The fight for Humanities: How are Schools Responding?

Parent Cafe
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Over the past 10+ years, trends show students choosing STEM and professional degrees at higher rates than the past. The article below (from the independent, student-run publication) shows how my D21’s alma mater is fighting back against that trend.

"“There is no reason that people should not be majoring in the humanities because the outcomes are the same,” Gertz said.

She said Washington and Lee is making an effort to debunk the idea that humanities majors are less practical or employable. These efforts include organizing alumni panels, bringing more speakers to campus and holding info sessions for first years to give them guidance when they are deciding what major to declare.

Gertz also hosts faculty development cohorts, such as the career connections cohort and the medical humanities cohort, so faculty know how to develop coursework applicable to the workforce and prepare students for their future. "

What are you seeing at other institutions? Is this even a priority?

Deans work to bolster enrollment in humanities - RingTumPhi

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Maybe it’s school dependent, but when you look at the overall, it’s pretty clear that it’s not the case - from a % hired or salary.

It didn’t just happen by coincidence that kids are choosing certain majors and eschewing others, hence the pivots many schools are making - which often eliminates majors, often humanities.

I’m personally not anti-humanities - but I think their statement, on a national level is easily debunked.

As I don’t have a kid on campus, the only thing I see is what’s in the press and often put on the CC - as schools restructure - and more often than not, it’s the Humanities that are put at risk - in part because they are often low enrollment.

Even an LAC like Clark, which is laying off 30% of faculty:

Refocusing curriculum and academic departments around three key areas of strength that are most relevant to meeting the needs of a changing world — Climate, Environment, and Society; Media Arts, Computing, and Design; and Health and Human Behavior

Then you have a Montclair State cutting and the Professors think it’s nuts but the administration claims it’s to help humanities.

Some may be cut for political reasons - Indiana claims cuts of 100 programs are because they are low enrollment and many are humanities. Florida is also cutting. Critics say its politics.

Then others are just struggling to stay afloat - a Clarkson - Clarkson University’s board of trustees approved a reorganization plan this week that will cut down net operating costs and phase out all nine of its majors under the department of humanities and social sciences and the department of communication, media and design over the next three years.

Some cut a mix - including STEM - this is WVU:

  • biometric systems engineering

  • art history

  • technical art history

  • music performance: jazz studies

  • environmental and community planning

  • recreation, parks and tourism resources

  • Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French, German studies

Brandeis, never known for engineering, added a School of Bus and Econ and one for Science, Engineering, and Technology. These are themes that others like Richmond and Bucknell, Furman and others have had success. But one of their four schools is the School of Arts, Humanities, and Cultures.

So I think that there’s a lot of wonderful majors - but at least initially they are not all leading to similar outcomes - both in wages and hiring rates. And that data is pretty clear - and I’m not talking Amherst, Williams - but the overall landscape.

And frankly, colleges are business - and they are looking to meet the demand, and to find the spot where they can make a dollar - and that’s leading the change IMHO.

Thanks

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The quote may have have been taken out of context, but major no doubt has an impact on future employment. To say that outcomes are the same is at best disingenuous. Perhaps he meant that the vast majority of W&L grads in both groupings have good outcomes – usually finding quality employment or attending grad/professional school, within x months of graduating.

That said, it’s not a simple rule such as STEM = good, humanities = bad. The influence of major on post grad outcomes is far more nuanced.

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And not to beat the dead horse (since I’ve posted on this topic before and have been ROUNDLY criticized)- the kids who major in Petroleum Engineering because it’s a “Rock Solid” path to a good job feel a little &*)_$ when they graduate into a downturn in the oil and gas market (which is both cyclical AND volatile). The kids who major in Nursing because again- mom and dad wouldn’t pay for anything that wasn’t practical- will find a job. But maybe not the where and the what they were promised. About 15 years ago one hospital in my area closed, two others merged, and the third and fourth were acquired by a large out of the area health system. The result? Nurses laid off. The new cohort coming out of the schools in the area? No jobs. The headlines were incredulous- everyone knows there’s a nursing shortage, how can it be that nurses are now talking about moving to Colorado and Wisconsin and Georgia? How can we have too many nurses?

Well, five or six years later it all worked itself out, especially when the tenured nurses revolted against the new 12 hour shift scheduling and decided to retire. But if you’re the new nurse who were told you could write your own ticket and then all of a sudden nurses are being given lay-off notices and instructions on how to file for COBRA….

Again, if you love nursing, terrific. You will find a job. Maybe not where you want, but you will find a job. And if you love petroleum engineering, ditto- the pendulum will swing. But I know a LOT of young CS grads now piecing things together between part time work at the “Genius Bar” (not enough hours for benefits), substitute teaching at the local middle school, and their old HS job in retail. Not enough money for their own apartment and they are truly, truly feeling like they were sold a bill of goods. “Who could imagine that the insane demand for CS grads would evaporate?” Literally ANYONE who was alive in 2001, the early 1990’s, or every other recession.

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I think we see this often and now with CS - people chase the hot thing today. No one knows tomorrow and that’s part of the issue.

Some of these colleges are blowing up their business / academic model based on today. Will that come back to haunt them ?

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It’s hard to predict the labor markets. It’s even harder when you’re trying to provide an intellectual and academic experience, and not operate a trade school supplying employees ready for Goldman Sachs, Apple, Nvidia.

I WENT to trade school. A fulltime MBA program, which was pretty much a month’s worth of content stretched into four semesters. And it paid off- tripled my pre-MBA salary in my first job, put me on an entirely different trajectory for the rest of my career.

But nobody in business school was pretending that it was an intellectual experience.

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I encourage commenters to read the article about the approach taken to expose students to careers where a humanities major is “marketable”, to work with humanities faculty to develop curriculum in ways that demonstrate career options in humanities, etc.

Based on the comments, I’m not certain everyone bothered to read the article to get the full story.

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Foreign languages will be cut for two reasons:

  1. Low enrollment;

  2. Replacement by AI (Artificial Intelligence translator programs).

P.S. I read the article. Not much substance.

In my opinion, the best way to preserve humanities professors’ jobs is to strengthen distribution requirements so that STEM majors are more well rounded and can communicate in an effective manner outside of their STEM oriented team/peers.

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I’m not at a college, so I can’t speak from that angle. I have, however, sat on a number of interview panels. And I’ve gotten to see the writing that some of my colleagues have done. Seeing the quality of some of my colleagues’ writing, I would get very excited by seeing a resume of someone with a writing intensive major. What AI produces, in comparison with some of my colleagues, is of much higher quality. And these colleagues are not stupid, with some of them graduates from colleges that are currently very popular with quickly dropping admit rates.

So, the ability to write is important. The ability to think critically is even more so. Whether that’s avoiding email phishing attacks or being able to read a an elegantly written submission and see that it’s compete baloney, it’s really necessary.

If someone can show that they have those skills, that makes me excited. Those skills can be acquired in other fields besides the humanities, but my sense is that in this day and age, if someone is majoring in the humanities, it’s probably because they have a love for learning and not just because they want a job. And that love of learning is likely to lend itself to thinking critically and writing well. So a humanities major could be a shortcut to conveying that information, whereas there would be a lot more sifting to be done for a CS or business or similar major to see if they had those same skills.

And though humanities majors may start off with lower salaries, especially as shown in outcomes of earnings of new and young grads, I do believe that people who have attained high levels of those writing/thinking skills can end up in financially satisfying positions. It’s one of the reasons why I sometimes review the Georgetown study that looked at career incomes of schools. Money isn’t everything, but when comparable schools (i.e. schools with similar major distributions, regions, and level of admission difficulty) have very disparate outcomes in terms of career earnings, my assumption is that the school with the higher earnings provided an experience with sufficient rigor to make sure its graduates learned those skills, whereas at schools with the lower incomes, they may not have had a sufficiently rigorous standard.

For those interested, here’s the Georgetown ROI info. And no, I don’t take it to mean that a graduate will get an ROI of $1,532,678 if they attend X institution and $1000 more if they go somewhere else. But a $600k ROI vs. a $1.1M vs $1.6M vs. $2.5M does start to be more meaningful (not that the amounts will be that in the future, but that a 50% or 100% difference is a significant tell, to my mind, about the outcomes graduates are having from the institution).

ETA: I agreed with the student who bemoaned the need to careerify/quantify the career skills of humanities majors and that there is benefit to doing something just for the intellectual reward. But I also acknowledge that for some families/students, it can feel like a luxury that they can’t afford. In which case, the careerification of the humanities (public/applied history, or the term in Austin, or panels with alums) can be useful. So it’s good to show that humanities majors can get jobs, but it’d be a shame if people went into the humanities only to get a job.

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I read - it shows W&L has wealth that others don’t. Many schools are trying to survive. W&L isn’t in the position.

I noted above I’m not anti humanities but ultimately businesses need to adapt or die. That’s what we are seeing by those less fortunate wealth wise. They are meeting or trying to meet the demand of their populace.

W&L has a financial backstop. Clarkson, Clark, and Brandeis likely don’t.

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My assumption is the income distribution primarily relates to the individual students, rather than “sufficient rigor”. However, as you touch on there are many potential relevant differences among individual students – selectivity and corresponding portion of high achieving and highly motivated students, major distribution, portion interested in different career paths, location, etc. Looking at the link, the lowest 20 year NPV highly selective colleges I saw were as follows:

  1. Smith – $400k
  2. Pitzer – $400k
  3. Grinnell – $440k
  4. Scripps – $460k
  5. Carleton – $475k

Most of above have a ~20% admit rate. The highest 20-year NPV I saw that have a >=20% admit rate were as follows. I am excluding specialty pharmacy/tech/business/… type schools, which rank at the top due to major distribution.

  1. Lehigh – $770k
  2. Villanova – $690k
  3. Case Western – $680k
  4. Santa Clara – $680k
  5. Clarkson – $670k

Do Smith and Pitzer hit below their selectivity class due to not providing students an experience with a sufficiently rigorous standard? While Lehigh and Villanova hit above their selectivity class due to having superior rigorous standard? I expect it’s more likely to things I did not control for like Smith being 99% female, specific % choosing majors associated with higher/lower incomes, percent choosing career paths associated with higher/lower incomes, percent pursuing grad/professional degrees, etc.

For example, compared to other highly selective LACs, Smith has an abnormally high % majoring in humanities and non-economics social science, which probably relates to being 99% female. I expect they have a notably smaller portion of students pursuing career fields associated with especially earlier career high incomes, such as finance and consulting. While Smith has a significant portion pursuing engineering (6%), they only offer an engineering “science” major. Smith students were also far less likely to come from wealthy families than Lehigh, Villanova, or most of the colleges that are regularly discussed on this forum, in Chetty study. I think the bulk of differences in NPV can be explained by something other than “sufficient rigor” like this, if you drill down far enough.

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My children are or are planning to study the humanities. D22 is a history and communication double major at UCLA. My S26 plans to study philosophy and math.

For S26, we did a lot of research into various philosophy and math department websites and course lists. The differences between the content on philosophy vs math pages was often striking. The philosophy departments would go above and beyond to be inviting and encouraging (“philosophy makes a great pairing (double major or minor) with so many stem majors! Please come check us out!”) while the math departments came across as more reserved and clearly less interested in wooing prospective or current students. I remember this particularly at the University of Rochester, which I believe is quite STEM oriented. Their philosophy department was nearly begging people to join them for conversations and classes. It was clear that they felt the pressure to attract students.

I’m no fortune teller, but I agree with some recent articles that point out that many would be wise to consider studying topics that develop critical thinking, creativity, imagination and writing skills—those are human skills that can’t as easily be replaced by a machine. A new collection of roles will emerge out of AI—someone needs to prompt, guide, evaluate and innovate, and those who have been studying patterns, making connections and rigorously applying judgment to societal problems and opportunities may well be poised to be quite employable.

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It’s, of course, too early but it will be interesting to know when he seeks and lands employment, if it can be ascertained if the double major had any impact. I’ll assume and of course I may be wrong - that the math major will be what attracts employers to him.

I personally think it’s awesome that students study what they want, first and foremost. Some of these posts are heart breaking because kids are clearly studying things that isn’t their true interest.

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I 100% agree that rigor is not necessarily the defining factor for the differences in the cases you selected. But then again, I wouldn’t consider those comparable schools.

Schools in Silicon Valley will likely have much higher incomes than someone in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, not because of the rigor of the school, but because lots of colleges feed their regions, and the Bay area’s pay is much higher than those other areas. Alternatively, having a school with large proportions of business or engineering majors vs. one that has no pre-professional majors, even if the two schools are comparably sized does not equate to comparable for me.

Here’s a better example of what I would be more likely to do. Below is a chart with a bunch of not-so-selective small to medium-sized schools in the Philadelphia metro area. I know that St. Joe’s has a popular business program and Thomas Jefferson has a lot of health programs, so those might be skewed, and it’s possible there are other schools on this list that are much more specialized than others (I am truly ignorant on these). But looking at this data, I’d suspect that the schools higher on the list do a better job of preparing their graduates with rigor than those lower on the list. That’s not to say that there won’t be exceptions and that top graduates from the lowest ROI school could out-earn the people at the highest ROI school, or that there might be a specialist, rigorous school where everybody goes to serve as Peace Corps-types for the remainder of their lives, but if I were to start looking at schools for my kids that might otherwise seem pretty comparable, I’d start with schools on the top half rather than the bottom half of the list.

School 30-Year ROI
Saint Joseph’s $1,783,000
Thomas Jefferson $1,715,000
Widener $1,613,000
La Salle $1,589,000
Ursinus $1,533,000
Holy Family $1,500,000
Gwynedd Mercy $1,487,000
Immaculata $1,412,000
Arcadia $1,255,000
Eastern $1,110,000
Cairn $949,000
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I’ll focus on the highest and lowest schools on the list. The vast majority of students at Saint Joseph’s major in pre-professional type business or health fields. The most common major is pharmacy. Saint Joseph’s pharmacy graduates have median early career earnings of over $100k, as listed in CollegeScorecard. Next most popular are pre-professional health and finance, which also are associated with high earnings. In contrast Cairn doesn’t offer pharmacy or anything health related beyond their premed major. The most popular majors at Cairn are psychology and bible studies. Elementary education is also among top 4.

Again it doesn’t look like rigor is driving factor. Instead it looks like major distribution and career path distribution has a large impact on earnings, fitting with the thread focus. This also highlights the problems with looking at this type of ROI for college name list. It’s near useless without controlling for other factors, particularly major distribution and selectivity.

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One need just look at the rankings of salary driven publications - hence a Babson, Bentley, Bucknell, and Richmond do great…..much better than an Amherst or Williams, etc.

US News speaks to many - but perhaps for those full pay, the salary based rankings matter too.

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They didn’t show humanities type majors but Poets & Quants left this one in my inbox. Page 1 is majors - and STEM heavy.

Poets&Quants For Undergrads - The Best College Majors For Jobs In 2026

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For more quant-focused jobs, yes, the math major would attract employers.

However, philosophy itself does have a greater focus on logical thinking than other humanities, so it practices the type of thinking found in both the humanities and science domains.

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I’m a sociology major so not a “hard science.” I felt it was a good field that gave me good insights into nurture/nature, group dynamics, etc.

I do think that being able to write well and communicate well is very important and not as stressed in non-humanities fields.

My PT’s son wants to major in philosophy & political science and then go to law school.

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Washington & Lee is not unique in having a decrease in humanities majors. It’s been occurring at colleges throughout the United States for the past 15-20 years. In another thread, I reviewed the majors with the largest increases and decreases in completions at Duke, which is summarized below. In response to this trend, Duke was considering no longer offering some of the humanities majors that had low/no enrollment (some have had 0 enrollment for years).

Biggest Increases (with sample size of at least 20 students in 2025)

  1. Computer Science – Up by factor of 6.6x (60 students → 394 students)
  2. Statistical Science – Up by factor of 3.2x (18 students → 68 students)
  3. Env Science + Policy – Up by 2.0x
  4. Mechanical Engineering – Up by 1.6x
  5. Electrical Engineering – Up by 1.5x

Biggest Decreases (with sample size of at least 20 students in 2012)

  1. Spanish – Down by 5.3x (21 students → 4 students)
  2. English – Down by 4.4x (83 students → 19 students)
  3. History – Down by 3.2x
  4. Asian Studies – Down by 3.2x
  5. Cultural Anthropology – Down by 2.5x

I think the change in major enrollment is both a reflection of what fields students perceive to be prioritized by society, and what fields students perceive to have superior work opportunities. For example, the timing of the humanities decline started during the 2007-09 global financial crisis, but the timing also coincided with Obama’s 2009 Education to Innovate program, with stated goals “to increase STEM literacy, enhance teaching quality, and expand educational and career opportunities for America’s youth.” The program included over $1 billon funding for STEM education. During this period I expect students had increasing pressure from parents, friends, teachers, and the general community to favor STEM fields over humanities.

Employment prospects have also changed. For example, in Princeton’s senior survey, CS majors (BSE) reported an expected ~$180k/year comp compared to ~$40k/year expected comp for English majors . Students are aware that there is difference in typical early career employment outcomes, and that difference influences major selection. There didn’t used to be this extreme a degree of variation in early career earnings between majors.

There is not a simple solution, as it depends on external forces beyond the college’s control. Stanford tried a CS+X program a few years ago. The idea was students could combine a major in a humanities field they were passionate about like English or foreign language with a more financially pragmatic CS major, integrating the 2 fields in to a joint major. It wasn’t popular with students, so Stanford ended the program. Most students just wanted to major in CS, without the +X. The small minority who wanted to study the other humanities field were fine with a double major, minor, or just taking electives; rather than requiring a special joint degree.

I favor more of a hands off type approach and let these external forces influences major selection. If kids want to major in CS instead of English, let them do so. Eventually there will be enough CS majors to saturate the market or cause a change in employment prospects for CS majors, leading to a decline. There is some evidence that this decline may be beginning. For example, Stanford CS major enrollment by year is below. 2025 CS enrollment was lower than CS enrollment a decade earlier, in 2015. Stanford shows enrollment rather than completions, so their stats may show the CS decline before other colleges. Duke also shows a decline, with notably fewer CS completions in 2025 than 2024.

Number of Stanford Students Enrolled in CS Major
2008 – 141
2012 – 360
2015 – 661
2018 – 739
2022 – 776
2023 – 865
2024 – 791
2025 – 639