That’s neoliberal’s for you. It’s STEM all the way and nothing else has value.
I mean, these are acute symptoms of a chronic problem:
he added, noting that enrollment in some of the college’s majors was down by more than 20% over a five-year period.
“The humanities and social sciences remain the heart of the university’s core curriculum, but the number of students choosing specific humanities majors has declined.”
The reality is, even if many students did enter universities with high ideals of recieving a proper enlightenment education, as senior year approaches they will increasingly be drawn towards more marketable majors. Even if their entire degree and its associated costs were free, they are still dedicating 4 years of their lives to studying one thing or another, and after those 4 years they will expect to get a job.
At this point, of course, many Lemmings will say “Grrrr, it’s all capitalism’s fault - they have to get engineering and advertizing jobs to line the shareholder’s pockets.” But… that’s still not it. Suppose we snap our fingers and completely reorient society towards doing good things. We’re going to make people happy and healthy and solve climate change and end malaria and solve the housing crisis. Great. Now in this world, the mechanisms of economics are still in effect, and so any given individual must ask themselves “what can I do for the good of others such that they will pay me for it?” And the answer is still doing things like picking up garbage, or designing fusion reactors, or getting feedback on the new pedestrian-oriented design for a downtown, or helping people decide what type of solar battery bank works best for their home, or gathering donations to build healthcare infrastructure in the Congo, or prosecuting Trump for being a pedo, or digging into billionaires’ financial records so they can be appropriately taxed until they are no longer billionaires, or tending to permacultural farms that grow blueberries, etc, etc, etc.
None of these require being able to thoughtfully analyze Prost - at least not to the extent that it requires a four year degree.