W&L has this:
“The university recently received money from the Hal and Barbra Higginbotham Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, which they plan to use to continue efforts to raise visibility and emphasize opportunities in the humanities, Gertz said.”
Do other schools have endowment earmarked for this? Would W&L be doing this without the gift?
While I appreciate all the sidebar, the point of my OP was to understand how various schools are addressing the declining “interest” in humanities majors. I understand some of these decisions are based on funding and public/private considerations, but setting that aside, I am curious how schools are addressing the trend, if at all.
Are they adjusting humanities curriculum to a light pre-professional approach? Is career counseling highlighting the marketability of these majors? Etc…
Or are they cutting those departments? (as in the Duke example someone posted above)
I think I misunderstood your original questions in the OP then. Perhaps adding more to the title might help? Something like: The fight for Humanities: How Are Schools Responding?
This is what Purdue says about their core curriculum which has humanities requirements:
The central motivation behind the core curriculum is to better prepare all Purdue students for future employment success and responsible citizenship. Recent studies indicate employers are seeking employees with a broad set of skills beyond their discipline-specific abilities. A well-rounded, broad-based core curriculum will ensure this need is fulfilled.
Put simply, the core curriculum will better prepare all Purdue graduates for future employment success. Employers are looking for potential employees who possess a broader set of skills beyond their academic discipline. The core curriculum will better ensure this need is met.
Additionally, the core curriculum will give students more flexibility in changing academic paths. Once a student fulfills a foundational learning outcome, the student receives credit for that outcome. If he or she CODOs to another program or college, all previously completed foundational outcomes will still be considered fulfilled.
The link to the courses and expected outcomes/requirements: Outcomes - University Senate - Purdue University
That’s the good.
Here’s the ugly:
The state of Indiana won’t fund any public university that has less than 15 students in a major for undergrad, and 10 for graduate programs.. That caused Purdue to eliminate 7 majors and do a consolidation/reorganization of departments. Their satellite campuses were much more heavily impacted than main campus and had to cut or merge 77 programs. Purdue campuses to cut or merge 83 programs ahead of new enrollment requirements
And the reality on main campus:
Purdue allows for using AP credits to fulfill its core. As such my D could have used APUSH, AP Euro, DE Gov, and AP lit to satisfy the sections of the core that she wouldn’t hit with classes for her major. She even could have tested out of her oral communication requirement if she gave an oral presentation to a team of professors. That would have led to needing to take no core courses as an undergrad.
Thankfully D listened to us when we told her that some of the best classes we ever took back in the stone ages were outside our major and the ones that we still talk about today. And, her honors college required a number of humanities courses. As it turned out, being enrolled in a unique communications class is how she landed her co-op as a freshman.
Good suggestion! I also bolded the question in the body of my post. Thank you!
Of course, that poses a problem in general (not specific to humanities or CS or any specific major) for colleges. Some aspects of planning may require a decades-long commitment, such as tenuring a faculty member. With rises and falls in number of students choosing any particular major happening much faster than that, a faculty’s departmental distribution may quickly become mismatched to student demand. So that may be a reason why colleges have been moving away from tenured faculty in favor of adjuncts and other non-tenured faculty who can be dismissed more easily.
I think it’s pretty clear, as a group, the Humanities are falling down as areas of study. But are they being incorporated (reading and writing matter) through a curriculum, perhaps.
I’ll analogize to my business though - just because we want something to succeed, doesn’t mean it will. We’ll develop a vehicle and decide why it should be successful - it’s small, it’s great for the families moving from suburban to urban. But guess what - the market doesn’t accept it? Then no matter - so schools can continue to try and find a home for these things or try to integrate - but if the market isn’t interested, in the end, they’ll go away.
Sort of like electric vehicles (outside of Tesla) - several companies went in heavy and flat out bombed - and now are pulling back all their investment. In some ways, a humanities class or degree are no different. A school can force but there has to be interest.
Interesting from the linked article below:
“As state universities across the nation face budget troubles, declining enrollments, and pressure to cut humanities courses and majors that have few students, some university systems are searching for innovative ways to restructure majors or entire universities.
The schools aim to continue teaching the humanities while also reducing costs and focusing on students getting jobs after graduation. For some schools, that means integrating the humanities into science or technology majors. For others, it means offering online humanities courses to students spread out on multiple campuses.
But the changes have sparked protests from some students and faculty who say the cutbacks will harm the quality of the courses and reduce the number of professors.
Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that to survive, the humanities must adapt.”
I think the “kids only want to study marketable subjects so that’s what colleges need to teach” is ignoring historical reality.
Yale had a Biblical Hebrew requirement at one point. Why? It was training young men for the clergy, and at the time, scholars (which is what clergy were considered before they became guidance counselors and ad hoc therapists and podcasters and mega-fundraisers and TV stars) could read and interpret the Bible in its original language. So Yale taught “marketable” skills.
What is considered a marketable skill changes and morphs over time. A university’s mission changes and morphs over time. I find the current anti-intellectual climate disturbing on so many levels, but I think it’s a mistake to just cast it as “anti-humanities”. It’s “anti-everything that doesn’t fit an agenda”. Epidemiology is not humanities. Virology is not humanities. Stem cell research is not humanities. Oceanography and Climate studies are not humanities. And anyone who thinks that subjects like CS, Engineering, Medicine, etc. are “neutral” because they are practical and vocational have clearly not studied the Third Reich (Mengele was a physician as were many of the most enthusiastic members of the SS). Or have not studied the Manhattan Project.
For those claiming that the humanities are dead- good luck living in a society where nobody understands the climate in which the Constitution was born, ratified and amended; where nobody can be bothered to understand the Bay of Pigs; where Watergate is a fancy address in DC which is a swamp which is being drained or whatever.
Wrong thread - but one can argue we are already here. Lots of “things” we should remember are long and gone - but this isn’t the spot for that discussion.
I do think there’s a wealth factor here. Wealthy schools can continue to carry on their educational mission while other schools have to focus on sustainability - and that’s why corners are being cut.
At least most every, if not every school, still has writing requirements. And the Jesuit or other religious schools seem to have an extensive core - that I assume won’t go away. But if you match that to the majors…..well, there’s not much and I’m guessing (but don’t know) that it’s a business decision. They borrow money - I know - because I lend to them - and they need to operate in a way they can pay their bills and I imagine, their “major” list is built to that.
The NNU Core Curriculum | Habits of Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength | Northwest Nazarene University
??? A flagship university cuts the humanities so they can redirect the resources towards vocational training– I thought that’s what the entire thread was about.
I remember when my kid’s middle school wanted to cut the time from an academic core subject so the kids could take a class and get certified in some programming language and packaged software product. The parents who did NOT work in tech, big company, etc. loved it. The parents who worked in related fields tried to explain that by the time their kids were old enough to get a job, technology would have moved on and their skills would be obsolete. So why not teach more math (the underpinning of CS innovation) instead of training the kids which keys to punch and in what order. Got very messy.
Resolved when the school couldn’t find a teacher.
An additional point I noted from our research—many of the philosophy course lists at the schools my son is applying to offer classes that are retooled for the modern age, with creative (even “Buzzfeedy”) course titles like “Bull$hit: how to spot it and how to protect yourself” and “Love and Sex” and “Philosophy in the movies.” Sure they offer all the flavors of typical philosophy coursework, but if someone discovers existentialism or phenomenology in a course that attracted them for less “academic” reasons, that’s a win for the department. We saw this most often at SLACs. Schools with a more pre-professional bent more often offer philosophy courses aligned to STEM disciplines — philosophy of medicine, physics, science, etc.
I think many STEM students do value humanities courses, and many work them into their course work (either because of GE requirements or out of interest) but don’t necessarily want to major in them. I think that’s ok, but it requires humanities departments to evolve how they think of their role within the institution. Maybe these departments would be wise to get to know their STEM counterparts and look for partnerships or “guest speaking” opportunities where a unit or topic in a stem class offers a look into their course from a humanities lens. Helping kids who have been wired toward STEM topics to consider history, philosophy, literature, etc within their stem context could be a way to elevate the humanities across the board.
Cannot answer this specific question. However, another question might be: How should colleges & universities address declining interest in humanities majors ?
If favorable, sell the results in terms that customers (students & parents) value. For Washington & Lee University that would be easy as it shows the second highest return (behind Harvey Mudd College) on investment of any LAC at the 40 year mark according to a study by Georgetown University’s CEW (Center on Education and the Workforce) shared above by @AustenNut. W&L’s ROI is phenomenal when calculated among 4,500 schools.
Approach the issue/concern by addressing a result about which most customers care ($$$$). The cost of higher education is too high to ignore the ROI. In large part, colleges and universities created the problem by the constant & rapid increases of the cost of earning a degree.
Yes and no - W&L has business and engineering - so you’d have to factor out those majors. I don’t know the #s, but if you believe Niche business is #1 and Econ #3. Of the top ten, only one would be (I thnk) considered a Humanity - English at #7, with 1/4 the students of business.
Look at Harvey Mudd - again per Niche -
CS - 55
Engineering 53
Go through some computational math, chem, bioinformatics and more - and eventually you get to what they call Liberal Arts and Humanities - 4.
This is why, in my opinion, schools like Richmond and Bucknell post their salary outcomes and other top LACs (without business or engineering) don’t. And those schools also outperform those perceived top LACs in college rankings that use salary as a metric.
So can W&L or Harvey Mudd truly tie their ROI to humanities? Even if a school has a core, when you are getting hired, it’s for your major. No one really thinks about what you did in your core - they wouldn’t know or wouldn’t care. They would know you have a degree in Computer Science or bio informatics or finance, etc.
Or am I missing something?
Regarding the question of how should, or could, schools respond to the declining number of humanities majors, a possible solution might be to utilize a different pricing model. Humanities majors would pay lower tuition than would those engaged in high demand majors. Could be done by awarding grants-in-aid for particular majors. Want to save a major in Classics, then offer a substantial discount to those who major in this academic area.
No. However, Washington & Lee University is selling Washington & Lee University degrees, not specific majors. Nevertheless, any school can sell a major via discounts specific to unpopular majors.
I’d like to circle back to this because one labor market that IS predictable now is the one created by AI, so we’d better start thinking about those skills necessary to successfully navigate this future. In an AI-saturated world, the value of the humanities as described by @Wjs1107 will only become more relevant as they sit both upstream of the machine and downstream of its output. I believe AI will eventually even out the ROI playing field between STEM and humanities.
TLDR: In an AI world, STEM may build the tools, but the humanities decide how and whether they should be used. Colleges are right to re-emphasize the importance of the humanities, but the message needs to be bolder and accentuate how humanities graduates offer the communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving expertise to know how to think about AI and how to supervise it. Our son lives in the technical depth of this world; I view it just as deeply from above. He and I often discuss how AI requires BOTH sets of expertise. It is not an either/or proposition.
Communication skills will become increasingly important. As AI floods workplaces with “good enough” language, exceptional communicators will stand out more, not less. The humanities teach people to frame arguments for specific audiences, detect ambiguity, manipulation, and hidden assumptions, and translate complex ideas effectively. Employers still need humans who can explain AI-driven decisions to regulators, clients, and the public as well as write policies, narratives, and messages that people actually understand and trust.
Critical thinking is how we will supervise AI. AI is excellent at pattern replication but poor at knowing when a pattern no longer applies, understanding causal vs. correlational reasoning, and recognizing ethical landmines it has never been trained to care about. The humanities teach students to question sources and incentives, analyze competing interpretations, and notice what is missing from a story which means that humanities graduates are well-positioned to evaluate AI outputs for bias, hallucination, or overconfidence. Critical thinkers ask better prompts and better follow-up questions and serve as the human “editor,” not just the user. In an AI world, uncritical acceptance is a real liability.
Problem-solving/imagination skills will be critical to properly define the problems we want AI to assist with because many real-world problems are ill-defined, stakeholders disagree on goals, and values conflict. The humanities teach students to hold multiple perspectives at once, understand tradeoffs and unintended consequences, work with ambiguity instead of rushing to false certainty. AI may be able to answer questions, but humanities graduates are good at asking the right ones.
Bottom Line: Technical skills date quickly. Interpretive skills age well. A humanities education prepares students to learn new tools rapidly, move across industries, and reframe themselves as roles evolve. In a labor market shaped by AI disruption, career resilience may be the most valuable outcome of all.
ETA: And let’s not get started on the ethical implications of this beast. Where are our philosophy majors?
And we see this - both to unpopular schools or unpopular majors.
and btw - when I go to Kroger, and something is marked down. Or we can’t sell a car and put a boatload of incentive on it.
A stock you wouldn’t buy - but the price fell 50% and now you buy.
Everything will sell at a certain price.
But then you might create two levels of service, etc. - should the person paying the lower tuition get the same access to things.
I know, via need or merit this happens, but can a formal business model be set up like this…almost like kids who go online pay less. Except these would need the same focus and attention….
Exactly. My daughter who majored in Classics did it for the love of it. She wanted to be a physician, but said teaching HS classics would be fine if plan A didn’t work. She is now a surgeon, but loves her Classics education.
I always hear this - and I don’t disagree btw - and even after AI, there will be the next thing.
But yet, society - consumers and then the businesses that serve them - are dismissing this argument. And have been for many years.