Education & Learning
Humanities Majors Collapsing as Students Face Pressure to Choose Lucrative Careers
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A philosopher’s argument against the cult of achievement | Zena Hitz: Full Interview
"In 2015, which was when was being written about, it was beginning to be noticed that contemporary colleges and universities, the study of the humanities was collapsing. So numbers of majors are down, departments are closing. And there's a loss in the common culture of the sense of why these kinds of study matter."
Hitz documents the crisis in humanities education across US colleges and universities, with declining enrollment numbers and department closures. She attributes this to intense pressure on young people to pursue pragmatic degrees that promise lucrative or prestigious jobs, threatening the disappearance of philosophy, literature, and political theory from both academic institutions and common culture.
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