When Chris came home from college for Thanksgiving, he waited until the turkey was carved and everyone’s plate was full before making his announcement.
“Family,” he said, raising his glass, “I have something to tell you. My girlfriend is pregnant!”
Forks froze in midair.
Then, after short pause, his father sighed with relief. “Whew! That scared me for a moment, Chris. Thank God. We were afraid you were going to tell us you had changed your major to something like philosophy or history.”
Not too long ago, a liberal arts education formed the backbone of the American public school curriculum. Today it resembles a patient lying on an operating table with a DNR sign – Do Not Resuscitate – hanging from the IV bag. The patient is not quite dead, but the prognosis is grim. Around the operating table stand the modern professionals – engineering, computer science, nursing, pre-med, and business – waiting patiently to carve up what remains.
The Numbers Tell the Story
The statistical trend for the decline in liberal arts is striking. In the early 1990s, nearly 15% of college graduates earned degrees in the humanities fields of English, history, philosophy, or foreign languages. Today that number has fallen to roughly 9% according to data compiled by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The message students hear – often explicitly from parents – is simple: choose a major that pays.
The Case for Career Education
We’ve experienced an accelerating cultural shift away from liberal arts education toward career training. Defenders of this shift want to train the individual; defenders of liberal arts want to educate the citizen.
From a purely practical perspective, the cultural shift to technical and career training may be understandable. With college tuition rising at breathtaking speed, many families now see higher education primarily as a financial investment rather than an intellectual journey. Understandably, students want assurance that the degree they earn will lead to a stable career. Engineering, computer science, nursing, and business seem to offer that promise.
This tension between economic utility and intellectual formation is at the heart of the debate: Should schools shape minds or supply the labor market?
Advocates of career training argue that education should lead directly to employment, not abstract academic study. Schools, they say, ought to prepare students to fill real workforce shortages, avoid costly college debt, and begin earning sooner. Practical training keeps many students more engaged, reduces dropout rates, and often produces faster financial returns than a traditional liberal-arts path.
Why Did This Shift Occur?
This question is best answered from a pragmatic perspective – the Flower Power children of the 1960s got a stiff reality check in the late 1970s. They began raising families while the United States experienced severe economic instability with inflation, oil scarcity, factory closures, and the loss of manufacturing jobs. Aging hippies who once sang along with the Beatles’ refrain, “All You Need Is Love,” eventually discovered that love alone does not buy food, diapers, toys, or a home larger than a flower-painted Volkswagen bus.
State universities, most subsidized according to student enrollment, catered to students by expanding business programs, engineering schools, nursing schools, technical and applied sciences. Parents and students increasingly evaluated majors by starting salaries, employability, and economic payoff. The availability of student loans coupled with increasing student debt discouraged riskier or exploratory academic paths in liberal arts. The computer revolution of the 1980s and 1990s accelerated this shift.
Today, STEM education is the buzzword. Organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine promote large investments in STEM education. National policy favors scientific and technological competitiveness. Huge government grants promote the sciences, but not the arts.
In short, while the purpose of education in the 19th and early 20th century was to form the mind and character of a free person, the purpose now is to produce workers for the economy.
Yet if schools abandon history, philosophy and literature, who will teach citizens the principles behind our Constitution? If students never study logic, rhetoric, or the history of ideas in schools, then how will they judge the arguments of those they elect as their leaders? And what becomes of a republic when education trains workers but not citizens?
One wonders if such narrowly trained graduates will be able to adapt as technology inevitably reshapes today’s careers. A society can teach people how to make a living, but if it never teaches them how to live, we risk becoming soulless, one-dimensional servants to AI rather than thoughtful citizens of a free nation.
Barry Nowlin is a retired English professor from the University of South Alabama. He presently works as an Uber driver for his two grandkids.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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