Did you read the recent piece online at The Atlantic? Building on an earlier online piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education (and using its graphs, like me) it makes the point that, when judged by the percentage of all degrees earned, the anomaly in the Humanities isn’t now but a few decades ago, when the influx of baby boomer freshmen found college majors. The drop that followed their departure is therefore better understood as a normalization.

From The Atlantic‘s article:

With all this feverish talk of decline, one might expect there to be some evidence that the ranks of English and philosophy majors are, in fact, collapsing — or even noticeably thinning out. The problem is, there isn’t any, at least when it comes to undergraduate education. By the standards of recent history, the humanities seem to be faring just fine on campus.

So might the problem here not be with the Humanities and their place in the university so much as the infinite growth model that we use to make sense of our situation in the world, whereby failing to earn more profits than last year means you had a bad year? For earning only 4% this fiscal year is bad news if you earned 6% last year–even if you had only ever earned 1% prior to that.

For seeing the data in a different light, we might conclude that the Humanities are doing particularly well right now, so long as we–as would any good statistician–take outliers like the post WWII baby boom into account:

There are other indicators that we also need to consider, of course. What jobs these graduates land will be important to know and what they end up doing with their lives is also crucial if we mean to understand the relevance of the Humanities, though knowing that people earn Humanities and Liberal Arts degrees for all sorts of reasons and end up using them toward all sorts of interesting ends suggests that these utilitarian measures will not help us all that much.

After all, President Obama was a Political Science major and Mitt Romney was an English major–wasted degrees for both of them if you only understand undergraduate education as being about getting a job in the profession you studied in undergrad, right? But they each seem to have done pretty well for themselves.