Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
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Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
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Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#2The 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)
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#3If 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)
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#4That is ...good. We should be funneling more women and minorities into lucrative majors like CS and engineering.
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#5I'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?
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#6It 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.
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#7Seems like rigorous data science on the statistics of people graduating with humanities degrees. Doesn't that seem just a little bit ironic?
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#8I 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!
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#9I 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...
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/us-universiti...
[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/24/engineering-har...
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#10>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...