Reimagining the Liberal Arts and Humanities

Right before Christmas, Clarkson University made the shocking announcement that it was closing its School of Arts & Sciences, phasing out all its majors in the humanities and social sciences, including foundational disciplines such as history, political science, sociology, and communications.

Except that it’s not entirely shocking given what’s happening across higher education.

Several colleges and universities recently have announced similar cuts, eviscerating the liberal arts in response to budget shortfalls, enrollment declines, and shifting student preferences.

At the same time, some schools are bucking this trend, integrating the humanities and social sciences with other disciplines and creating experiential learning opportunities to prepare students for the job market.

What does all this portend for the future of the liberal arts?

Last year saw several institutions announce cuts to their liberal arts programs.

West Virginia University made headlines by chopping 28 majors and eliminating 143 faculty positions thanks to a $45 million budget shortfall and enrollment declines necessitating an “academic transformation” on campus.

Student protests ensued, and faculty voted no confidence in E. Gordon Gee, the university’s embattled president.

Chief among the academic targets for retrenchment were liberal arts programs, including art history, linguistics, music, and world languages, though other disciplines, such as environmental planning and recreation and tourism, were also eliminated.

“This is a time of great change in higher education,” Gee said, “and we are leading that change rather than being its victim.”

West Virginia’s situation is hardly unique. Facing a $36 million budget deficit, Miami University in Ohio proposed cuts to 18 majors, most of which fall under the liberal arts umbrella. Ohio Wesleyan said it planned to eliminate 18 majors to solve its financial problems, targeting comparative literature, dance, religion, and earth sciences, among others.

SUNY Potsdam is phasing out art history, chemistry, French, music performance, and philosophy — nine programs in total — over the next few years.

And Marymount University in Virginia slashed programs in philosophy, math, art, history, and English in addition to several others.

In many cases, low enrollment drove these decisions. At Clarkson, the total enrollment among the majors targeted for elimination constitutes only 2% of the student body. At SUNY Potsdam, it’s 4%.

Miami of Ohio identified majors with fewer than 35 students. Across the university, 72% of students cluster in 30 of the institution’s 130 majors, and those low-enrollment programs tend to be in the liberal arts.

So are colleges redesigning the curriculum based solely on student preferences? And is it wise to let students determine what constitutes a college education?

Not entirely, says Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester College and author of the new book, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.” Yet institutions must acknowledge that students are paying customers, he told BestColleges, and their preferences can’t be ignored.

“Colleges and universities are under enormous financial pressure,” said Rosenberg, who’s currently a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “and they’re looking [at what students want] and saying, ‘Here is where we need to make investments to attract students, and here’s where we need to make the cuts in order to make those investments.’

“It’s a balancing act. You don’t want to completely gut the curriculum, but you need to have some flexibility, not just to reflect student interests but to reflect the way the world has changed.”

For the liberal arts and humanities disciplines, the world has been changing for 50 years.

Since the 1970s, the number of degrees conferred in the humanities has dropped fairly steadily, and that decline has picked up steam in recent years. From 2012-2018, the number of bachelor’s degrees earned in the humanities fell by 27%.

Much of that decline can be attributed to the Great Recession that began in 2008, during and after which students sought more career-oriented degrees to improve their employment prospects.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on … the relation between higher education and getting a job,” Rosenberg said, “and as higher education has become more and more expensive, that connection has become more and more important to people.”

A recent BestColleges survey bears this out. When asked why attending college is important to them, 15% of students ranked “improving income or career prospects” first, while 45% listed it among their top three reasons.

That hasn’t always been the case. In 1971, fewer than 40% of students said “being very well off financially” was “essential” or “very important” to them. But by 2013, that percentage had more than doubled.

Students’ choice of majors reflects those shifting preferences. In 1970, English majors accounted for 7.6% of bachelor’s degree recipients. In social sciences and history, that share was 18.5%. By 2014, those figures had dropped to 2.6% and 9.2%, respectively.

Only 8% of bachelor’s degrees were awarded in social sciences and history in 2021, compared to 19% in business and 13% in health sciences. Between 2010 and 2021, the number of degrees awarded in computer science increased by 144%.

Yet, as interest in the arts and humanities has declined at the baccalaureate level, the same can’t be said for associate degrees. In fact, popularity among these fields has been trending in the opposite direction at community colleges.

From 1987-2018, the number of associate degrees earned in the liberal arts and humanities grew by an average of 4.3% annually, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. By 2018, the number of such degrees reached the highest level on record, surpassing the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in those disciplines.

At the same time, the number of associate degrees awarded in vocational and professional fields dropped steadily from 2012-2018.

Unfortunately for faculty at four-year colleges, student interest in the arts and humanities doesn’t carry over to the baccalaureate level. Why the change in academic demographics? Given that 80% of community college students want to transfer to four-year schools, it’s likely students are satisfying general education requirements in the liberal arts only to later declare majors in business, engineering, healthcare, computer science, and other career-focused fields.

In doing so, they may be banking on short-term dividends instead of long-term value. A Georgetown study found that while the return on investment of a degree from a liberal arts college 10 years after enrollment is 40% below the median ROI for all colleges, by 40 years it’s 25% above the median.

Not all four-year schools are gutting the liberal arts. Some are simply reimagining the curriculum, combining fields to create new concentrations, and integrating arts and sciences disciplines with pre-professional studies.

Simmons University in Boston has developed a new humanities major, combining languages, literature, philosophy, and history, along with other fields, subsuming some standalone departments in the process. It’s also revamping its Spanish major into an applied Spanish language and culture major focused on professional practice. And majors in biostatistics, math, and statistics will morph into an integrated major in mathematical sciences focused on applied learning.

Lycoming College recently opened its Humanities Research Center, which coordinates experiential learning opportunities, student-faculty research, internships, digital humanities, academic conferences, and a student-run literary journal — all with an eye toward growing the number of humanities majors in the coming years.

And Allegheny College is revamping its curriculum based on workforce needs, introducing majors in software engineering, data science, industrial design, and public humanities, a multidisciplinary program covering issues such as democracy, technology, sustainability, and social change.

Reconfigurations often involve creating new majors. For some colleges, though, it’s enough to infuse the curriculum with humanities courses so all students can benefit.

“The question is, Can we rethink the way the humanities fits into a liberal arts education?” Rosenberg said. “Does it have to be through a major? Or can it be through core courses that expose students who are majoring in other things to the humanities?”

That’s the premise of a Teagle Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities initiative called “Cornerstone: Learning for Living,” launched in 2020. Inspired by Purdue University’s program of the same name, Cornerstone aims to “revitalize the role of the humanities” by infusing humanities courses into the general education curriculum for all students and majors.

Courses are designed to strengthen students’ creative thinking and communication skills, enabling them to delve into “big questions” within “thematically related clusters” such as healthcare and medicine, science and technology, and conflict resolution and justice. Students completing courses in those clusters earn certificates to complement their degrees.

“I think this notion of having a foundational exposure for every student, including the ones going into more technical or scientific fields, is a way that the humanities can stay alive and relevant,” said Rosenberg, who serves on the Teagle Foundation board.

As of last August, 60 colleges and universities had created similar efforts on their campuses with support from the grant program. Among them, 45% are minority-serving institutions or community colleges, “highlighting how the program model serves students of all backgrounds,” Teagle claims.

Despite these widespread efforts to resuscitate, elevate, and more thoroughly integrate the liberal arts and humanities across the curriculum, offering students opportunities to apply their learning through internships and other experiences, it’s difficult to imagine these disciplines regaining the popularity they once enjoyed.

Rosenberg envisions a two-tiered system emerging over the next 15-20 years in which the liberal arts become further marginalized and reserved for a select few, while most students pursue more practical pursuits with perhaps a modest exposure to the humanities through a smattering of courses.

“If you can afford to go to an Ivy League school or to an elite liberal arts college, you’re going to get a liberal arts education that doesn’t look all that different from what it looks like now,” he said. “But for the vast majority of people who don’t go to those kinds of schools, I do think we’re going to see a system that is very different and more focused on career preparation.”