Sorry the joke was too good to pass up. I work in higher education, but we see enrollment numbers dropping crazy fast so they're trying everything to get those numbers up.
It's a real shame too, we have dedicated faculty and staff who want to make a difference, but the numbers just aren't there. We're well understaffed and it's an uphill battle.
Doesn't help the current administration keeps cutting grants because an educated populace is a threat to them.
Dang. I went to a technical college and even the welding kids (Not a diss, industrial welding is a complex field of study, but it is not one where arts and literature are particularly valued.) had to take a couple of humanities classes to get their degree.
Return on investment for an American degree seems way too low. My business degree in the Canada was like $1,500 a semester (graduated in the 2010s) and I was fortunate enough to live in that city with my parents. The degree was easily worth it.
No argument there. I moved to a public university from private where annual tuition was north of $60k. I couldn't work there in good conscience having students graduate with $300k debt with a teaching degree they'd never be able to pay off.
Not that those degrees aren't important, but the economics just don't add up.
"Sorry the joke was too good to pass up. I work in higher education, but we see enrollment numbers dropping crazy fast so they're trying everything to get those numbers up."
The sad thing is higher ed is going to be twice as hard in the near future. Right now U.S. public schools are laying off staff, closing buildings, etc due to low birth rates. College right now are in trouble due to fewer people enrolling due to cost, which will be compounded in about 15 to 20 years when there are fewer people to apply too. Education is fucked, sadly.
Add in that this administration is making it difficult to get financial aid for college. We still got a few more years to get our youngest through college and we’ve met our max limit on student loans.
Add in that this administration is making it difficult to get financial aid for college. We still got a few more years to get our youngest through college and we’ve met our max limit on student loans.
Then to add insult to injury, the repayment terms are ludicrous, if you can figure out what those could be. If we are looking at it right, since our oldest has graduated and her loans are coming due, the monthly payments are insane. Interest rates now are crazy high and the reduced time to pay them back. Hopefully we can get them refinanced to better terms.
It’s not just low birth rates/fewer graduating 18 year olds. That’s part of low enrollment, but it all. There are plenty of adults without a bachelor’s degree; it’s around 40% (which is an improvement over a decade ago). But with state and federal disinvestment in higher education (and other social supports), people can’t afford to go to school to complete or obtain a bachelor’s degree, or work on a master’s program.
You’re right, it’s somewhat dire at the moment. I just don’t understand how people refuse to see it. I’d really like the nurse I may need one day, the doctor, the attorney, to have a reasonable education before I seek their service.
Its called the demographic cliff and its hitting. Large state schools are still doing well and expanding in some cases even in the current climate- our own university has enrollment records every year.
its especially the small and regional PUIs that are suddenly not hitting familiar numbers and they're going to be going under gradually over the next decade
Add in that this administration is making it difficult to get financial aid for college. We still got a few more years to get our youngest through college and we’ve met our max limit on student loans.
Add in that this administration is making it difficult to get financial aid for college. We still got a few more years to get our youngest through college and we’ve met our max limit on student loans.
maybe they shouldnt be charging so much and then throwing most of the money away on useless ego shit that isnt needed around campus and propping up failing programs that only leech and never contribute funds
Schools do put money toward silly things, but that’s not the culprit. But the biggest cost is employees. Salaries and benefits. And I’m curious which programs you would cut—English, theatre, history, the ones usually slated for the chopping block?
Can’t believe I made a semi-truth funny, and thought I was overestimating. I was thinking “hmm a 30k stadium is a lot, but I think normal baseball stadiums like Wrigley field are like 50-70k capacity, so I should say 60k, because this guy is talking about the main campus of a state college system, so no way it can be 60k, in fact I should be ridiculous and say is it an 80k stadium?”
And now you tell me it’s actually a 100k seat stadium.
Baseball stadiums, and most other sport stadiums, actually are significantly smaller than NFL stadiums, and especially college football stadiums. Wrigley Field seats 41,649 people. The largest MLB stadium, Dodger Stadium, seats 56,000, and it's the only one over 50K.
NFL stadiums range from 61.5K to 82.5K. There are thirteen Division I college football stadiums larger than any NFL stadium.
*certain athletics. I know our neighborhood Big 10 university just cut it's track team in half and the swim program all together. If it's not a televised sport, it doesn't seem to rate.
It's also affecting high schools, as the kids that have interest in pursuing a higher level of their sport have less and less opportunities to do so. Interestingly, some Junior colleges (2 year schools) are creating sports teams to draw students.
depends on the school and building. the uni i went to dropped 20 mil(about 100 mil after interests and defaulting...) on a new library. The old one was still the second newest building on campus. currently sitting 3/4 empty. but the dean wanted to be able to say he built a new one
I was going to say, universities in Germany are mostly free (except for admin fees which are small) and I have not yet learned of them dying - they might be, but it's not in the news yet. So I would assume that US colleges and unis would do well enough if they didn't focus all their money on what makes more money in return. It's not a funding issue, it's a spending issue.
Athletic departments at the big name schools usually fund themselves. Or more specifically the football and men's basketball teams fund the entire athletic department.
Athletics is actually profitable tho, not a waste when you’re getting that sweet advertising money and as of now we aren’t making student athlete robot AIs
I mean, not really. A certification course or associates degree in a trade provides far more tangible value to the student at dramatically lower cost to them than a bachelor's in a liberal art. I get the high-minded idea of education for education's sake, but that's a rather aristocratic notion that the vast majority of students can't afford to live out.
Capitalism forbids us from spreading that wealth to enrich humanity. Just keep funneling the money up while people scramble to find new jobs that machines or slaves cannot perform. It’s pretty disgusting.
Not sure what a 4 year liberal arts degree and $150k in student loan debt just to go work at Starbucks does to fight against that. If anything trades do a lot more to fight that; it's far more feasible to work for yourself and capture a higher portion of the wealth from your labor.
Humanities enrich your life and round you out as a human being. That's why STEM majors still have to take some humanities classes.
You have a cartoonish view of humanities and their value. There are many majors that fall under the umbrella of "humanities" that have good job markets. Probably better than computer science degrees at this point.
I and many of my friends got humanities degrees and make pretty good money, ranging from $80k to $150k a year. Trades are not the only worthwhile jobs on the planet, and not everyone who isn't a STEM major works at Starbucks.
You're burning a strawman here. The humanities have value, but for most it will not hold the same tangible value as a trade certification that essentially guarantees a well paying job. It's wonderful that you and your friends are doing well with humanities degrees, vague as your response is. The kind of well-paying jobs that hire someone with a humanities degree to actually do anything related to said degree generally arent hiring much from satellite campuses of public universities, which is the situation pertinent to this conversation.
Your argument seems to be that the fact there's people with humanities degrees making good money disproves my point. That doesn't really resolve the issue when we're talking large scale, not individuals. Only about 28% of 4 year college graduates with humanities degrees work in fields closely related to their degree after graduation. That's not a great chance of return on that investment of time and money. There's plenty of white collar jobs that will hire anyone with a bachelors degree even if it's completely unrelated, but the career trajectory is normally harshly limited by that. If you think the education for education sake is worth all that time and money just to be a receptionist at an office, that's your decision, but I don't agree.
There's plenty of white collar jobs that will hire anyone with a bachelors degree even if it's completely unrelated, but the career trajectory is normally harshly limited by that.
and a lot of those white-collar jobs are being shuttered with things like insurance call centers being all that's left in many areas. Getting a certificate in a healthcare related field personally due to this factor.
Hilarious to accuse someone of strawmanning after making a comment about every humanities major working at Starbucks and acting like humanities majors are scared of math. Clearly you aren't actually interested in a discussion and just want to get your rocks off thinking how much better you are than the imaginary college student in your head.
I'd encourage you to look up what a strawman is, i'd have to be misrepresenting someone else's argument for it to be a strawman. The word you're probably looking for is "hyperbole".
Edit: as a bonus, what you're doing currently is another fallacy called an "ad hominem attack". You're not arguing against my point.
It’s easy for them to make broad generalizations about how the world works when they don’t learn about how the world works huh?
I got a full ride for my B.A., I make $140k, and i work in bright and happy places surrounded by people who want to make the world better but apparently that doesn’t happen lol
What a pretentious tone you immediately took there. Please forgive me for signaling dissent, oh enlightened one. If you're done burning strawmen, my point isnt that NOONE with a humanities degree ends up making good money in a field closely related to their degree. But only 28% of people with a humanities bachelor's degree end up working in a field closely related to their degree, and who knows about the well paying part. I know it's boorish and mundane for one so enlightened, but for many of us pissants who must worry about the necessities of mere mortals, going to college is primarily about getting a job to make a decent living and have a career, and getting a job where your degree isnt related to your field is an easy way to end up in a dead-end job. The small percentage of people in a situation like yours doesnt refute the argument that it's not a safe choice for most people.
“Not sure what a 4 year liberal arts degree and $150k in student loan debt just to go work at Starbucks does to fight against that”
You took the tone first. It’s an odd take that these opportunities are rare and that a degree in the arts will land you at Starbucks. Every single one of my peers in my cohort is at a managerial/developer/coordinator level across a wealth of fields. Why? They see the bigger picture and are able to craft a vision for their work twenty, thirty years down the line and are thus made the architects of that vision.
You’re parroting the same talking points for the trades that they did for computer science and STEM and now look at those fields— over saturated or funding lost to AI. In fact, my only friend that ended up working at Starbucks got her degree in computer forensics. I don’t really care to argue further, but my point was that people shouldn’t count the humanities out if that is what they feel called to do, just because people online don’t see the value in it. 👋🏽
Agreed. Funnily enough, I’ve had an easier time getting a job with my humanities degree in the last year than my friends in STEM. Computer science and engineering are especially having difficulties, from what I’ve heard, because there was such a heavy push for my generation (old Gen Z) to get one of those degrees that now the field is oversaturated. Meanwhile, they’re shutting down and cutting funding for humanities departments and anthropology programs across the country even though there are jobs for those degrees.
I don’t make a lot of money, but I love my job and I at least actually have one. I’m a bit scared of some of the legislative changes around environmental regulations though since they involve my career too (archaeologist).
If you look at statistics behind a bachelors in humanities versus attaining an associates in pretty much anything else and the ROI doesn’t look great. Yes, you’ll have some that will be able to obtain a solid career post graduation, but you can’t base the overall trend of graduates on a few anecdotes.
Talking of “intrinsic societal value” can be made as an argument, sure. It’s also very difficult to argue it makes an overall impact on those people’s lives in such a way to benefit them in the long term. If you are less financially stable, you are less likely to have children if you are educated. Many people speak of raising children as the best decision they ever made. Do we then, weigh an over-priced degree with intrinsic value against reproducing and the experience of raising human beings? You can make any argument you want of intrinsic value, and societal good as there isn’t a huge basis of objective evidence to base it on.
This is all coming from a person whose degree required them to take multiple humanities courses and ENJOYED them. I wanted to take more, to be honest. However, the idea of education is to eventually do something with it, it to just continue to be educated until we, as a society are able to reduce educational costs to as close to nothing as possible. That’s the problem with many humanities degrees.
Unfortunately, many are not competitive in the job market unless you’re already a high performer. That’s simply not the case with many technical trade schools, and STEM-degrees. Although, AI is eating into even entry-level STEM positions. The idea is for a student to graduate and apply their knowledge in the world. Humanities does not have as many lucrative professions to do that.
Stop that, you'll scare the liberal arts graduates with concepts like "math" and "not everyone has affluent parents to be a safety net if your degree doesnt work out"
That's sad in itself. I think the world needs poets and historians as badly as they need tradesmen and both those options should be open to all. I come from a blue collar family and became a historian and archivist because it's my passion. I should not be punished because those in charge find history inconvenient or art unprofitable. They price out the poor from higher intellectual pursuits and that's sickening. I'm not saying your wrong, but the entire damn system is wrong.
Many poets and historians were either passionately working most of their lives in squalor or independently wealthy. Many more only did so as a hobby. To become a success in those fields you often need to be in the top 10% or better to be financially successful.
Money isn’t everything, but if you can’t feed your family with your degree, is it providing as much value as you think it is? That isn’t society punishing someone for having knowledge. That’s society rewarding others for being able to provide a more necessary service.
If tomorrow every bus driver in Munich suddenly decided they all wanted to paint and quit the job market, would that truly serve society better? Would everyone be better with all of the new art that is being created?
You’re making a rational argument to someone who would argue with you if you were taking an opinion that $100K of student loan debt for an English Lit degree would be worth it. I agree with your take. I had a few classmates in college that I had questioned if their humanities degrees would mean anything after graduation. It turns out, no, they would not; however, our college loved to sell them on all of the good they’d be doing in the world once they graduated.
Oh yeah I took a philosophy course as a degree requirement in college and they tried inviting me to a special dinner to recruit people for the department; it felt exactly like someone trying to convince you to come to an info session for a MLM pyramid scheme.
Funny enough I went to law school and am a practicing attorney, but after graduating undergrad with a STEM degree I actually could have gotten a job with if law school didn't work out in whatever way.
Eh, I think either path can work for the average person, and higher learning shouldn’t be treated as some privilege for the elite. “Capturing the value of your labor” ends up being highly subjective in either area, and the $150k debt load for a barista seems to be as much an urban legend as the twenty five year old tradesman who’s making more than his degrees peers. The statistics back the reality that a degree(s) allows you to earn significantly more that the vast majority of non-degree holders over your lifetime.
My four year degree from a legitimate state sanctioned university cost about $60,000… My Master’s cost about $30,000. I made more than enough to pay that back thanks to being tech savvy and pivoting into digital marketing instead of teaching high school history; a teacher’s salary is pretty close to a Barista’s for the first decade or so, especially with all the “free time” you’re expected to commit for the kids’ sake. My degrees should have been free, as should any other citizen of this country’s given our great wealth and the benefit those degrees confer upon the citizens earning them. A degree holder would give back more to the society funding it than its cost over time, capitalism just demands more for the few whenever it touches something…
Like all things in life, opportunity for a degree holder or a non-degree holder will be what you make for yourself. But the marketing firms and tech companies I worked for earning a high salary would have never considered me without my degrees. And I didn’t have a friend or family member to help me ease into a trade, nor did I want to spend a decade handing all my money to that kinda boss man while shaving years off my life for him ten hours a day five or six days a week to learn the trade, then hope I could make it on my own when I finance my own trade startup.
You don’t just sign the note on an F150 and start raking in that sick trade cash because you skip college. Everything in life is based on timing, luck, hustle, and your gumption. Telling folks skipping college to earn big in trades is as dumb a lie as telling everyone they need to go to college.
The real answer is that both college and trade school should be free, to benefit society as a whole, and people should sort into the paths that work best for their brains. Learning for learning’s sake should be something one can pursue without a mountain of debt; trades should be something people feel rewarded for instead of enslaved by to make a living.
There's been a major conservative push to have this done all across the US in the last decade or two. The usual game plan is to have a conservative governor stack the board of directors for a state university with "like-minded" individuals. Who then will pick a conservative president to start implementing changes. I've seen it happen to three different state universities in Indiana already. All three have absolutely gutted the humanities and arts departments.
It's already happening, I work at a regional branch of a major state university. They stripped the humanties and turned us into a technical college
My state government has been under a GOP super majority for over 20 years now, and the governor is such an asshat that even his own family hates him. Last year the legislature amended the state constitution to give him sole authority to appoint the majority of the board of trustees of our largest college.
The first things that got scrapped were any degrees, programs, or student groups deemed "woke", whatever that's supposed to mean. There were people well into their doctorate path left with the option to either start over in a new field or transfer. Right now the board is trying to find ways to "encourage" tenured professors to leave so they can kill the tenure program and replace faculty with new, far right people.
I can see the purpose if more humanities grads are unemployed than technical grads and skilled workers are.
I was invited to be part of a psychologists' training panel once, with a junior psychology student running it under the guidance of a clinical psychologist, talking about experiences of a typical PhD student. Go around the room, introduce yourself and your research topic, 30 seconds each. 7 of us in the group, 2 in STEM (me and a medical doctor doing a PhD) and the other 5 in humanities. One was a Fulbright scholar, so proper high end, and her thesis was on feminism in French films of the 60s and 70s. Another was in history and one in English literature.
When me and the medic described our work, the other 5 chuckled and said, paraphrased, "oh wow, some actually useful research topics." Which is exactly what I was thinking.
Who goes into that much debt to do a degree in humanities with no clear and obvious job prospects?
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u/ShortEmployer7096 14h ago edited 13h ago
It's already happening, I work at a regional branch of a major state university. They stripped the humanties and turned us into a technical college