how to highlight colleges’ existential dilemma

Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, humanities professor Frank Donoghue is pondering what will happen to the humanities in the coming decades and once again revisiting the question of what exactly are colleges supposed to be doing today. His assessment? Humanities might not be around at universities over the next century or so, pushed out by the sciences and vocational majors pretty much across the board. Now, with my admitted lack of philosophical sophistication and my posts arguing that we need STEM majors far more than we need philosophers and literary critics, you might think I’d say goodbye and good riddance if a humanities curriculum was relegated solely to specialty colleges. But the fact of the matter is that we really do need the humanities, and we need to use their decline as a catalyst for a serious discussion about colleges, what they do, and whether college education as we now know it is really accomplishing its stated mission.

Here’s the problem. Since the dawn of higher education to the recent past, colleges existed to provide what a regular citizen would consider to be rather esoteric skills. You simply didn’t need to have a college degree to get a job or maintain a stable career that could pay your bills. Today, employers demand undergrad degrees as prerequisites for an interview and college is supposed to be for everybody because without a two or a four year degree, the jobs you can get are rather limited, and often don’t pay a decent living wage. So colleges are responding by offering more and more vocational majors and emphasizing skills they think will net students a job rather than remaining focused on teaching the arts, culture, theology, philosophy, and law. Of course all of these curricula are still around, especially law schools since the U.S. is a litigious nation to put it mildly, but in light of the constant reminders that we need to remain competitive and focus on practical skills instead of the more nebulous realm of the humanities, they’re getting fewer resources and less regard within academia.

It’s quite a dilemma actually. We do need lawyers, writers, and critics of all stripes, and they need to have the kind of humanities education Donoghue and many others fear may be on its way out of colleges. But we also need to keep cranking out engineers, scientists, and economists. Colleges have to find the balance between being just another institution that prepares people for a future job, which would be far, far more problematic than it would seem at first glance, and serving as a place where students go to expand their knowledge and become better versed and rounded in their disciplines. Combining the two ideas, as many colleges try to do, often ends up being more expensive for the students, and since the degrees they’ll earn have been demoted to an entrance into the job market, these students see the humanities as an obstacle to their education, trying to sap their wallets and trap them deeper in debt, rather than something that could expand their horizons. And as if to add insult to injury, those who do choose a career in the humanities will often find themselves with an education that won’t help them pay the bills since there are so few jobs for them. Likewise, since jobs which are in demand today are in no way reflective of the jobs in demand tomorrow, trying to match your degree to a projection by the BLS at the time of your enrollment is also a very risky tactic.

Again, I’m going to bring up the idea of professional certifications earned through a combination of real world apprenticeships and classroom education at accredited, non-profit colleges replacing the formal degree as the prerequisite for a career. Those who want to deepen and broaden their knowledge with a job secured can afford to take on the humanities courses in which they’re interested, or pursue formal degrees to become the researchers and scientists of the future. Rather than requiring that new high school grads pick what they want to do for the rest of their lives, saddle them with toxic debt, then worry about cramming them with a grounding in the humanities which they’ll see as a mere nuisance, why not cater to those who began their working lives, have the cash to study what they want, and will see the humanities as a creative outlet? This way, the colleges can fulfill their purpose of expanding their students’ knowledge in both the sciences and the humanities, and still help prepare them for a career, give them hands-on experience, and do it in much shorter timeframes.