The narrative around the humanities in American higher education tends to follow a fatalistic arc: students don’t want to major in literature or philosophy anymore, enrollment has collapsed, and the disciplines are dying a natural death. The actual story is more specific and more institutional. Humanities departments are being closed in disproportionate numbers, but the closures correlate less with student demand than with administrative decisions about resource allocation that often produce the demand collapse they’re then cited as responding to.
The data is more nuanced than the narrative
Humanities major numbers have declined nationally over the last two decades, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis sharpened anxieties about employability. But the decline has been wildly uneven across institutions. Some universities have seen humanities enrollment hold steady or grow. Others have seen it crater, often after specific administrative decisions reduced course offerings, eliminated tenure-track positions, or merged programs into larger units. The pattern suggests demand isn’t uniformly disappearing — it’s responding to what’s available, and what’s available is increasingly being decided by administrators rather than by student preference.
How the spiral starts
The mechanism is recognizable. A program loses a few faculty positions to retirement and isn’t given hiring lines to replace them. Course offerings shrink. Class sizes rise or scheduling becomes inconvenient. Students who can’t fit a course into their schedule, or who can’t get into a section that fills quickly, choose other majors. Enrollment numbers drop. Administration cites the dropping enrollment as justification for further cuts. The spiral accelerates, and after several cycles the program is small enough to merge or eliminate. By the time the closure is announced, the demand collapse can be presented as having caused the decision rather than been produced by it.
The funding-model incentives
Most contemporary universities use budget models that allocate resources based on student credit hours, grant funding, or “high-demand” criteria that disadvantage humanities programs by definition. Humanities classes typically don’t generate large grants; they don’t have laboratory infrastructure to attract sponsored research; their majors don’t pay the tuition premiums that professional programs command. Under credit-hour-based budgeting, a department that doesn’t pull in enough enrollment-driven revenue is structurally vulnerable, regardless of its academic value. The funding model produces the outcome before any individual decision is made.
The administrative class has grown faster than faculty
While humanities programs have been cut, administrative ranks at U.S. universities have expanded substantially over the same period. Studies have repeatedly shown the ratio of administrators to faculty rising decade over decade, with major growth in non-academic categories like marketing, fundraising, compliance, and student affairs. The financial argument that universities can’t afford humanities programs is undermined by the simultaneous expansion of administrative spending — money that could have been allocated differently was, in many cases, allocated to growing the administrative apparatus instead.
Bottom line
The humanities have real challenges, including some honest critiques about whether certain programs need reform, modernization, or refocusing. But the dominant narrative — that they’re dying because students don’t want them — substantially mischaracterizes what’s happening. Many programs are being eliminated for institutional reasons that precede and produce the enrollment patterns now cited as their cause. The honest version of the conversation requires looking at the administrative decisions, not just the student-decision symptoms downstream of them.
Leave a Reply