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Popular College Majors Changed Abruptly After the Financial Crisis (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: 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 almost every field in the humanities... and related social sciences," wrote Schmidt in the The Atlantic. "[T]hey have not stabilized with the economic recovery, and they appear to reflect a new set of student priorities, which are being formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom."
Oooh, so that was the reason....people got wind of the uselessness of (most of) those degrees (especially the WAY they are taught), enrolment decreased, and the response of the humanities was.....the insane politicking and the march against logic, reason, knowledge, discipline, learning, critical thinking, diversity of opinion, open mindedness, freedom of thought and speech....etc.
Figures!
So degrees that were never big money makers in the first place are now huge financial losses since the economy has taken a hit, so people are avoiding them?
>It's not clear they are making the right decision.
I mean, if by "right decision" you mean "not bankrupting themselves", then I'd say it's quite obvious they are making the right decision to skip out on these humanities degrees.
There was a time (you know, back in the baby boomer days) when having a college degree was meaningful. It really didn't matter what the major was. Employers saw a degree and found that to be indicative of a good potential employee.
Today, college degrees aren't meaningless, they are a minimum expectation. Few
entry level white color jobs don't have a college degree as a minimum requirement to even get your application a set of eyes. But it's not even just the degree anymore. Entry level job postings will require a degree in a related field. That typically nixes humanities. So, parents and high school councilors know this and discourage studying humanities.
Honestly, I would discourage my children from studying humanities too.
perhaps you should check out the fact the "tenure is dying", the percent of tenured professors has taken a nose-dive.
College is big business, high paid employees are bad for the bottom line.
It's not clear they are making the right decision
How is it not clear that.a bunch of people turning away from History to study something they can use to get a job is the right choice?
Sure history is important, but not to the degree that we need a TON of history majors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The US perception of education is so broken its not about getting educated anymore it's about paying for a job placement. The conversation here is going to be nothing but how that imaginary pipeline is only served by technology focused disciplines. So what's the point of bringing it up at all as a conversation point. People here can't fathom why anyone would get a degree in history when there are bridges to be built and that's pretty fucking sad.
to a civilization. Contrary to popular thought you _can_ teach critical thinking. But you can't do it with Math. Math is too difficult a subject and there's no value in being 50% right.
As for why you want people to learn critical thinking, well, what's one of the first things a fascist does when he seizes power? Even before he goes after guns? That's right, they crack down on the intelligentsia. Fascism can't exist in a country of critical thinkers. People see past the bullshit.
As for why _you_ want to pay for the humanities (and with it a nation of critical thinkers), unless you get lucky and become one of the fascist's todies that doesn't get powerful enough to be killed (boy that's a fine line to walk, just ask anybody in the North Korea) then you're gonna be part of the working class. And do you really want to be part of the working class of a fascist dictatorship? Again, just ask anybody in NK...
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"Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying—in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market."
"Students aren’t fleeing degrees with poor job prospects. They’re fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they think they have poor job prospects."
"If the whole story were a market response to student debt and the Great Recession, students would have read the 2011 census report numbering psychology and communications among the fields with the lowest median earnings and fled from them. Or they would have noticed that biology majors make less than the average college graduate, and favored the physical sciences. Most 18-year-olds are not econometricians, and those that are were probably going to major in economics anyway."
"But most of the differences are slight—well within the margins of error of the surveys."
I think this is where Schmidt really messes up. Maybe some students are still not avoiding some of the bad economic choices, but I think after story after story of people who go bankrupt from choosing the wrong college degree and suffering from the college debts and being worse off financially than if they had gotten no degree at all, I think students listened to those stories.
"The top-paying college majors earn $3.4 million more than the lowest-paying majors over a lifetime."
Source:
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...
Millions of dollars seems more than a "slight" difference to me.
Schmidt left off a few important graphs: 1) The decline of humanities compared to the cost of college over time. 2) The average income by degree.
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The plural of anecdote is not data. However, I will share my counter example. I paid $35k a year for a philosophy degree back when that was about as expensive as schools got. Then went to law school, got a masters in tax law, and started at a six-figure job right after graduation during the worst part of the recession. Yes, it was very expensive ~$200k all in, but I paid my loans back within 5 years. I wouldn't change a thing.
The problem is not majoring in humanities- it's going to school with no particular interest or plan for what you will do afterwards. I know people who majored in hard science and struggled afterwards. There's not much you can do with a B.S. in biology or physics career-wise, but nobody jokes about the uselessness of a biology degree. If you want to major in those subjects, you need a plan for what you will do afterwards.
It's an interesting position to take. Humanities are required in the science and engineering fields - I had to take at least six classes of English, languages, arts or philosophy for my engineering degree.
Now universities are eliminating math requirements from humanities curriculums. Because, apparently, structured critical thinking skills are not required in a rounded university education.
At the very least make everyone take a statistics class. That's the one thing everyone seems to botch.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
A good student with a humanities degree has very marketable skills, particularly in language and communication. They can identify and rebut bad arguments, make convincing and valid arguments, and even make bad arguments sound convincing. These are commercially valuable skills. The problem isn't the "uselessness" of the subject matter expertise they accrue. Many of the programmers I know studied physics or math. My friends who studied electrical engineering? Coders. They haven't designed a chip since their honours project.
When's the last time NP-completeness or Turing machines were relevant to the typical /.er's work? It's a rarefied few who put to use their knowledge of compiler or kernel design. Nevertheless, the skills learned in mastering those subjects are the reason they are able to analyse and solve analogous problems. The same goes for history majors. The true cause of the fall of the Roman empire is lost to time, if there ever was a "true cause". But the skills learned by formulating arguments pro et contra Gibbon's views enable them to coherently parse and argue analogous debates.
The smart humanities graduates I know are bond traders (philosophy), lawyers (history, linguistics), bankers (English), marketing executives (classics), journalists (political science), and business owners (women's studies). The stupid ones serve coffee, just like the stupid engineers and computer scientists who work in tech support. The problem is that universities have allowed many more of the stupid to graduate from humanities programs than they have from STEM programs. It gives the rest of us a bad name.
Let's focus on the problem with humanities - the decline of academic rigour. And let's focus on the problem with universities - mass enrolment for profit. If we keep pretending that everyone should be going to university, and the trend of rising STEM enrolment continues, then it won't be long before standards in STEM subjects start to fall. Do your non-genius kids a real favour - let them study a trade.
Wait, so how did the story end? Are you posting this from inside a dumpster behind a McDonald's with free WiFi, or what?