudster
Is this a point you'd like to elaborate on? Without accusing you of anything,
when I read a one sentence dismissal of humanities/social sciences, what I
tend to think is that this is someone who thinks "post-modernism is bullshit",
"third wave feminism is bad", "intersectionality isn't real", "everything is
cultural marxism", "safe spaces", etc. and who is appealing to Jordan Peterson
as an expert on everything. If we're lucky, they'll throw in Sokal or some
other sincere attempt to engage with problems in the discipline.

This might be an unfair judgment of you personally -- certainly it doesn't
suggest charity on my part. But I just mention it because, in the event that
you have something to add to the discussion that isn't just boilerplate, you
might want to know that in the absence of actually adding it, you are being
judged in this way.

(Personal disclaimer: I'm not in the humanities, I have my own critiques of
where major humanities disciplines are. I am an academic. But I also waste
enough of my time on awful websites that I am very acclimatized to driveby
dismissals of anything that emerged out of critical theory, and I can't say I
agree with that.)

~~~
lovich
It might have been my school but I found the degree poorly taught. You could
get a fairly easy B+/A- by just parroting the teachers opinion on the topic at
hand. STEM classes had some teachers like that, but most of the work there had
objectively wrong and right answers.

My friends from other schools all had the same experience for the most part
with only a handful of exceptions for particularly good teachers, who also all
happened to be employed at other jobs and working as an adjunct professor to
teach single courses on their topics.

The humanities to me seem like they are of lower quality because professors
have no incentive or desire to actually teach, but as much of the humanities
has no right or wrong answer then the professor can bullshit as much as they
want. I don't think that the teachers are any worse than STEM teachers. If
STEM courses were as subjective I'm sure we'd see the same problems

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> The humanities to me seem like they are of lower quality because professors
> have no incentive or desire to actually teach

Why do you think faculty’s lack of desire to teach is something limited to the
humanities? In STEM fields too you will commonly see faculty delegating their
workload to teaching assistants so that they can focus on things that interest
them more.

~~~
lovich
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I think the lack of desire to teach is a
country wide problem for universities in the US. I think it's more apparent in
the humanities because a teacher can define their opinion as "right" and put
very little effort into educating students on the topic since they can just
grade less harshly if they need to keep a certain pass rate on their students.
On the other hand there is a much larger proportion of STEM work that is right
or wrong and a teacher can't just pass students without it becoming obvious to
the department that the students coming out of Professor N's classes have no
grasp on the topic, and so they are forced to teach more skills that are
useable in any class or jobs that touch on that subject

------
charleslmunger
As everyone knows, the costs of a humanities degree (or any degree) has been
increasing much faster than inflation - while at the same time, the earnings
potential of a humanities degree has dropped. Student loan debt and high
housing costs are shackling a generation of college graduates.

Undergraduate tuition and fees at the author's university total nearly $50,000
a year - and that's without counting food, textbooks, rent, etc. Even with
help from financial aid, that is a huge amount of money (largely paid for by
non-dischargeable debt) to spend on a degree that doesn't provide significant
new career prospects.

------
jonnat
This is simply short sighted. Yes, we are at a time in which machines have
automated enough of the labor to cause panic and drive students to practical
fields, but not enough to cause mass revolt.

But it's inevitable. Some form of UBI will have to be instituted, by consensus
or force, and at that point, a large part of the population will find itself
with lots of time on their hands and no need for knowledge in any productive
area. Then, most majors will be in philosophy, literature or art.

------
microcolonel
If every imaginable move is made to render the humanities rote and
ideologically captive as possible (seemingly for the personal leisure of a
handful of faculty), and at the same time prices are increasing, is it any
wonder that they are fast going extinct? (or more accurately, that the
absolute interest in study under humanities departments is not keeping up with
the interest in STEM study)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I agree with almost everything you said, except

> seemingly for the personal leisure of a handful of faculty

So far as I know, the humanities professors do not have any more leisure than
other faculty. (Or did you mean that, by making the humanities ideologically
captive, the professors don't have to think?)

And in fact, that "ideologically captive" part occurred to me as a possible
partial explanation, as well. Large parts of the humanities have come to
resemble indoctrination rather than free enquiry. That may place a serious
limit on the popularity of those departments.

------
sonnyblarney
For reference:

College Majors, 1970-2011 Share Of All Bachelor's Degrees Awarded By Field

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-
your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph)

------
withdavidli
This was one of the blogs that factored into deciding not to go grad school
even though I ready took the GREs (psychology, would have been for I/O so more
quant heavy than most in the field) :
[https://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1](https://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1)

------
lizzytheo
I have a PhD in the humanities and am now working on NLP. I can attest to the
difficulty of finding a fulfilling career in humanities academia, but I don’t
know if it’s worse than STEM academia since academia is insanely competitive
in general. In my school (Ivy League) , PhDs in my department attain
professorship as often as STEM ones, if not faster. I think the humanities are
more suited for general education than specialization, unless you want to be a
professional scholar, which is a fine choice as long as you are aware of the
competition. I do think humanities need to re-brand itself as an essential
part of general higher education (STEM kids need to know some humanist
thinking) rather than just specializations.

~~~
gowld
[http://stemtosteam.org/](http://stemtosteam.org/)

------
eanzenberg
That is ...good. We should be funneling more women and minorities into
lucrative majors like CS and engineering.

~~~
AmericanChopper
Problem with that is women and minorities are all individual people who make
their own decisions about what they want to do in life. What does a funnel
look like? Forced degrees? Forced employment?

~~~
matthewmacleod
Probably just a less obviously-hostile environment would be a good start.

~~~
AmericanChopper
What exactly is obviously hostile about our universities? Is it the safe
spaces? Is it the lower standards applied to minorities and women to make it
easier to get in? Is it all of the scholarships open only to minorities and
women?

Universities are quite obviously the most inclusive and least hostile place in
the world for minorities and women.

~~~
groby_b
Assuming you even have a degree: People like you. People who parrot the same
sound bites you do. That's what is making our universities hostile.

~~~
AmericanChopper
You know this isn’t a rational argument at all right? You’re literally
defending a baseless assertion with “no, you!”.

~~~
Latteland
You do come across as having a negative attitude toward women and minorities
because you are saying they only got in because someone let them in, they are
expected to be lesser.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I’m not saying that at all. But that is exactly the message affirmative action
sends to applicants. In general they are both sexist and racist, even to those
they supposedly benefit.

What I said was that even with systemic advantages put in place encouraging
women and minorities (excluding Asians of course, because for some reason they
don’t count) to join stem courses, they still show a statistically significant
preference to do other majors.

If you think I have a negative attitude towards any group, it’s not because of
anything I’ve said. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably just the
reaction you have to people when you can’t engage in rational discussion on
this topic.

------
docker_up
With schools increasing costs and no jobs available, going into humanities is
a complete financial catastrophe waiting to happen.

If countries care about humanities, they need to fund it via government. I'm
not much of a big government person, but things like this is required when you
care about things that capitalism won't fund.

------
vinceguidry
This is a matter of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can
remain solvent."

In the long run, STEM is going to become increasingly niche, STEM is the
industry that eats its young. Not too long ago, it was possible to make a
lucrative career out of non-coding front-end, meaning a design focus with no
javascript. Those days ended a few years ago.

You can't expect your job to remain stable if you go into anything STEM,
unless you move up the value chain to underlying tech, where living-wage jobs
are as rarefied as million-dollar, you're literally a rockstar, contracts /
jobs. My dream job here is to actually get paid $X00,000 to work on Rails. Not
_implementing_ Rails, _developing_ Rails.

This is a pattern that replicates all across STEM. In the humanities, _all_
sustainable jobs are equivalent to my dream Rails gig. Out of hundreds of
people who want a salaried anthropology job, only a handful are going to earn
them, because the economics just favor STEM at the moment.

But eventually the mid-level market for all STEM jobs is going to dry up.
Whatever obsession society has for engineering is going to pass, and then
engineering is going to look like the humanities, and the humanities is going
to find purchase with all the new technology that we're building and that's
where the jobs will go.

Which is a grand shame. Humans shouldn't be so laser-focused on the mother-
loving present all the freaking time. It's going to take the web world another
5-10 years to realize that the obsession it's been nurturing over Javascript
is ridiculous and that Rails really did do it right. Web assembly is a
solution in search of a problem, and native is eventually going to find its
sea legs. React is okay but its successor will be better, my guess is that CSS
is going to be seen as the bottleneck and the new React will do what React
did, only with a management paradigm for styling. The focus on ES6 will die
out and decent language design is going to one day win out over that ugly pile
of hacks.

Once the development community realizes all of this, and thousands of other
lessons that are essentially variations on the same theme of timelessness,
then the focus will shift on the people actually creating the meaning and
value that people want out of life. Young people who want to rap will, well,
rap. The marketplace of ideas will cease to be dependent on the technical
ability of creators because STEM will have long eaten its young and has fully
professionalized and turned into Hollywood.

Every industry will eventually be Hollywood. It's just a question of how well
they manage that mid-level market. Hollywood has a guild system. We feel we're
too good for that.

~~~
nradov
Why would an employer pay you to contribute to Rails when so many others are
willing to do it for free? In the end it's just another framework; it works
well enough but not really superior to the numerous alternatives.

~~~
vinceguidry
Rails gets lots of corporate sponsorship, not nearly as much as React, but
it's there. So do all the big, useful open-source libraries. Some companies
are even willing to pay you a full-time salary to work 20% of your time on
their business interests and allowing you to spend your other 80% of your time
on framework dev. Open source and the tech world would really, really suck
without the generosity of business.

------
Moodles
80% of humanities papers are never cited once. 80%. That. is. appalling.
[http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca...](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-
papers-citation-rates-remler/) Social "science" is even more terrifying in my
view. 25% of social sciencist identity as Marxist.
[https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht...](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html)

I don't know how anyone can see these statistics and not think that there is a
crisis.

I nearly took history at undergraduate. My colleague has an English degree but
now works in CS with me. What's shocking is that, at age 16, we're meant to
make these huge decisions for our lives and we really have no clue about the
ramifications.

~~~
thesagan
A lot of them are Marxists because they’ve studied it.

I’m not exactly Marxist but I’m more terrified by those who judge his works
without having legitimately studied it critically and in depth under
supervision.

He’s a lightning rig for prejudice and too many people equate Marx with
Stalin, or believe him to have caused Stalin.

~~~
jhbadger
He's not the same as Stalin, but he certainly caused him. Marx was basically
the founder of a secular religion and like the theistic kind, religions
attract scoundrels because they see it as a way to power. Stalin himself
studied to be a priest before he changed religions.

~~~
thesagan
Marx wasn't the first, and he wasn't the last to argue for a community/worker
owned and operated economic system. He's just the best known. He might have
co-written written a manifesto, but had he not another would very likely have.
It was a long time coming. But that's really besides my point.

Importantly, Marx did not advocate for a totalitarian political regime. That's
a big deal, because that's a defining element of Stalinism. Marx didn't cause
that aspect; the aspect that people actually detest. Stalin did. His military
underlings did.

I'll say it again, because it's very misunderstood, generally speaking: Marx
did not advocate totalitarianism.

Another underlying point is that violent men come from many places, and given
the conditions of early 20th century Russia, I would argue the Russians would
have had their violent revolution and totalitarian regime, Marxism or not.
Like the French had happen to them. Violence begets violence, and Russia,
under their monarchy, was an ugly place and had been for a very long time.

So, Stalin was probably coming no matter what, I hate to say. And he was a
totalitarian, unlike Marx.

Interesting side note: Stalin was a darling in the U.S. before we demonized
him after we were done with the War. Kind of like Saddam Hussein.

~~~
vixen99
Karl Marx (Capital) “You are horrified at our intending to do away with
private property ..."

Did a military underling write that?

Try asking anyone at all what their views are on a suggested policy saying "we
will make it impossible for you to own private property!" It's delusional to
imagine that such a program could not be accomplished without a totalitarian
revolution.

~~~
genericid
Do you understand the difference between private and personal property?

------
jabberslocku
The crisis is that students are wracking up debt for degrees that will take,
on average, 22 years to pay off and have a less than 10% chance of actually
being useful for their chosen jobs.

If you want to study humanities, then there are dozens and hundreds of
resources available for free or very little financial cost to you.

I took a humanities "education" in my spare time over 5 year span because I
love the arts, philosophy.

But I got an actual degree where I can give substantial value to society (as
measured in income)

