The other day I wrote a post about a program at Brandeis University to expand job opportunities for those graduating with humanities PhDs. Interestingly, on the same day, a post appeared from Tanner Greer over at the Scholar’s Stage website, seeking to explain the declining share of students majoring in history over the last several decades. It’s a long post, one not everyone may take the time to read carefully, so I thought I might try to summarize it here.
The post begins by offering three reasons (suggested from a commenter on the website) about why the decline has occurred. These explanations are:
Students are preferring degrees that confer more concrete career opportunities, like engineering.
As more of the population goes to college, the college experience has shifted from a focus on enlightenment to a focus on signaling skills to potential employers. History’s signaling value is lower than, say, math or statistics.
Conservatives have become alienated from history as the professorate has grown more left-wing, and its political agenda become more obvious.
The author appears to agree with each of these statements to varying degrees. On #1, history is pretty clearly less useful for landing a job in business, compared to a business or accounting degree. On #3, it’s not hard to find history professors with an ideological axe to grind, though Greer points out our culture more broadly also appears to value history less than it used to, and he offers some anecdotes to that effect. So perhaps it’s not just conservatives who are losing interest.
Greer is most convinced by the second explanation, that the signaling value of history is lower than other disciplines, and points to the fact that rates of undergraduates studying history at places like Yale or Princeton are higher than rates overall. Presumably this is because these students feel less pressure to signal through their major, since they already attend a university with strong signaling value.
I was not fully convinced that higher rates of study at elite institutions demonstrate the eroding influence of signaling on interest in the humanities. For one thing, I could see signaling through a major being even more important at ivy league universities. These are the future leaders of business and government. Some will likely end up billionaires. Some could even be president. Isn’t there more pressure for these students to demonstrate their smarts, relative to their peers, compared to their counterparts at less elite schools? The potential upside is enormous.
Along the same lines, these are also the students who have the best chance to land positions in academia in the fields of their major. If you went to Hunter College, like I did, there’s probably very little chance you can land a decent job as a history professor, no matter how smart you are. If you went to Princeton, your prospects look much better. It seems rational that more people will opt to study history at Princeton than at Hunter.
The post then goes on a digression about an ideological battle for status and influence between two groups of intellectuals. These are: a) “the poets” and b) an alliance of “the modelers” and “the intersectionalists.” The latter group is essentially data social scientists and grievance studies academics who, despite having very different areas of study, both claim to speak on behalf of science and both of whom downplay the importance of art and literature on the basis of it either being too subjective or too ethnically-biased.
Greer argues that this alliance has mostly been successful in relegating “the poets,” who are the humanities professors basically, to a lower rung on the sociological ladder. The end result is that literature and art are now viewed as something “fun” to be done as a leisure time activity on weekends, not as a means of revealing eternal truths.
Finally, Greer concludes by offering a fourth explanation for the decline in history majors: that students don’t want to read. Maybe that’s true, but I’d like to see some data on reading trends over time.
Finally, I’ll add one more possibility to the list. Professor Tyler Cowen gave a recent lecture before the Adam Smith Society in Columbia, where he argued that, in the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith worried that individuals will become too narrow in their worldviews as the division of labors extends further and further.
Given how much of an investment it is to become a good programmer or a good accountant these days, and given how the legal and technological environments surrounding these professions is rapidly evolving thereby requiring constant upkeep of skills, it’s easy to see how jobs today afford us less time to devote to “higher” areas of study. There is a high opportunity cost of people’s time, perhaps higher than in the past.
In this way, the market itself may be contributing to the decline of interest in the humanities. Whether this is true or not, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, the possibility is worth pondering. It suggests a deliberate strategy is in order to reverse the trends in the humanities, as they are unlikely to reverse on their own. Whether we are up to facing that challenge, or whether most people even view it as a problem, remains to be seen.
Addendum: I’ve been told these is considerable evidence to support declining reading rates, so perhaps that is an important part of the story here.