Is It Worth Studying a Humanities Subject?

With people seemingly moving away from studying humanities, why should you still study a liberal arts degree? In response to this, Dr David Steiner, the Executive Director of the Institution Policy, School of Education at John Hopkins, said “the real question is whether we can find an argument for their existence”.

Dr Steiner explained “creativity is at the heart of the humanities,” and teaches students “what counts most about being human”. Dr Bergeron also said that the “skills developed by humanities subjects are the hardest to automate”, meaning that as the job market sees the results of technological advancement, there should be a greater demand for the ‘human skills’ learnt in humanities degrees.

Dr Steiner said that it’s important to consider what you want to get out of a degree, whether it’s a higher salary after graduation or to expand your knowledge or be inspired – or both. Although the initial salary difference between humanities and STEM graduate salaries is substantial, he said, there is “no difference in graduate salaries after 10 years”.

“In the US there’s an incredible drive to relevance. We have dumbed down the humanities in order to increase enrollment” says Dr Steiner, “the harder the course, the higher the enrollment level”.

To demonstrate this, he gave several examples; the University of Texas’s ‘study of great books’ course gained popularity once the university increased the course’s difficulty, eventually having over 500 applications for only 100 places. “If the humanities want to survive”, Dr Steiner explained, “they need to stop pandering and stop dumbing down”.

He also stated that there is a recent tendency to shy away from studying the past and a general belief that we should only be future looking, but “we were not born without an inheritance and humanities is the study of this inheritance”.

**

Why did you choose to study a humanities subject? Let us know in the comments below.