10 ms·

New data on college majors confirms old trend: technocracy is crushing humanism

71 points by faizshah 8y ago

jseliger 8y ago
I've been to grad school in English and taught humanities classes for ten years. In many respects, humanists have their own habits and beliefs to blame: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/08/08/oh-the-humanities https://jakeseliger.com/2018/08/08/oh-the-humanities. I'm surprised the reckoning has taken this long to arrive, or be noticed.
- woah 8y ago
  Well written post
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Your objection to the humanities as it is taught today is that it has veered toward what is useful. That is true, but that is not what is shifting people from the humanities. What is useful to society is not necessarily useful to the individual, so people veer to engineering to get their paycheck. Sticking to what is beautiful without regard to any application to society would not have saved the humanities either.
angersock 8y ago
Humanists crawled up their own asses in very public ways, and they can't pay the bills. STEM won out from sheer practicality.
- dang 8y ago
  This is a crap comment that breaks the site guidelines. You can do better than this. Please do, or don't post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Alex3917 8y ago
> But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed. This is actually pretty insightful for an NYT piece.
- gascan 8y ago
  a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. I hadn't thought of it like that, but upon reading this, suddenly it seems so clearly true.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  I'll withhold comment about the religious aspects, but I think I would like to see more academic interest in what it means to "live the good life" in a developing era of high technology, with an anxiety-inducing attention economy, lower-cost material needs but increasingly tempting highly marketed material wants and positional goods (an economy in the style of Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over"). Teach people enough to critically understand whether progress is a treadmill, and whether the treadmill is worth getting off. There is evidence (higher suicide rates, and depression rates, although depression rates may be influenced by underlying trends in clinical technique) that all this progress doesn't make us any happier. Keeping up with the Joneses to compete for status results in a pretty shitty nash equilibrium when there are a billion people in the world. It feels like any and all effort that the humanities put into making an actual impact on modern day life is just lashing out at power structures. This can help achieve equality in the long run, but for student's who are studying these topics, it does not provide anything actionable to their own lives. Academic Philosophy is applicable to a student's current and future life, but the way that it is studied only rarely provides a grounding foundation for a personal lifestyle philosophy.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Some (lots of?) of 'humanism' means 'superstition and myth'. I'm glad those things are on the way out.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  Including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
- lucas_membrane 8y ago
  So 'humanism' means the opposite of 'Humanism'? How can we debate on a level playing field if one set of goalposts sounds just like the other?
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Not debating anything. Anyway, the OP defined the issue as the decline in history, philosophy, religion. Thus my comment.
ng12 8y ago
I would have loved to major in a "humanist" major -- probably history or anthropology. Unfortunately education and living are expensive and life in an ivory tower doesn't pay.
mattnewton 8y ago
While reading, I just kept thinking the old Clinton campaign quote “It’s the economy, stupid!”. In other words, we sold a generation on college being the way to middle class or better jobs, and there aren’t many middle class or better jobs that require humanities degrees. There are no apollonites leading the charge, it’s each person individually looking at what it will take to pay down their debt everyone told them to take on, and realizing poetry and French literature won’t help the majority of the time. The post briefly adresses this but then goes off on how we need more inquiry into religious truths and less of the “Very Online”. Maybe I am possessed by Apollo and that has left me unable to understand how that would ever work. Any change that doesn’t directly adress the economic incentives will work only on those who have hereditary wealth and don’t need to care about those incentives at 18.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  This really seems to be one of the important problems (not the only one and I certainly wouldn't want to write a thesis here) Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places. Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    A humanities degree in the 70s/80s also wouldn't subject you to endless contempt and disrespect.
  - curun1r 8y ago
    It's really the result of a shift in mindset about education from primarily being about the benefit to society to one where the primary benefit is to the educated individual. I unfortunately can't find it anywhere, but I remember reading an interesting Rolling Stone article that traced the shift in thinking to Ronald Reagan, first during his governorship of California and eventually during his presidency. What happens when you start viewing education that way is that you start subjecting it to the laws of supply and demand. If you view an education as having hundreds of thousands of dollars of value for a graduate, you start to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of getting that education. When it was viewed primarily as a public service that people did to become better citizens, there was more emphasis on cost controls since the state was shouldering more of the burden cost. Once that shift in mindset happened, or so posited the article, the increase in the cost of education that we've seen over the past 3 decades becomes an inevitable conclusion of schools closing the gap between what they charge and what people are willing to pay. And once education becomes this expensive, the move towards STEM and away from humanities also becomes inevitable so long as both degrees are roughly the same cost. If the humanities want to survive and thrive in today's educational environment, they need to figure out how to charge significantly less for that degree. If a humanities grad can emerge into the job market with $20k in debt compared to a STEM major that comes out with 10x that, you might see more people choosing the humanities route.
CompelTechnic 8y ago
Committing 4 years of your life to study various artistic works and social studies is a luxury, and it does have value. Good career prospects are not part of this value proposition. I wonder how much better-informed current rising freshmen are about career prospects after seeing the fallout of the great recession. I wonder where they get their research for choosing their college majors.
- wvenable 8y ago
  > Good career prospects are not part of this value proposition This is a relatively new situation. It wasn't long ago that having a degree humanities was sufficient to get an entry level position for a good middle-class job. Now college/university is seen as a necessity, that is no longer sufficient to stand-out career-wise.
  - treespace8 8y ago
    It’s the slow disaster that seems to be ignored. People want a roadmap to secure job. Or at least a secure field. Without proper guidance on how to achieve this modest goal young adults lose valuable productive years of their life.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
vlunkr 8y ago
A decline in students majoring in humanist subjects doesn't necessarily correlate with a decline in humanism itself. The real issue is that if you're going to go into crazy debt for an education you better pick something that will get you out of debt. You can still study these things in an unofficial way.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  Assimilating a meaningful part of the canon requires a considerable time investment. For many people, university is the only time in their lives they will have that time for reading. Sadly, you just cannot expect the average working person (especially after they become parents to child) to maintain time and motivation for such a program of study.
- throwaway427 8y ago
  Yeah but if you live in New York or Washington DC credentials are more important than substance.
defnotadog 8y ago
I was lucky enough to go an engineering school that required us to take a lot of humanities. In retrospect, I wish I had taken more than the minimum. I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. I have plenty of friends in humanities who took the bare minimum which was only one class (physics for poets or something similar) and a lab (which could be psych or some other soft science).
- joanofarf 8y ago
  >I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. This. And incorporating more technology/computing into the humanities themselves.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    Exactly. Both fields have so much they can learn from each other. I'm really glad that I ended up doing a STEM major with a humanities minor (almost double major, but class fell through final semester). It taught me a lot and I'd say I definitely learned more useful skills in my humanities courses, working as a teacher now (of a STEM subject). There's just so much STEM fields can't teach, like how to interact with and understand other people; it's just not something that can be boiled down to a science.
skadamou 8y ago
I think that a populace educated in the humanities is an immense societal good. Of course, this view is informed by my own personal interest in these subjects and has little to do with the economic incentives college students must consider. I was able to balance these interests by attending a school with a “liberal arts” slant and choosing to major in a science. I think I got some quality exposure to the humanities in my gen ed courses but was still able to obtain an (economically) valuable degree.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  I completely agree. I'm a teacher in a STEM field who graduated with a STEM degree and a humanities minor. I've honestly found my humanities minor to be much more beneficial when dealing with students, and I wish we could convince them to interact with the humanities more in secondary school, as I think it would do them a load of good. Just like I think it would do everyone good. Though, of course, that's not to say we can't incorporate STEM aspects into humanities courses as well. I'm certain there's new ways to analyze things that opens up with computers, and everyone should be scientifically literate (and mathematically literate, but that might be the math teacher coming out in me)
Phantasmagoria 8y ago
If the singularity comes to pass the humanities subjects and the very concept of the human condition will become as intelligible as the Voynich manuscript.
leroy_masochist 8y ago
I really disagree with the thesis of this article, namely, that the decreasing number of humanities majors at elite schools is reflective of overall cultural decline. It's not because of cultural decline, it's because there's been a leveling of the playing field wherein competition has gotten a lot fiercer on two fronts: it's generally harder to get into elite colleges, and top-tier employers look at a broader range of schools than they used to. Put another way, being born into a wealthy family, attending Suburb Country Day and then spending a few years at boarding school is less of a tailwind for getting into Harvard than it used to be; and also, going to Harvard is less of a tailwind for getting a top-tier job than it used to be. So, the applicant pool to Harvard is less wealthy and more scrappy and pragmatic; and also, students once at Harvard make more practical decisions with regard to what they choose to study. To give an example of an industry I know firsthand, as a (relatively) recent Goldman IBD alum I can tell you that there's been a profound shift in analyst recruiting over the last couple decades. 20 years ago, NESCAC alumni with humanities degrees were like half the analyst class and state school grads (other than Wharton) were an endangered species. Today the senior partner in your group might have a history degree from Williams, but few if any of the analysts do. This is reflective of increased competition, not disenlightenment. And it's a good thing. The state school finance majors are better investment bankers and deserve the opportunity more.
- ricraz 8y ago
  "State school grads (other than Wharton)" Can't tell if ignorance or top-tier trolling.
  - leroy_masochist 8y ago
    If you work on Wall St and are not a Wharton grad it is your sacred duty to troll them whenever possible.
    - jakeinspace 8y ago
      You are probably aware but for those who do not know, Penn (University of Pennsylvania) is not a state school, Penn State is.
chapium 8y ago
If humanist degrees don’t pay, perhaps the supply exceeds the demand for this knowledge.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Not everything can be readily explained by trotting out free market dogma.
  - sodafountan 8y ago
    I mean it's kind of a trivial statement to make but it's not wrong.
  - yellowcherry 8y ago
    No, not everything. But this can be.
  - jerf 8y ago
    If we don't "free market dogma" applying to college major decisions, then we've got to figure out how to make it so choosing humanities is not signing up for a near-lifetime of debt with no practical way of discharging it. If there is any discipline for which it make absolutely, utterly no sense that college today is so many multiples more expensive than it was 50 years ago, it's the humanities. Have books gotten more expensive? No. A huge chunk of the material is public domain, so it's not licensing problems. We shouldn't need more administrators, we should need massively fewer what with computers taking care of all the tedious paperwork. The teachers involved are making maybe a couple of times more than what they would have 50 years ago, inflation adjusted, and a great deal of them are making less than they did back then, as associate professors. Where is all the money going?
    - gammarator 8y ago
      > Where is all the money going? It's complicated? And depends on if you're talking about elite private universities, middle-tier state schools, for-profit schools, etc. Most classes of schools have larger administrations: some are just bloat, of course, but others are managing demand for increased student services, greater requirements on compliance for federal grants, increased desire to woo wealthy private donors, etc. Virtually all classes of universities are trying to expand their facilities and update or maintain their physical plants; this becomes an arms race when students are paying full freight--who will pay in the high five figures yearly to attend some place with run-down buildings? Elite universities have sharply expanded financial aid as they have broadened their student bodies beyond the already wealthy. For-profit schools charge what they can and direct the extra to shareholders, propped up by federal student loans; this has led to a wide range of abuses. Finally, we must not forget that there has been a major effort to defund public higher education. Rather than casting a university degree as something that other citizens benefit from, it's depicted as purely a private good that students themselves should pay for. See "Unmaking the Public University" by Newfield. In this case the "higher tuition" is not new money to the university, but shifting the burden of paying for the education from society to the individual.
rayiner 8y ago
Yay, we're winning!
fallingfrog 8y ago
Makes sense- it used to be that college was a place where the ruling class sent their children to be educated in how to be gentlemen/managers. The humanities were considered what such a person needed to know; an understanding of people and society, but not specific work skills since it would be the underclass doing the work. Now, college is increasingly a form of trade school where members of every class go to learn a marketable skill, in order to sell their labor. Not everybody can be a member of the ruling class, and people are realizing that. Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.
- frockington 8y ago
  I'd rather have management that knows its business/technology over a humanities major any day
  - derefr 8y ago
    Maybe you're picturing "management" on the wrong level. Think "Limited Partners in VC firms", not CEOs. Being in management—even being a CEO!—is still a trade-skill (it is, in fact, the quintessential haute-bourgeoisie trade-skill) and not the sort of thing you'd historically learn in college. Most historical "captains of industry"—think e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller—never went to college. College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.) Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.
minikites 8y ago
The humanities (and liberal arts in general) are important for a functioning society because they endeavor to teach people what it means to be a person in a world full of people. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/nussbaum-democracy-humanities-020912.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/nussbaum-democr... >Increasingly viewed as "useless" by politicians, humanities and arts programming is being replaced by technical training courses in sciences, engineering and technology in the name of economic gain. While technical skills are important for the future health of nations, Nussbaum said that they alone do not make for a fully educated student. Without people with a liberal arts background, she said, the world would be filled with "narrow, technically trained workers, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition and authority, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements." >These so-called soft-skills are essential for developing a "decent world culture" and maintaining healthy democracies, she said. Study of history and culture imparts the ability to approach global issues as a citizen of the world. Study of philosophy teaches the critical thinking skills that help us reason about our choices. Participation in the creative arts fosters an empathetic capacity and, Nussbaum said, "allows us to imagine the challenges facing someone unlike ourselves." >In closing, Nussbaum reiterated that the arts and humanities not only "shape people who are able to see other human beings as full people with thoughts and feelings" but also build "nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and well-reasoned debate."
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  I keep on seeing this unsupported assertion everywhere when the humanities are called upon to justify themselves or feel envious - that humanities are the best for critical thinking. Why does it mean that they can think for themselves when in many cases the humanities slavishly follow what came before even in face of evidence that says no it really doesn't work that way (people who look at Marx for economics for instance)? Why are social skills assumed to stem from them only? Why is the ability to divine objective truths about reality and literally prove something indisputably impossible or true not count as critical thinking? There is nothing more critical than seeing and stating "and yet it moves" despite what everybody thinks. The utility of humanities is done a great disservice by these arguments The author's very thesis is incoherent- complaining both about death of tradition and people not thinking for themselves. Complaining about advertisers while praising soft skills is a similar contradiction.
DubiousPusher 8y ago
Is it a little early to begin the lament when the average University requires 2 years of humanities before technical classes and not the other way round?
ibn_ibid 8y ago
You don't need college to learn the humanities. A library is free and most schools post class curricula online. I went to a very expensive private liberal arts school and they preached endlessly about the institution's power to create good citizens, engage in debate etc but to be honest the classes themselves were lackluster. It was the conversations after class on the lawn or over coffee or outside the library that really mattered and are the insights I remember after all these years.
andy-x 8y ago
I think many colleges like to attract a lot of international students these days (who are paying with hard cash). I doubt that many international students would ever go into humanities/social studies. Could that be a reason for relative shrinking of those majors? In general more hard statistics would be useful here.

71 points by faizshah 8y ago

I've been to grad school in English and taught humanities classes for ten years. In many respects, humanists have their own habits and beliefs to blame: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/08/08/oh-the-humanities https://jakeseliger.com/2018/08/08/oh-the-humanities. I'm surprised the reckoning has taken this long to arrive, or be noticed.

woah 8y ago
Well written post
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Your objection to the humanities as it is taught today is that it has veered toward what is useful. That is true, but that is not what is shifting people from the humanities. What is useful to society is not necessarily useful to the individual, so people veer to engineering to get their paycheck. Sticking to what is beautiful without regard to any application to society would not have saved the humanities either.

angersock 8y ago

Humanists crawled up their own asses in very public ways, and they can't pay the bills. STEM won out from sheer practicality.

dang 8y ago
This is a crap comment that breaks the site guidelines. You can do better than this. Please do, or don't post. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Alex3917 8y ago

> But a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible (I would say likely) truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual and the Very Online, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian Machine that Jacobs’s Christian humanists opposed. This is actually pretty insightful for an NYT piece.

gascan 8y ago
a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink. I hadn't thought of it like that, but upon reading this, suddenly it seems so clearly true.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
CompelTechnic 8y ago
I'll withhold comment about the religious aspects, but I think I would like to see more academic interest in what it means to "live the good life" in a developing era of high technology, with an anxiety-inducing attention economy, lower-cost material needs but increasingly tempting highly marketed material wants and positional goods (an economy in the style of Tyler Cowen's "Average is Over"). Teach people enough to critically understand whether progress is a treadmill, and whether the treadmill is worth getting off. There is evidence (higher suicide rates, and depression rates, although depression rates may be influenced by underlying trends in clinical technique) that all this progress doesn't make us any happier. Keeping up with the Joneses to compete for status results in a pretty shitty nash equilibrium when there are a billion people in the world. It feels like any and all effort that the humanities put into making an actual impact on modern day life is just lashing out at power structures. This can help achieve equality in the long run, but for student's who are studying these topics, it does not provide anything actionable to their own lives. Academic Philosophy is applicable to a student's current and future life, but the way that it is studied only rarely provides a grounding foundation for a personal lifestyle philosophy.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Some (lots of?) of 'humanism' means 'superstition and myth'. I'm glad those things are on the way out.

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
Including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
lucas_membrane 8y ago
So 'humanism' means the opposite of 'Humanism'? How can we debate on a level playing field if one set of goalposts sounds just like the other?
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Not debating anything. Anyway, the OP defined the issue as the decline in history, philosophy, religion. Thus my comment.

ng12 8y ago

I would have loved to major in a "humanist" major -- probably history or anthropology. Unfortunately education and living are expensive and life in an ivory tower doesn't pay.

mattnewton 8y ago

While reading, I just kept thinking the old Clinton campaign quote “It’s the economy, stupid!”. In other words, we sold a generation on college being the way to middle class or better jobs, and there aren’t many middle class or better jobs that require humanities degrees. There are no apollonites leading the charge, it’s each person individually looking at what it will take to pay down their debt everyone told them to take on, and realizing poetry and French literature won’t help the majority of the time. The post briefly adresses this but then goes off on how we need more inquiry into religious truths and less of the “Very Online”. Maybe I am possessed by Apollo and that has left me unable to understand how that would ever work. Any change that doesn’t directly adress the economic incentives will work only on those who have hereditary wealth and don’t need to care about those incentives at 18.

raverbashing 8y ago
This really seems to be one of the important problems (not the only one and I certainly wouldn't want to write a thesis here) Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places. Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  A humanities degree in the 70s/80s also wouldn't subject you to endless contempt and disrespect.
- curun1r 8y ago
  It's really the result of a shift in mindset about education from primarily being about the benefit to society to one where the primary benefit is to the educated individual. I unfortunately can't find it anywhere, but I remember reading an interesting Rolling Stone article that traced the shift in thinking to Ronald Reagan, first during his governorship of California and eventually during his presidency. What happens when you start viewing education that way is that you start subjecting it to the laws of supply and demand. If you view an education as having hundreds of thousands of dollars of value for a graduate, you start to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of getting that education. When it was viewed primarily as a public service that people did to become better citizens, there was more emphasis on cost controls since the state was shouldering more of the burden cost. Once that shift in mindset happened, or so posited the article, the increase in the cost of education that we've seen over the past 3 decades becomes an inevitable conclusion of schools closing the gap between what they charge and what people are willing to pay. And once education becomes this expensive, the move towards STEM and away from humanities also becomes inevitable so long as both degrees are roughly the same cost. If the humanities want to survive and thrive in today's educational environment, they need to figure out how to charge significantly less for that degree. If a humanities grad can emerge into the job market with $20k in debt compared to a STEM major that comes out with 10x that, you might see more people choosing the humanities route.

CompelTechnic 8y ago

Committing 4 years of your life to study various artistic works and social studies is a luxury, and it does have value. Good career prospects are not part of this value proposition. I wonder how much better-informed current rising freshmen are about career prospects after seeing the fallout of the great recession. I wonder where they get their research for choosing their college majors.

wvenable 8y ago
> Good career prospects are not part of this value proposition This is a relatively new situation. It wasn't long ago that having a degree humanities was sufficient to get an entry level position for a good middle-class job. Now college/university is seen as a necessity, that is no longer sufficient to stand-out career-wise.
- treespace8 8y ago
  It’s the slow disaster that seems to be ignored. People want a roadmap to secure job. Or at least a secure field. Without proper guidance on how to achieve this modest goal young adults lose valuable productive years of their life.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

vlunkr 8y ago

A decline in students majoring in humanist subjects doesn't necessarily correlate with a decline in humanism itself. The real issue is that if you're going to go into crazy debt for an education you better pick something that will get you out of debt. You can still study these things in an unofficial way.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
Assimilating a meaningful part of the canon requires a considerable time investment. For many people, university is the only time in their lives they will have that time for reading. Sadly, you just cannot expect the average working person (especially after they become parents to child) to maintain time and motivation for such a program of study.
throwaway427 8y ago
Yeah but if you live in New York or Washington DC credentials are more important than substance.

defnotadog 8y ago

I was lucky enough to go an engineering school that required us to take a lot of humanities. In retrospect, I wish I had taken more than the minimum. I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. I have plenty of friends in humanities who took the bare minimum which was only one class (physics for poets or something similar) and a lab (which could be psych or some other soft science).

joanofarf 8y ago
>I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. This. And incorporating more technology/computing into the humanities themselves.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Exactly. Both fields have so much they can learn from each other. I'm really glad that I ended up doing a STEM major with a humanities minor (almost double major, but class fell through final semester). It taught me a lot and I'd say I definitely learned more useful skills in my humanities courses, working as a teacher now (of a STEM subject). There's just so much STEM fields can't teach, like how to interact with and understand other people; it's just not something that can be boiled down to a science.

skadamou 8y ago

I think that a populace educated in the humanities is an immense societal good. Of course, this view is informed by my own personal interest in these subjects and has little to do with the economic incentives college students must consider. I was able to balance these interests by attending a school with a “liberal arts” slant and choosing to major in a science. I think I got some quality exposure to the humanities in my gen ed courses but was still able to obtain an (economically) valuable degree.

dorchadas 8y ago
I completely agree. I'm a teacher in a STEM field who graduated with a STEM degree and a humanities minor. I've honestly found my humanities minor to be much more beneficial when dealing with students, and I wish we could convince them to interact with the humanities more in secondary school, as I think it would do them a load of good. Just like I think it would do everyone good. Though, of course, that's not to say we can't incorporate STEM aspects into humanities courses as well. I'm certain there's new ways to analyze things that opens up with computers, and everyone should be scientifically literate (and mathematically literate, but that might be the math teacher coming out in me)

Phantasmagoria 8y ago

If the singularity comes to pass the humanities subjects and the very concept of the human condition will become as intelligible as the Voynich manuscript.

leroy_masochist 8y ago

I really disagree with the thesis of this article, namely, that the decreasing number of humanities majors at elite schools is reflective of overall cultural decline. It's not because of cultural decline, it's because there's been a leveling of the playing field wherein competition has gotten a lot fiercer on two fronts: it's generally harder to get into elite colleges, and top-tier employers look at a broader range of schools than they used to. Put another way, being born into a wealthy family, attending Suburb Country Day and then spending a few years at boarding school is less of a tailwind for getting into Harvard than it used to be; and also, going to Harvard is less of a tailwind for getting a top-tier job than it used to be. So, the applicant pool to Harvard is less wealthy and more scrappy and pragmatic; and also, students once at Harvard make more practical decisions with regard to what they choose to study. To give an example of an industry I know firsthand, as a (relatively) recent Goldman IBD alum I can tell you that there's been a profound shift in analyst recruiting over the last couple decades. 20 years ago, NESCAC alumni with humanities degrees were like half the analyst class and state school grads (other than Wharton) were an endangered species. Today the senior partner in your group might have a history degree from Williams, but few if any of the analysts do. This is reflective of increased competition, not disenlightenment. And it's a good thing. The state school finance majors are better investment bankers and deserve the opportunity more.

ricraz 8y ago
"State school grads (other than Wharton)" Can't tell if ignorance or top-tier trolling.
- leroy_masochist 8y ago
  If you work on Wall St and are not a Wharton grad it is your sacred duty to troll them whenever possible.
  - jakeinspace 8y ago
    You are probably aware but for those who do not know, Penn (University of Pennsylvania) is not a state school, Penn State is.

chapium 8y ago

If humanist degrees don’t pay, perhaps the supply exceeds the demand for this knowledge.

jacquesm 8y ago
Not everything can be readily explained by trotting out free market dogma.
- sodafountan 8y ago
  I mean it's kind of a trivial statement to make but it's not wrong.
- yellowcherry 8y ago
  No, not everything. But this can be.
- jerf 8y ago
  If we don't "free market dogma" applying to college major decisions, then we've got to figure out how to make it so choosing humanities is not signing up for a near-lifetime of debt with no practical way of discharging it. If there is any discipline for which it make absolutely, utterly no sense that college today is so many multiples more expensive than it was 50 years ago, it's the humanities. Have books gotten more expensive? No. A huge chunk of the material is public domain, so it's not licensing problems. We shouldn't need more administrators, we should need massively fewer what with computers taking care of all the tedious paperwork. The teachers involved are making maybe a couple of times more than what they would have 50 years ago, inflation adjusted, and a great deal of them are making less than they did back then, as associate professors. Where is all the money going?
  - gammarator 8y ago
    > Where is all the money going? It's complicated? And depends on if you're talking about elite private universities, middle-tier state schools, for-profit schools, etc. Most classes of schools have larger administrations: some are just bloat, of course, but others are managing demand for increased student services, greater requirements on compliance for federal grants, increased desire to woo wealthy private donors, etc. Virtually all classes of universities are trying to expand their facilities and update or maintain their physical plants; this becomes an arms race when students are paying full freight--who will pay in the high five figures yearly to attend some place with run-down buildings? Elite universities have sharply expanded financial aid as they have broadened their student bodies beyond the already wealthy. For-profit schools charge what they can and direct the extra to shareholders, propped up by federal student loans; this has led to a wide range of abuses. Finally, we must not forget that there has been a major effort to defund public higher education. Rather than casting a university degree as something that other citizens benefit from, it's depicted as purely a private good that students themselves should pay for. See "Unmaking the Public University" by Newfield. In this case the "higher tuition" is not new money to the university, but shifting the burden of paying for the education from society to the individual.

rayiner 8y ago

Yay, we're winning!

fallingfrog 8y ago

Makes sense- it used to be that college was a place where the ruling class sent their children to be educated in how to be gentlemen/managers. The humanities were considered what such a person needed to know; an understanding of people and society, but not specific work skills since it would be the underclass doing the work. Now, college is increasingly a form of trade school where members of every class go to learn a marketable skill, in order to sell their labor. Not everybody can be a member of the ruling class, and people are realizing that. Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.

frockington 8y ago
I'd rather have management that knows its business/technology over a humanities major any day
- derefr 8y ago
  Maybe you're picturing "management" on the wrong level. Think "Limited Partners in VC firms", not CEOs. Being in management—even being a CEO!—is still a trade-skill (it is, in fact, the quintessential haute-bourgeoisie trade-skill) and not the sort of thing you'd historically learn in college. Most historical "captains of industry"—think e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller—never went to college. College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.) Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.

minikites 8y ago

The humanities (and liberal arts in general) are important for a functioning society because they endeavor to teach people what it means to be a person in a world full of people. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/nussbaum-democracy-humanities-020912.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/nussbaum-democr... >Increasingly viewed as "useless" by politicians, humanities and arts programming is being replaced by technical training courses in sciences, engineering and technology in the name of economic gain. While technical skills are important for the future health of nations, Nussbaum said that they alone do not make for a fully educated student. Without people with a liberal arts background, she said, the world would be filled with "narrow, technically trained workers, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition and authority, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements." >These so-called soft-skills are essential for developing a "decent world culture" and maintaining healthy democracies, she said. Study of history and culture imparts the ability to approach global issues as a citizen of the world. Study of philosophy teaches the critical thinking skills that help us reason about our choices. Participation in the creative arts fosters an empathetic capacity and, Nussbaum said, "allows us to imagine the challenges facing someone unlike ourselves." >In closing, Nussbaum reiterated that the arts and humanities not only "shape people who are able to see other human beings as full people with thoughts and feelings" but also build "nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and well-reasoned debate."

Nasrudith 8y ago
I keep on seeing this unsupported assertion everywhere when the humanities are called upon to justify themselves or feel envious - that humanities are the best for critical thinking. Why does it mean that they can think for themselves when in many cases the humanities slavishly follow what came before even in face of evidence that says no it really doesn't work that way (people who look at Marx for economics for instance)? Why are social skills assumed to stem from them only? Why is the ability to divine objective truths about reality and literally prove something indisputably impossible or true not count as critical thinking? There is nothing more critical than seeing and stating "and yet it moves" despite what everybody thinks. The utility of humanities is done a great disservice by these arguments The author's very thesis is incoherent- complaining both about death of tradition and people not thinking for themselves. Complaining about advertisers while praising soft skills is a similar contradiction.

DubiousPusher 8y ago

Is it a little early to begin the lament when the average University requires 2 years of humanities before technical classes and not the other way round?

ibn_ibid 8y ago

You don't need college to learn the humanities. A library is free and most schools post class curricula online. I went to a very expensive private liberal arts school and they preached endlessly about the institution's power to create good citizens, engage in debate etc but to be honest the classes themselves were lackluster. It was the conversations after class on the lawn or over coffee or outside the library that really mattered and are the insights I remember after all these years.

andy-x 8y ago

I think many colleges like to attract a lot of international students these days (who are paying with hard cash). I doubt that many international students would ever go into humanities/social studies. Could that be a reason for relative shrinking of those majors? In general more hard statistics would be useful here.