A new study is out reporting that the number of Humanities majors continue to slide.
Much of the decline in the humanities is traced to a collapse in the number of History degrees.
Meh. Things ebb and flow.
I graduated undergrad in 2013. My high school class was applying to colleges when the market collapsed. We went from “follow your dreams!” to “get a ‘marketable’ degree” almost overnight. So that drop doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Purely anecdotally, the number of enrolled history students at my U is up over the last year or two.
I also wonder if this takes into account the new integrated majors and programs which don’t have traditional titles.
2012-2014 graduates presumably entered college from 2006-2010 if they were full time undergraduate students attending continuously. It would not be too surprising if the drop in humanities majors over those cohorts of students were due to heightened concerns about immediate job and career prospects after graduation during the financial crash of 2008 and subsequent economic downturn.
Besides that, there is also the factor that the trend of increased college costs and student loan debt may also be creating pressure to study something seen as increasing the chance of immediately getting a job after graduation in order to start paying off student loans.
Of course, whether other majors chosen in lieu of history and humanities majors actually do offer better job prospects after graduation (immediately and/or in the longer term) is another matter entirely. But it is the perception that drives such choices, whether or not the perception matches reality.
Also, this “ebb and flow” isn’t limited to non-STEM fields.
For instance, there was a drop in CS majors at many Boston area colleges right after the dotcom bust of 2001 as it caused the unemployment or underemployment of many recent CS grads and those coming up for graduation. One friend with a CS masters from a respectable university was working as a floor representative for a big box store after getting laid off from a lucrative technology job because of that bust.
Some of those CS graduates/students ended up never working in their field as was the case with a rental car sales rep I chatted up while my friend was looking to rent a car. He graduated in CS in 2001 right into the bust and found himself unemployed and underemployed for some years before deciding to change tracks which led him to working as a car rental sales rep a decade later.
Also, there was a sharper drop in ChemE majors according to several older engineer relatives who remembered the '70s and early '80s as a period when the job market for ChemE majors was so bad* many were underemployed working as taxi drivers, restaurant/coffee shop waitstaff, etc. Even though one of my former supervisors was one of the extreme lucky few to land a ChemE related job upon graduation, the state of the market was such he switched over to CS/computer technology as many other ChemE majors did in that era.
- One common recounted joke among engineering relatives and their engineer friends about this phenomenon was how some parents would rather encourage their children to go to Hollywood in the hopes of landing a leading lady/man role in an otherwise star-studded big-budget Hollywood production as their chances of landing that were far greater than landing a job with a ChemE degree in that era.
I was on Facebook the other day. I think it was FB, I might have clicked on a link or something, I can’t remember. Anyway, I ended up on a guy’s site. He is a model from Hawaii. I’d say he was in his 20’s. Long hair, great tan, 8-pack abs, you know the drill. So, here is the point. His “job,” speaking of following one’s dreams, is to party and wake up whenever he gets around to it where ever his heart takes him with his amazing young GF and take pics of all the fun and post them on social media.
He then gets paid for that since they have a couple ba-jillion followers. I have no idea who “follows” guys like this I think i am too old and lame to know. How can college compete with that?
I mention this because, IMHO, college and following one’s dreams are somewhat incompatible. You go to college to get the skills you will need to get a decent job/career. You can develop all the other soft skills without college just fine although there is nothing wrong with developing those soft skills while at college. I think using college as a place to follow one’s dreams makes college sound like something it really isn’t or really shouldn’t be.
I hope whatever conversation that follows is civil. I am not here to offend.
As someone who is, for lack of a better description, and professional historian, I’d say a history degree would’ve prepared me very well for my career 
If getting the skills for a decent job/career and following one’s dreams are incompatible goals, there’s no shortage of students who follow their dreams in college. They keep gender studies and sociology professors across the country gainfully employed.
FWIW, the earnings of history majors are near the top of the pecking order among humanities majors, likely because they learn skills in college that open the door to a career in a relevant field - historical writing, museum work, etc. - or transfer easily to other disciplines.
Oh, please. Historical writing? Museum work? Those are positions that exist, but they don’t employ many people, and they don’t pay well. History majors do fine because the skills in studying history – collecting evidence, sifting through it, mastering records systems, reading carefully, ignoring prejudice, reaching judgments, communicating, defending, and revising them – are at the core of tons of productive work in the world that isn’t called “history.”
Agree that the incredibly high cost of college puts pressure on students to be able to go out and make a living after graduation.
For what it’s worth, my undergrad major was not history. (It was something far more useless- Arts & Humanities- what’s that???)
But anyway, I think there are far more public history jobs than people tend to think of. But yes, the majority of people in history (or any other major for that matter) will not get jobs with the title of their major in the name.
These types of things just bore me. Humanities aren’t going away. History isn’t going away.
But Zeus help us all if it does. As someone who specializes in the worst parts of US history, I’m already afraid that history is repeating itself.
History might be repeating itself but it isn’t because of ignorance of basic history it is because America is geting it’s butt kicked economically by Asia countries, lack of resources worldwide, etc. and that has caused anger so let’s blame the anger on (insert ethnic minority group here) and if we eliminate them America will be great again.
I think it’s very simple. Everyone currently believes the only way to make money is to study STEM. There will soon be a glut of STEM grads on the market, and eventually people will rediscover humanities, but never in great numbers. FWIW, my kid wants to study humanities, so all isn’t lost.
College needs to serve the student in two ways.
- give them the means to make an economic contribution to society.
- give them the means to be good citizens, put the world’s events in context, and arrive at their middle years with grace and without anger.
Hard to do 1 without 2; hard to do 2 without 1. I kind of like the idea of a STEM degree from a liberal arts school, or a liberal arts degree heavy with STEM electives.
I agree with @50n40w and that is one of the reasons my kid has applied mainly to LACs. The world is still going to need teachers, judges, librarians, etc… I also,think we are going to see more kids doing dual degrees for all these reasons.
At a college open house recently, an admissions staff member told me that humanities majors get extra points in admissions at her school because they have tenured faculty in departments like classics who need students. Finally, something that works in D2’s favor!
I’m quite jealous of our town historian, but even her job includes running events at the public library and her resume includes a stint of being a caterer.
Not related to thread content but to thread title: @Zinhead it seems like you named it after “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Nice one there.
I must admit that Gibbons, Spengler and that Time magazine top 100 female author Evelyn Waugh were inspirations for the thread title.
Not all STEM subjects are in economic demand (i.e. adding STEM does not necessarily improve #1 above).
However, some knowledge of STEM subjects is helpful in #2 above.
Science and math fall under the definition of “liberal arts”.
You do not have to go to a “liberal arts college” to study liberal arts.
My dream, growing up, was to be the first in my family to get a college education and a Bachelor’s degree.
I followed my dream, and it came true.
Oh, I also got a (white-collar) job after graduating.
With a humanities degree.