Part 2 of 3
Congressional intern Brentin Ungar never expected to be supplementing his income by hustling for tips at a pizza bar after graduating from Wabash College last year with a liberal arts degree.
“Things have been going slow since graduation,” said Mr. Ungar, who earns $2,600 to $3,000 a month from his Capitol Hill and pizza parlor jobs and spends most of his tips on public transportation and food.
The 23-year-old Ohio native, who earned a bachelor of arts degree in history and political science from the tiny, all-male institution in Indiana, also is studying for the foreign service. Nearly a year after college, he bunks with relatives in Northern Virginia and has no intention of attending graduate school as he pays off $20,000 in federal student loan debt.
Mr. Ungar’s situation is emblematic of many alumni of the nation’s humanities programs, as soaring costs prompt families to question the value of a four-year undergraduate degree. Education specialists say the liberal arts produce the majority of employment-challenged graduates.
Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio, charges the highest undergraduate tuition of any private institution in the nation: nearly $67,000 a year. Last year’s class of liberal arts graduates earned an average salary of just $39,349 a year in fields such as writing, social work and hospitality, according to Zippia.
“A lot of people are finding out it’s not worth it,” said former Education Secretary William Bennett, an academic philosopher and onetime associate dean of liberal arts at Boston University.
With liberal arts students paying premium tuition rates but earning half the income of their classmates in science and engineering, universities have started closing humanities departments and trimming traditional subjects — even English and mathematics — to offer only specialized classes needed for more lucrative majors.
Dozens of small liberal arts colleges have folded or downsized since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered campuses in March 2020. In Minnesota last month, board members at the all-female College of St. Benedict and all-male St. John’s University approved the elimination of several liberal arts programs because of declining interest. Located near each other, the linked Catholic schools have a combined undergraduate enrollment of 2,900 students and share the same facilities and staff.
SPECIAL COVERAGE: Oh, the humanities! The death of liberal arts in higher education
Citing inflationary pressures and slumping enrollment, Cazenovia College in central New York will close at the end of the school year.
“For the most part, all of liberal education is on the skids, and much of it deserves its fate,” said John Agresto, an acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Reagan. “Unless there’s a reformation in how we see, explain and understand the liberal arts, it’s not worth saving.”
Liberal arts advocates have long argued that they serve as a “finishing school” for careers in business, law and medicine that often require additional degrees. A liberal arts education not only nourishes the soul but also develops the habits of thinking deeply, writing coherently, speaking clearly, listening carefully and making sound judgments — qualities that they say are valued by employers.
The value of “knowledge for its own sake,” as ancient Greeks understood a classical education, lies in having surgeons who know ethics, defense attorneys who have mastered public speaking and politicians well-versed in history and political science.
‘College is Worth It’
The National Association of System Heads, which represents the leaders of 65 university systems, announced in December a “College is Worth It” campaign to fight what it calls a growing “crisis of confidence” in the value of higher education.
Part of the campaign examines how four-year undergraduate degrees drive social mobility and individual prosperity. Those are areas where liberal arts programs, even those preparing students for careers in law and medicine, have struggled to offset rising tuition costs.
Making matters worse, employers that previously required four-year college degrees have stopped insisting on it as they struggle with pandemic-era labor shortages.
An executive order from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, declared that 92% of state government jobs will no longer require a college degree.
“Many middle-class and upper-middle-class white-collar jobs are dropping college degree requirements, including paralegals, real estate agents and human resources assistants,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a free market think tank in Austin, Texas. “Students should research the occupations they are interested in and determine whether a four-year college degree will help them succeed.”
Electricians, plumbers, welders, roofers, masons, carpenters and cosmetologists with high school diplomas already make more money than liberal arts graduates, said electrical contractor Joshua Page, an author and TED Talks speaker who skipped college. He said electricians starting out in Massachusetts earn $26 to $55 an hour.
“They require a willingness to work, to work hard, work with your hands and your brain,” Mr. Page, 38, said in an email.
Mr. Page said he was a C and D student and went to work for an electrical contractor four days after graduating from Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical High School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Now he owns three electrical companies.
“I think we will see an increase in people wanting to work in the trades and seeking other alternatives than just college,” he said. “The cost of college is so great, and the cost of living is even greater. One thing about the trades is no robot can ever replace what we do.”
Falling enrollment
According to the Department of Education, total undergraduate enrollment fell by 9% from 17.5 million students in 2009 to 15.9 million in 2020. The department projects enrollment will grow by 8% from 15.9 million in 2020 to 17.1 million students in 2030, driven largely by surges in international and first-generation student applications.
Meanwhile, most liberal arts programs at public and private colleges have stopped offering the Western-civilization-based core curriculum. They focus instead on pursuing lucrative federal grants and private donations for research into trendy studies related to race, sexuality, ecology and gender.
“Why do I want to save a program that’s teaching a woke curriculum instead of the classic core curriculum covering the whole scope of human learning? It’s not what it used to be,” said Mr. Agresto, the former member of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
From 1989 to 2000, Mr. Agresto served as president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a private liberal arts school with its main campus in Annapolis, Maryland. In 1937, St. John’s became a Great Books program. It reorganized its teaching around seminar discussions of primary sources, making it an outlier in higher education trends.
“Go to almost any school’s catalog and look at the titles of the courses in English, history and classics, and they all revolve around things like ‘women in antiquity’ or ‘homosexual responses to classical learning,’” said Mr. Agresto, who holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University. “That’s what young professors today learn in their graduate schools and what they want to teach. Why not study Western civilization? Because it’s racist, sexist and homophobic, and the documents are all written by people who owned slaves.”
The decline of the liberal arts further snowballed as thousands of young people skipped college during the early years of the pandemic, creating an enrollment crisis as they headed straight into the workforce.
Overall undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% nationally from 2019 to 2022 and did not rebound even after colleges resumed in-person classes, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. The drop in the rate of high school graduates going to college since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number of freshmen enrolling in college increased slightly from 2021 to 2022 but remains well under pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, demand has soared for apprenticeships in the trades. The Department of Labor reported that the number of new apprentices has rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels after dipping in 2020.
To fill their dorms, colleges have increasingly offered scholarships to international and first-generation students. Although these scholarships once let students choose liberal arts majors, they are now restricted to recruiting underrepresented minorities into lucrative technology majors such as computer science.
According to the Common Application, an undergraduate admissions program that 841 colleges and universities use, surging applications from first-generation and international students have offset a general trend of declining enrollment at four-year institutions since 2019.
Insiders say most of those students are more interested in finding stable jobs than in discussing the classics from either a traditional or woke perspective.
From this August through March, the Common Application found that underrepresented minority applicants increased by 31% over the same period in 2019-2020 and first-generation applicants increased by 36%, nearly three times the rate of continuing-generation applicants.
Meanwhile, the company said, the number of distinct applicants from outside the country increased at nearly triple the rate of U.S.-based applicants. China, India, Nigeria, Ghana and Canada were the leading countries for international applicants.
“For first-generation college students, many of them see it as a ticket to middle-class or better success, and they want fields with a clear path to success after college. Degrees in softer woke-ified areas are not likely to do that,” said anthropologist Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars.
A former associate provost at Boston University, he sees the trend as a brain drain that may help Chinese research universities surpass American institutions. At that point, he predicts, the pipeline will dry up.
“The magnet of American higher education that draws international students is our reputation for excellence in prosperous science, technology, engineering and math fields,” Mr. Wood said. “I’ve encountered very few international students coming here to seek liberal arts degrees, although some who find engineering and science too difficult settle for less-demanding studies.”
⦁ Tomorrow: Preserving the liberal arts
The value of “knowledge for its own sake,” as ancient Greeks understood a classical education, lies in having surgeons who know ethics, defense attorneys who have mastered public speaking and politicians well-versed in history and political science.
A liberal arts education not only nourishes the soul but also develops the habits of thinking deeply, writing coherently, speaking clearly, listening carefully and making sound judgments — qualities valued by employers, advocates say.
Yet college humanities programs have been struggling for years to attract students, with COVID-19 shutdowns exacerbating higher education’s problems. Colleges and universities nationwide are now slashing their humanities programs, and some liberal arts schools are shutting down entirely.
This three-part series examines the role that the push for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education has played in the decline in interest in the humanities; the growing challenges that liberal arts programs face, including sky-high tuition and dropping enrollment; and the effort by conservatives and Christians to save traditional humanities education.
• Part 1: Colleges’ focus on STEM is killing liberal arts programs
• Part 2: Liberal arts programs face mounting challenges
• Part 3: Conservatives, Christians work to preserve traditional liberal arts
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.