Ten years have passed since the 2008 financial crisis, and the effects linger. For one thing, the crisis produced a significant shift in American higher education. Scared by a seemingly treacherous labor market, since the downturn college students have turned away from the humanities and towards job-oriented degrees.
It’s not clear they are making the right decision.
The humanities were humming along prior to 2008, according to an analysis by the Northeastern University historian Benjamin Schmidt. Over the previous decade, disciplines like history, philosophy, English literature, and religion were either growing or holding steady as a share of all college majors. But in the decade after the financial crisis, all of these majors took a nosedive.
The popularity of the history major is an illustrative example. From 1998 to 2007, the share of college students graduating with a degree in history averaged around 2%. By 2017, it had fallen closer to 1%. (All data in this article are based on reports that colleges submit to the US Department of Education.)
Other humanities majors saw a similar fall. “Declines have hit […]
This is not a function of the economic crisis of 2008, but is a result of the amount and structure of student debt. Why choose a major where the student cannot pay the debt? Especially if that debt will remain after a bankruptcy judgement. Students are making rational choices based on the information they have at hand.
I agree with the last statement in this article which says that the Humanities would be a way for young people to make changes in the government so as to alter the negativity of the Trump administration. Ever since I read “Forbidden Archeology”, subtitled “The Hidden History if the Human Race”, and other books like it, I have been interested how many lost civilizations have come and gone and what caused their downfall. We may never know how many Countries have gone down because of people like Trump at the helm. The records are not really as established as they might seem just by looking at what is being taught in our schools. Another side of this train of thought is: can we recover from the climate change issue by what methods are in place or being discovered now, or will we need a massive expenditure of capital to really find out and where will it come from, especially with conservatives in control, who do not seem to care about the future? We may not survive in the future unless drastic measures are put in place to overcome the prevailing paradigm. History is important!