I thought this was a pretty interesting article, looking at the decline in enrollment in humanities courses at Arizona State and Harvard. The author looks, in a not very in-depth way, at some of the causes and some of the institutional responses/pressures. One thing the author does note is that there fields like the History of Science or Medical Ethics that do not get counted as humanities but have lots of humanities content.
My son was telling me that back in Victorian era one read Virgil because all educated people read Virgil. By common consent. You talked about Virgil at high society dinners. Over time the prestige of virgil declined. It was not held in any special high esteem anymore. Likewise what was considered prestigious changes from time to time. He was telling me that back in the day, for bright young people to go and work for the state department or the cia was prestigious. They may have studied Russian language and literature. Public service was cool â maybe this was during jfkâs time. Now there is less prestige in that. Prestige is now more diffuse now. Sensitive young men and women now ho and study environmental studies. Because they want to do something about it. This is the cohort that may have gone into the humanities in the past â the non profit minded crowd, less animated by pay. That cohort has moved on. They want to have impact. The majors they choose are less in the traditional humanities. You were never getting the money minded kid anyway. But over time you have lost the non money minded kid because their interests have changed over time. Environmentalism is just an example. I am sure there are several others like that. Perhaps a more accurate measure of drift away is to see by how much the stem and business majors have grown as opposed to the losses in just English and history. Those gains will be smaller, although still gains. Debt and the shooting up of college costs is obviously a factor as everyone is aware. Comparing with alternate professions in a hyper informed world is a factor â opportunity cost.
Also a natural exit for some of these humanities majors used to be Law. I think law is also in decline as a profession.
Law has been affected by outsourcing, and now probably ChatGPT will have a major impact as well. You just need one person to vet the output rather than a flock of associates researching and outlining cases. The well-structured nature of legal texts and arguments may make it particularly vulnerable.
I have a close family member who is a lawyer. That person works in international banking law/regulations. While itâs true that companies are doing more outsourcing of legal services, by and large, theyâre outsourcing some of the work to law firms. He/she has not encountered any organizations yet in their line of work using AI at all for legal analysis.
The above statement re: âyou just need one person to vet the outputâ is not necessarily true. If itâs a really complex topic or issue, sure, you could use one attorney, but you wonât necessarily get the best legal advice, based on what that attorneyâs experience and expertise is.
I thought the article made several good points about the decline in prestige of humanities among students and lack of interest in the study of historical texts generally. Apparently even Harvard students are not always prepared to read fairly simple works like Scarlet Letter anymore.
From Harvardâs dean of education, an English professor:
âThe last time I taught âThe Scarlet Letter,â I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentencesâlike, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,â she said. âTheir capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.â
The last two decades have been an issue of more competitive national and international markets and less quasi-oligopolistic dynamics, not technological change. Yet starting salaries at large international firms (where CC kids tend to end up) are above 200k⊠I think what we will see is firms able to develop and invest in technology will become more profitable and take over âpoorerâ firmsâ clients, and this in turn will raise again the costs of entry into the market keeping prices high, but no one has a crystal ball, not at this time. With all due respect, rushing to a broad conclusion on the decline of the legal profession is too simplistic an analysis for our CC audience which is looking for advice on major life decisions. Perhaps the same could be said for the decline of the humanities, which are too narrowly defined by many; video games are as much narratives as are novels. The imagining and building of those narratives require completely different skills and capacities than coding the games or marketing the games. The rumors of the death of the humanities have been greatly exaggerated.
Iâm sure it is true. But, schools like Harvard need look no further than their admission policies for the reason some of their students canât read at expected levels.
Legal salaries have a bimodal distribution (or maybe trimodal). The first group are the top 20 or so firms. They pay quite well. The second group are the other, often smaller firms. Pay was a lot less when I last heard about them. The third group, which probably pays the most over time, would be plaintiffâs firms that do class action lawsuits and especially shareholder class action lawsuits.
There are firms that use AI to do storage/retrieval of documents. They also use cheaper, smaller, foreign law firms for some tasks. But, I suspect that the ability to assimilate vast numbers of cases will be a task that AI can do better than most humans.
Back to humanities discussion. Those who are able to may wish to acquire a traditional prep school education for their kids where they read canon literature-that is the only place my kids acquired it, not in college anymore.
Yes, the difference in preparation of the kids arriving on ivy campuses ( and others too) is staggering. Some have read Beowulf; others canât read Scarlet Letter.
When I attended an Ivy back in the dark ages, I found the prep school kids were, on average, definitely better educated, especially in the humanities. However, the public school kids who were largely upper-middle and middle class were, on average, significantly brighter. In that era, it was probably easier to get in from prep schools.
And a major part of the problem is that at some of the Ivy League schools, including Harvard and Yale, you need little more than a pulse to graduate if you take the easiest classes. As my nephew said about his Yale education, âIt can be hard to get an A, but itâs much harder to get a C.â
Agreed, at least in the humanities courses. Perhaps that is why they are not valued as highly anymore. I do think even a C grade in math, physics or similar courses still requires some effort.