While STEM Continues to Rise, the Humanities Remain Important
This year, based on data from a third of Notre Dame’s senior class, 68% of the majors the class of 2025 applied to were in STEM. This was by far the majority, compared to the 7% of majors that were categorized as humanities and 23.5% that fell into social sciences. It’s becoming increasingly clear that science, technology, engineering, and math are taking over universities and colleges. And with this increase comes a decline in the humanities, social sciences, and arts.
There’s no doubt that the humanities, arts, and social sciences are beginning to disappear in higher education. Many universities have been cutting out these majors and departments in recent years. Last year, Marymount University in Virginia decided to discontinue major programs in English, theology, sociology, and history, among others. West Virginia University cut 28 different majors, including art and modern language. Their justifications come from the reduction in enrollment in these programs and budget cuts in education. Why put money into programs that so few people utilize, when you can focus support on technology and engineering majors that are increasing exponentially?
Science, technology, engineering, and math majors have become increasingly popular in higher education, mainly for reasons surrounding employment and salaries. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in these careers has increased by 79% in the last 30 years. The popular sentiment is that if you become a programmer or a doctor, you’ll probably have a stable job and income. According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2017, people aged 23-25 with bachelor’s degrees in computer science and engineering earned an average of $61,744 compared to the average of $45,032 earned by people who majored in history and the social sciences. In our digital age, computer science and math departments have seen an especially large influx of people. These trends continue to grow each year. Society has already begun to deem the humanities, arts, and social sciences useless to pursue in higher education; it seems like these disciplines will soon become obsolete.
Sure, science, engineering, technology and math are important. We obviously need doctors, programmers and engineers to run our world. But we cannot lose the humanities, the social sciences, or the arts either. The humanities are where we study our human nature and culture and where we can gain a better understanding of one another. We look at human relationships to create better societies when studying the social sciences. The arts are where we express our creativity and human emotion, giving meaning to the world. Even when pursuing fields like technology and engineering, it is important to be well-rounded in the humanities and social sciences. Unethical engineering practices, the creation of exploitative artificial intelligence, and the decline of educators all happen when we become disconnected from each other. This is something the humanities, arts, and social sciences aim to address. You don’t need to pursue these fields to understand their impact, but that's also not to say you can’t be successful if you do.
The social sciences, arts, and humanities are what makes us human. They give us culture, communication, and connection. Imagine a world without books, music, language, politics, and religion. You probably can’t because we need these things to function as humans. To quote John Keating from “The Dead Poet’s Society”, “medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
