Should US politicians be cutting humanities courses?

Ebonee Rice-Nguyen constantly hears the talk, even from her friends.

A senior majoring in English at the University of Pittsburgh, Rice-Nguyen comes from Tyrone, about two hours to the east. It’s one of many small Pennsylvania towns struggling after the decline of their manufacturing glory days. In her high school’s graduating class of 120, only about half went on to a four-year college or university.

At Pitt – a leading public research institution – Rice-Nguyen has friends and classmates majoring in the sciences who expect jobs that pay $90,000 (£70,000) or better right after they graduate. She is less confident about her own prospects, but she does derive “some comfort” from data showing that humanities majors typically do well, too, at least later in their careers. “I look into those [data] every time I get a little stressed out,” she confesses.

The anxiety among US college students such as Rice-Nguyen appears to be widespread and growing. As the nation’s caustic partisan attitudes coarsen and spread into the world of higher education, one of the emerging ideological divides with particularly acute real-world implications is that between the left’s ongoing valuation of traditional liberal arts majors and the right’s inclination to much more aggressively promote job-centric training.

Increasingly, US conservatives with underlying hostilities towards the mission and atmosphere of higher education are latching on to the idea that its operations and components should be judged on the basis of their demonstrable contribution to what they regard as career success: high-paying jobs. And a growing number of conservatives are suggesting the direct use of government money and power to bring that about.

As with many of the era’s antagonisms, the most overt example may be in Florida, where lawmakers have been calling outright for the state’s main student scholarship to be limited to academic fields that yield the largest numbers of jobs with the biggest salaries. The state’s bombastic governor, Ron DeSantis, has put it in terms of opposition to the idea that “a truck driver [should] pay for someone’s degree in gender studies”. And he has begun appointing institutional governing boards that are shutting down courses they don’t like, notes Lynn Pasquerella, a former president of Mount Holyoke College who now heads the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), a group of about 1,300 institutions focused on the liberal arts. As she sees it, such draconian moves are part of “the existential threat that higher education is under today”.

Nor is Florida’s approach unique. Fellow travellers include Oklahoma, whose oversight board for public colleges and universities, the State Regents for Higher Education, is pushing the idea of giving higher pay to faculty who teach in higher-paying science and engineering fields. West Virginia University, the state’s flagship public institution, is trying to save money by making major cuts in programmes and faculty in the humanities, despite indications that those types of majors cost less to run. And Mississippi’s Republican auditor, Shad White, recently said in a report that the state should more closely focus its funding on subjects that match its workforce needs in order to stem its brain drain. As part of that, he advocates the defunding of numerous social science and humanities programmes. Subjects mentioned in his social media posts include German literature, sociology, anthropology, gender studies and women’s studies, which he dismissed as “indoctrination factories” and “garbage fields”.

“When you threaten the funding for the left’s favorite college majors, and want to spend it on majors that teach actual skills, they know you’re threatening the very thing that allows them to warp the minds of young people,” he tweeted.

More and more, US colleges and universities are being told in various ways by both local and federal politicians that they are spending too much money and that the solution may involve a targeted culling of liberal arts majors.

“There’s definitely more pressure to be job-centric,” says Pasquerella. And while her predecessor at the AAC&U, Carol Geary Schneider, doesn’t “want to say I’m in despair, I will say that it is extremely worrying that several forces have come together to reduce the part of the college curriculum that is most important to democracy and to a creative economy”.

The question of how closely education should focus on job outcomes is, of course, a timeless one. More than a century ago, the progressive educator John Dewey urged educators away from vocational training that “will ‘adapt’ workers to the existing industrial regime”, adding: “I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that”.

Generations of parents before and since have argued with their children over the importance of finding a prosperous career. And both race and gender have consistently played central roles in the value that society puts on particular jobs and, by extension, the majors that workers in those fields typically come from.

From the perspective of power politics, the debate is seen by some experts as just another marker of dysfunction, whereby conservatives chasing economic supremacy are increasingly hamstrung by their tactical alliance with those peddling social fears – and who are suspicious of the humanities for their supposed connection with liberal perspectives on social issues, rather than for their lack of application in the jobs market.

That has given higher education a world in which the Republican Party is funded by many corporate leaders who studied the liberal arts during their own college years and instinctively understand the humanities’ workplace value. Very few CEOs majored in business, Pasquerella says: “More likely, they were majors in English or history majors or other humanities [subjects].”

Virginia Foxx chairs the education committee in the US House of Representatives and sets for Congress a biting Republican tone on most issues. She, however, earned an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s in sociology and can preach at length about companies’ need for people who can read, write and think analytically. “I love the humanities,” she says. “I don’t care what job you do in this country – you need to be able to think, and you need to be able to communicate.”

Even then, it’s not that simple. Foxx grew up so poor in rural Appalachia that her family didn’t get a home with running water and electricity until she was 14. She worked as a janitor at her high school while she was a student there. Before getting into politics, she taught English at one community college and served as president of another. And during her time heading Mayland Community College, at the western end of North Carolina, Foxx recalls some local business leaders coming to her and telling her they could use some graduates trained in industrial maintenance.

The college had a tight budget, so Foxx embarked on a campus-wide review. She found that Mayland had a long-running programme in auto mechanics with two faculty that hadn’t produced a graduate in 18 years. She promptly rid the college of auto mechanics and added industrial maintenance. “That auto mechanics programme was helping 10 to 12 guys every semester fix their own vehicles,” Foxx says. “But it was pretty darned expensive. So I had to make a decision because the community needed this other programme, which had a much bigger impact.”

That, in sum, is her prescription for a nation with 9 million unfilled jobs and 40 million people carrying student loan debt. “What colleges and universities have got to [consider], and what people in legislatures, and we at the federal government, have got to [ask], is: What is the return on the money we are giving? What is society at large getting for it?” Foxx says.

The topic is also complicated for Bobby Scott, Foxx’s chief sparring partner in Congress. Scott led the education committee when Democrats last held majority control of the House and he too has pushed for greater job-focused accountability in the post-secondary world. But in line with the general divide between the two parties, Scott’s focus falls more heavily on for-profit institutions, as they tend to make far more explicit promises about their programmes leading to specific jobs.

That focus was also reflected by US education secretary Miguel Cardona when, in September, he announced new gainful employment rules, under which, from 2026, degree programmes at for-profit institutions (as well as vocational certificate programmes everywhere) will have to demonstrate that their graduates will be able to afford their debt repayments and that they will earn at least as much as the median high school graduate in their state. Failure to demonstrate this for two out of three consecutive years will see access to federal financial aid removed. “Higher education is supposed to be a valuable investment in your future," Cardona said. "There's nothing valuable about being ripped off or sold on a worthless degree.”

In general, though, Scott does not believe that politicians should be restricting student choice of majors since traditional colleges are designed to deliver a wide range of benefits. Scott is a graduate of two elite institutions – the Groton School, a private boarding school in Massachusetts, and Harvard University – and he criticises lawmakers “who feel emboldened to make the argument that if you want a liberal arts college experience, you’re not going to get it unless you can write the cheque on your own”.

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Another factor for colleges to consider is the distorting effect of the US’ growing wealth divide. As Rice-Nguyen has seen at Pitt, this makes students from lower-income backgrounds disproportionately wary of making a massive investment in college – and ever more determined to make the investment pay off. Most poorer students don’t even think of pursuing a humanities major, Rice-Nguyen says: “I feel like that just further cements this idea that the humanities are for the white elite.”

As Schneider notes, college was universally understood by past generations of wealthy white male students as primarily an experience of individual and societal enrichment, not a key to future employment. “We never stopped talking about the importance of higher learning to democracy – that was front and centre for everyone,” she says.

But as poorer and minority students have begun enrolling at university in large numbers, anxieties about return on investment have intensified. Equally, however, there are clear racial implications if humanities courses are largely expunged from the public universities where poorer and minority students are concentrated. And there are suspicions that the right-wing backlash against higher education as a whole – and certain subjects in particular – is partly fuelled by racial grievance among the white working class. Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, is working on a book chronicling the history of education and personal freedom, and he sees popular resentment building in some corners of US society as the advantages of college spread beyond the white community. “One can never overstate the racism that runs through American society,” Roth says.

Even without the political and ideological dimensions, college leaders have plenty of other factors to consider when weighing the job-related value of their offerings.

One is the small matter of artificial intelligence, which could ruin the careers of some liberal arts graduates – or, alternatively, bring them entirely new value because their training emphasises adaptability over job-specific skills. The coming AI transformation makes a robust college experience even more critical, says Roth, “because a lot of the jobs people think they’re preparing for won’t exist in a few years – they will be done either by artificial intelligence or by robots”.

Educators also are confronting uncertain and shifting attitudes among employers. Half of US companies, according to the latest annual survey by the education services company Cengage, have stopped requiring two-year and four-year degrees for their entry-level positions – a single-year increase of 32 per cent in that measure. Data from the Burning Glass Institute, however, shows that larger companies still overwhelmingly expect them.

State officials in Oklahoma say their idea of field-specific pay increases for faculty is necessary to meet huge student demand for training in engineering and sciences. “We pay a lot of attention to the workforce needs in the state,” the chancellor of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education, Allison Garrett, recently told the system’s governing board.

But some suggest that US higher education might have grown excessively attentive to such shifts. A team of public policy experts at the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan suggested in a recent analysis that universities’ efforts to tailor their offerings to employers’ desires could be wasteful given the lag inherent in student preparation. And the consequences of that fall heaviest on lower-ranked institutions and lower-income students, the team found, as more selective campuses show “negligible responses” to local workplace demands.

It all fuels student uncertainty. Experts are getting better at combining government databases on college attendance and employment to show some basic facts, including that a worker with a college degree is paid better than one without, that advanced degrees provide even bigger salaries, and that training to be an engineer or an architect is a surer pathway to riches than training to be a grade-school teacher.

But even those insights come with an array of caveats and exceptions. For many people, learning a well-paying trade, such as plumbing, can be a better value option than going to college. And many people with liberal arts degrees do fare very well in their careers, eventually finding themselves at the top ranks of companies and government.

Then there are questions of personal satisfaction and public benefit, which also have financial implications. With some justification, politicians in Oklahoma and elsewhere who push job-centric visions of higher education say they’re reflecting demand from students and their families. The annual nationwide survey of freshmen by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute consistently identifies the desire for better job prospects as a top reason for attending college, cited by 81 per cent in the most recent edition.

Yet a slightly bigger share of those surveyed, 84 per cent, went to college “to learn more about things that interest me”. That consideration shouldn’t be overlooked, the AAC&U’s Pasquerella says, given how many Americans these days appear unhappy with their jobs and with their lives more generally. Only about half of US workers say they are extremely or very satisfied with their jobs overall, according to a Pew Research Center survey this year. That kind of data reflects the “skyrocketing mental health issues we’re seeing among college students and the general population, who are lacking a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives”, Pasquerella says.

Motivation is especially important for college students since those facing the biggest risk of getting stuck with an unaffordable loan are, by far, those who fail to graduate. And pursuing a humanities major seems to help here: nearly 70 per cent of humanities majors at four-year institutions finish their bachelor’s degree within six years, more than 10 percentage points higher than those in other majors, according to a Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of federal data carried out on behalf of Times Higher Education.

“If you’re engaged in a field that you’re passionate about, you’re more likely to stay in college, that’s for sure,” Pasquerella says. “It’s people who are shunted into programmes they’re not interested in that are a real risk.”

Universities deserve some blame for any excessive focus on job-related degrees, says John Thelin, a research professor emeritus of the history of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky. After higher education came under political pressure in the 1960s as part of a conservative backlash against student involvement in the civil rights movement and other progressive issues, “a generation of state governors and university presidents went overboard on pitching public and tax support for higher education,” Thelin says. They overemphasised “job payoffs” while being less careful to explain the more holistic nature of the benefits they provide.

The societal necessity of the teaching profession offers an especially strong example of the risks of imposing a job-centric focus on higher education, says Martin Van Der Werf, the director of editorial and education policy at the Georgetown centre. Engineering degrees do lead to higher incomes than teaching degrees, Van Der Werf acknowledges. “But the fact remains that without good teachers, we wouldn’t have engineers.”

Some of the societal value of degrees could perhaps be measured – by crediting teachers with the future income of their students, or crediting artists with economic growth around a downtown theatre. But such assessments would be unavoidably subjective, says Robert Kelchen, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville: “I haven’t seen a good effort to quantify this because I expect there is a lot of disagreement about the value of certain majors,” he remarks.

There’s nothing inherently wrong, Kelchen says, with the government or an institution deciding to not invest in a particular programme. “But when they start trying to dictate which programmes should be allowed to exist, that is a major issue,” he adds.

Fundamentally, he and other experts warn, politicians appear to be projecting themselves into debates about academic prioritisation without fully understanding the close interplay between humanities and other fields. The humanities in recent years may have seen their organisational share of majors decline, their advocates acknowledge. But pretty much all colleges and universities still maintain core requirements in the humanities for all students.

And students appear to be getting more and more of their servings of the humanities at high-school level. The number of Advanced Placement tests taken jumped more than 30 per cent between 2012 and 2022 to more than 1.1 million nationwide. And among the AP courses on offer, the humanities’ enduring popularity is only growing, according to an analysis by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As long as politicians don’t start fighting general-education classes, says David Feldman, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary, then “I don’t have a particular problem with the jobs focus.”

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Gen ed requirements, however, may be under threat from another development sparked by value-for-money considerations: shortened bachelor’s degree programmes. One of the major federally recognised accrediting agencies, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, recently approved bachelor’s degrees with as few as 90 credits – compared with the usual 120 – at a couple of the institutions that it accredits. The agency’s leader, Sonny Ramaswamy, says the compression will happen in part by teaching some humanities-like content – which accreditors regard as essential elements of a four-year degree – as part of the major, such as asking engineering students to write a pitch for their project to local authorities or write an essay on the ethical considerations of their proposal.

The political push for greater employment focus in higher education has been accompanied for many years by suggestions that post-secondary institutions try harder to offer skills-based credentials that can be earned at lower cost than traditional associate and bachelor’s degrees, and in shorter periods – perhaps of just a few months. Advocates include the Lumina Foundation, a billion-dollar charity funded by student loan industry profits that has been urging a structure in which such credential credits could feed smoothly into two-year and four-year degrees as the student shows interest.

But that idea hasn’t gained much traction, Schneider says, in part because it doesn’t seem realistic as a means of getting disadvantaged students to consider more comprehensive educational pathways that could benefit them more than quick job-specific training. Such students are often overwhelmed by their life circumstances, she says, and “they don’t have time to look into the whole strategy of higher education.”

Education experts also tend to dismiss the drive for job-specific credentials as an attempt by employers to get students and the post-secondary system to cover their corporate training expenses – and by for-profit colleges to drum up new business. Such suspicions have been bolstered by conservative politicians’ habitual defence of the for-profit sector as it compiled a consistent history of abusing its eligibility for federal student loans.

Feldman holds out room for some reasonable increase in the attention that higher education pays to job markets. “That’s not a bad thing,” he argues, to the extent that a job-focused mindset helps remind institutions of the costs their students are facing. But, he adds, “If it causes [universities] to change their programming in ways that fundamentally dilute or destroy the other and very important aspects of education, then I would worry.”

Either way, politicians would do well to keep out of the process, says Ben Wildavsky, an education policy expert serving as a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia, pointing out that “question of whether college has career value”, in reality, has little to do with the divisive issues of the political culture wars. “I wish more people on both sides of the political divide saw how much evidence supports the career value of gaining both broad education and targeted skills to get ahead economically,” Wildavsky says.

Still, there are those convinced that salaries are such a good measure of societal value that they should be more respected across higher education. The advocates include Preston Cooper, a higher education policy researcher at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a thinktank backed by conservative donors that has been compiling data on tens of thousands of bachelor’s degree programmes to argue that choice of major is the “biggest factor” in career earnings.

Generally, Cooper asserts, “Majors which pay more tend to pay more because they have more value to the economy” – though teacher-preparation programmes could be a partial exception, he concedes, because teachers’ wages “are largely set by government rather than the market, and, therefore, are less likely to reflect this profession’s full social value”. 

At Pitt, Rice-Nguyen is still turning it all over in her mind. She’s grateful to have a family that was willing to let her choose a major based on her personal interest. But she is a little confused and distressed to see so many of her classmates so consumed by the question of their future earnings potential.

Talk of employability “is such a casual language that’s used so much that it’s just saturating every part of regular life”, Rice-Nguyen says. “And it’s weird to see a bunch of 21-year-olds worry that much about it.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com