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.
Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
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Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#12That 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
#13Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#14If 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)
> 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.
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#15Seems like the majority of US population has now become poor enough that taking getting a humanities degree is risky.
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#16I 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 internat…
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#17I'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
#18I 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 wo…
Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#19> 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 e…
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.)
Re: Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities
#20I 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 wo…
Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.