The Decline of the Humanities Major on American Campuses

Recently checking on the myth of STEM worker shortages I looked at what areas the American system of higher education is awarding degrees in--and found that the past decade has seen an absolute and relative surge in the degrees awarded in STEM fields, with this going not just for international students in the U.S. simply to study, but U.S. citizens--a change the more striking as there is no evidence of any great expansion of job opportunity in the relevant areas, improvement in the associated pay and conditions, or for that matter, improvement in the preparation of students for these courses of study. At the same time I was struck by the collapse in the number of students majoring in English--whose numbers fell from some 50,000 in the 1990s and 2000s to under 40,000 in 2018-2019, and just 38,000 in 2019-2020, which is to say from over 3 percent of degrees awarded to under 2 percent of them--with this seemingly indicative of a broader collapse of study of the humanities.

Just what is going on?

It seems plausible to imagine that the propaganda for STEM, STEM, STEM!, combined with the endless bashing of the humanities as economically useless, in a context where hard-pressed students are facing rising costs for and falling returns to college degrees (to the point of producing a situation akin to financial bubble), is having its effect on their choices. Distorted as the view is (the economic benefits of STEM degrees are oversold, and so too the image of the English degree as a ticket to working behind the Starbucks counter), students acting in this manner can still be judged as responding reasonably (at least, within the limits of the information available to them).

Still, there may be less reasonable factors in this behavior.

There is how the humanities have, I think, been damaged by postmodernism--by its obscurantism and its reactionary, misanthropic, divisive politics.

There is, too, the fact that people are not going to be tempted by the humanities unless they actually feel some attraction to things like literature, history, culture, the "life of the mind"--and I suspect that all this is withering in today's society. This is partly because of the anti-intellectualism in which American society is awash (turbo-charged by the direction of our politics); partly the debased level of a popular culture that is ever more audio-visual, disposable and frankly "dumbed down" (even the music we listen to, which is simpler, louder and more repetitive); and partly the failures of K-12 education in these areas (which get so much less attention than its failures in STEM).

Additionally, say what you will, the opening up of access to college has not gone along with access to those conditions that permit students to devote themselves to their studies. The majority of today's students are not leading leisurely lives on New England college greens but have their hands full with work and family responsibilities, and in many cases are dealing with genuine hardship. Perhaps one in three college students suffer "food insecurity" during their college careers. One in seven college students is homeless. And others who may be neither are selling their blood for the money with which to buy textbooks. When this is the case, is it any wonder that many have little to spare for the intellectualism that is an essential for an interest in the humanities? Indeed, as the longstanding epidemic of plagiarism of student papers demonstrates, while we are endlessly beaten over the head with "aspirational" stories of "triumph over adversity" (indeed, that such aspirationalism passes for "liberalism" today says about what that liberalism has come to, and in some sense always was) a far more common reality is students in very difficult circumstances trying to brazen their way through the system to that piece of paper they are told is their sole way out of the dead-end life they have already suffered too much from--and we must never forget that for a second if we are serious about discussing the very real problems posed by the state of higher education today.