The Great Recession Never Ended for College Humanities Sorry about the bad Noah joke. "Humanities education in the U.S. is in free fall. And the decline probably shows that the nature of what American students want out of college education is changing — more young people are in it for the money. University of Washington history professor Benjamin Schmidt recently wrote a long blog post in which he showed, very convincingly, that the number of American undergraduates majoring in the humanities has dropped in the last decade. Five years ago, Schmidt thought that it might be a temporary blip after the Great Recession. But now he has changed his mind: The last five years have been brutal for almost every major in the humanities … there is, in the only meaningful sense of the word, a crisis … Rather than recover with the economy, [the] decline accelerated around 2011-2012." Easy lesson not learned!!! The problem is not that the students are in it for the money. That is a given which only accelerated when the Academe decided that allowing in 75% of the high school graduating class every year was a good idea. The result of that foolishness was a large number of illiterate and innumerate people attending college. The problem was self-resolving, and about 60% of those people should have failed out during their first year leaving about 30% of the high school class to finish a college education. The truth be told, only about the top 30% of the high school class can get anything out of a college education today. Perhaps with better K-12 education, those numbers could be higher but that is not the reality today. Just to let Noah in on a dirty little secret, the problem was, and remains, that the universities want the money these students bring. The problem is not that students are in it for the money but that the universities are in it for the money. The other problem is the humanities provide no value to the student, not monetary value or intrinsic value. It used to be that a solid education in the humanities or classics or Western Civilization was valuable because it taught profound, inherent truths, critical thinking, thoughtful analysis, logic, how to construct logical arguments, rhetoric and other useful skills. Today the humanities is a wasteland of indoctrination and simplistic rote repetition. This video shows the high order of intellectual skill and acumen achieved by these dolts: So, they can chant, but neither they nor the leader cannot remember a few silly chants and the leader must constantly refer to her cell phone (her "brain" or what stands in for her brain). What comical buffoons. Their minds are clean slates, so they regurgitate whatever nonsense is poured into them. Is it any wonder there is no value in a humanities degree today? At the bottom of this heap of steaming, stinking dreck are Journalism, Education, and the "Studies" courses and majors. But something had to be done to keep the idiot students who are not able to perform real college-level work, and so these areas softened rigor until virtually anyone with two brain cells to rub together can get a degree here. The universities are happy, the students are deep in debt, but don't realize it until they are graduated and long gone, and the degree is worthless. "That feeling of permanent danger and scarcity means that young people probably no longer feel as if they can afford to major in whatever strikes their fancy. Instead, they feel like they have to take the safe path and go for the money. And they can’t help but notice that — with some exceptions — the chances of finding a job generally tend to be higher for science, technology, engineering and math graduates than humanities graduates ..." Noah cannot be this stupid. Who in their right mind is willing to leave summer work at Starbucks to attend five years of residential college at +$25,000 per year to get a degree which will allow them to work at Starbucks, but not much more? Oh, and don't forget that some significant part of that $25,000 turns into a debt millstone around their necks. So, if given a chance who out there wants to work at Starbucks? Who wants to work at Starbucks with $45,000 in student loan debt? My guess is the former has a larger number of takers than the latter. A degree in humanities increasingly only offers the latter. The solution is simple, add rigor to the coursework, and make the humanities college-level work once again, or don't but there are no other options. One will inexorably lead to failure, the other success. If you had a solid old-school humanities degree solving this problem would be easy. If not, you are probably shite out of luck!
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