I am tired of hearing people tell me that the future is STEM.
When I share my intended major, journalism, with others, I am often e looks and offhand remarks. People challenge my ability to make money, my ability to find a job post-graduation, and occasionally question my intelligence as a whole.
In America, between 2009 and 2020, history majors dropped by 35 percent, and English majors fell by about 67 percent, according to bestcolleges.com.
Historically, the rise and fall of humanities degrees has followed a fairly predictable pattern. The economic stability of the 1950’s made students more confident in studying English, history, and philosophy, while the stag-flation of the 1970’s caused interest in these fields to crash, according to The Hechinger Report.
Bachelor’s Degrees in the humanities over the past 35 years peaked at 15 percent in 1992 and have been on a near-steady decline since. By 2020, they fell to an all-time low of less than 10 percent of all Bachelor’s Degrees, according to The Hechinger Report.
When the economy is not as stable and students are less confident in their decisions, the humanities become much less attractive since they don’t teach a specific, marketable “skill.” Instead, they teach critical thinking and analysis that is vital for day-to-day life and practical decision making, according to the STEM Fellowship, a charity that supports young STEM students. Despite these skills being beneficial, they can be viewed as second to STEM skills.
STEM is often viewed as more difficult, more impressive, and all around more important than the humanities. While humanities degrees have fallen, the number of STEM degrees being awarded by universities has boomed. Over the last decade, they have grown by 34 percent, according to Daily Money.
People frequently cite medical achievements, impressive engineering feats, and scientific discoveries that govern the world as we know it to highlight the importance of STEM. On paper, the humanities don’t have the same practical actualizations and most people seem to separate the two. But in reality, STEM and humanities cannot exist without each other. Albert Einstein’s own theories were heavily inspired by philosophers like Immanuel Kant, a German Enlightenment philosopher. Einstein’s famous Theory of Relativity was partially inspired by the work of David Hume, a prominent philosopher and advocate for social science, according to Aeon. Many of the earliest scientists, such as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, were deemed “natural philosophers.” Those historical figures are remembered in the realm of science, they were also important in the world of humanities too.
Science and the humanities are hopelessly intertwined, but the latter still offers something that STEM doesn’t: a high degree of job flexibility. Graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering leaves you open to one field only: mechanical engineering. But with a humanities degree, like literature, history, or philosophy, you learn communication and critical thinking skills that will follow you wherever you go.
No matter how the job market changes, employers will continue to look for strong communicators, creative thinkers, and team-minded individuals, according to a 2023 Oxford University study of 9,000 humanities graduates entitled ‘The Value of the Humanities’. Humanities graduates develop a sense of resilience in the face of a rapidly changing job market, including one that is quickly beginning to integrate AI, the same study found. Not to mention that 90 percent of people with a humanities degree are content with their life path, according to a 2021 study published by The American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Despite the fact that the humanities seem to be shrinking, I remain confident in my decision to study journalism. Even if I do not end up becoming a reporter, I know that the skills I will develop along the way, including communication, empathy, and information synthesis, will be invaluable to any career I choose to pursue.
