In Defense of Humanities Degrees

Talia Cutler ’27

Executive Opinion Editor

“Oh, brother! The author majors in English! Spare me!” As a recently declared sophomore, I am plagued with a lot of insecurity. Not the physical kind where I fret over a warped Target mirror, but rather an academic insecurity that clouds my mind when I sit in a seminar class. I love my classes, I adore my professors and I have never once doubted that I am going to work in the field I am studying in. Instead, this insecurity stems from a stigma around the humanities itself. Specifically, I have noticed a troubling rejection of humanities subjects in mainstream culture, having severe repercussions not only on Trinity’s campus but across the academic realm. 

There is a poster in 115 Vernon titled “What can you do with an English major?” The poster contains sage advice, such as that an English degree is useful because it teaches you to “communicate effectively” and “understand other points of view.” I am baffled by this poster. I am not majoring in English to build skills that should have been evident in elementary school. My education should not be reduced to “communicating effectively” — seriously? It feels equivalent to asking “Why math?” and being told, “To learn how to count!”

To be fair, I understand what the poster is attempting to do — English majors are underrepresented in the student body. After all, there is certainly a false postulation that the humanities are a collection of fields with a scarcity of employment opportunities. On the surface level, this Canva masterpiece brought to us by Norton Literature Dot Com can pacify any uncertainty a prospective major may have about their future post-graduation. 

This urge to appeal to students is a hotly discussed topic by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has published such articles as “Humanities on the Cutting Room Floor”, and “Value of Humanities Degrees Goes Beyond Salary.” In these articles, authors Robert Zaretsky and Jennifer King Rice (respectively) discuss the dangers of letting the humanities become obsolete in a market where humanities jobs are still in demand. The more the general population leans into the idea that the humanities is some jobless void, the more it will self-perpetuate. If we discourage people who are interested in history from majoring in it, there will be fewer and fewer history majors until one day we find that there aren’t enough qualified people to work in jobs that require a history background. Then, the whole field and the academic community around it is going to decline. This phenomenon can already be observed — Education, Anthropology, Art History and Creative Writing were ranked among the (egregious and dystopian) list of “20 Most Useless Degrees of 2024”. Yet, the rate of dwindling humanities majors runs almost parallel to the declining national literacy rate. Most Americans now read below a sixth-grade level according to data from the U.S. Department of Education. Oh no — I’m sure I lost some of you when I used the word “postulation.” As the number of humanities majors declines, the country’s critical thinking skills (another thing listed on the poster!) go with it. 

Trinity College is not immune to this symptom. As the English Department has only 90 declared majors, there is a marked illiterateness that wipes through campus — I overhear students complain of an ‘impossible workload’ of 15 pages of reading a week. Last semester, a classmate asked me if “Thank you” was one word or two. Yes, these could be labeled as outliers — every Econ major has a bad day once in a while! However, I’m not so sure. As students (and the rest of the world) become increasingly reliant on AI for homework and TikTok for news, misinformation runs rampant and a void grows in the space where common sense should be. Thus, I return to that didactic “What can you do with an English major?” poster. Perhaps “communicating effectively” isn’t as elementary as I made it out to be — perhaps what the poster (troublingly) signifies is which skills die when the societal devaluation of the humanities reaches a critical point. 

How do we weigh importance in a field? By salary? By legacy? Is a teacher more or less important than an investment banker? Does the IT specialist beat the journalist or the plumber in this conjectural game of employment rock paper scissors we’ve invented? Degrees in the humanities should not be considered useful just because they serve other fields — they serve their own and that is enough. In this way, I will conclude by contradicting the title of this article. Humanities degrees do not need defending. Their value is evident in a world where even college students struggle with fundamental literacy. I do not need a poster to tell me this — and maybe if others do, they should look for a less literate field.