Devaluation of humanities

The humanities – those quiet disciplines of thought, memory, and meaning – have long occupied an uneasy place in the modern hierarchy of value. They are the fields that dwell not on what can be engineered or measured but on what can be understood: the motives that drive people to create, to destroy, to believe, to doubt. And yet, in a world increasingly dictated by metrics, efficiency, and the relentless demand for “usefulness,” these disciplines have been pushed to the margins of respectability. Universities close philosophy departments, literature faculties shrink, and policymakers speak of “innovation” as if it were synonymous with code and circuitry. This is not merely a budgetary decision – it is a moral and civilisational one. To sideline the humanities is to strip society of the very tools that make it capable of reflection, empathy, and critique. As the American Academy of Arts and Sciences observes, despite the prevailing skepticism about their practicality, humanities graduates consistently earn more than those without degrees and demonstrate high levels of job satisfaction (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2023). Yet, this empirical truth is drowned out by a louder cultural myth: that the humanities are indulgences, luxuries for the sentimental or the impractical, unsuited to the “real” world.

This mythology of uselessness has a deep economic and ideological root. The late capitalist obsession with productivity has reshaped education into a marketplace, where knowledge is appraised not for its depth but for its immediate profitability. In this logic, a degree is an investment, and its worth is judged by the salary it yields. What cannot be priced cannot be valued. As Tufts Daily reported in 2024, the number of history degrees in the United States fell by more than a third over the past decade, while nationwide, the share of humanities degrees dropped from 17.1 percent in 1971 to just 12.8 percent in 2021. Students are told – by parents, by counsellors, by the structure of tuition debt itself – that wisdom without economic leverage is a luxury they cannot afford. The result is a quiet evacuation of entire intellectual traditions. Departments that once trained historians, linguists, philosophers, and writers now shutter under the weight of administrative indifference, their libraries reduced to archives of what once mattered. But as Johns Hopkins University News-Letter argued in a 2024 editorial, “The notion that the humanities are inherently less valuable than STEM has pushed students away from studying societally important subjects.” To undervalue the humanities is to undervalue the human itself – to declare, in effect, that critical thinking, ethical imagination, and cultural literacy are dispensable.

And yet, what is lost when we accept that premise? What is the cost of a society that knows how to build but forgets how to understand? The University of Oxford’s 2023 study found that employers consistently prize skills cultivated in the humanities – critical reasoning, communication, creative synthesis, empathy, and adaptability – above almost all others. These are not “soft skills” but the sinews of a functioning democracy and a dynamic workforce. They are what allow people to navigate ambiguity, to imagine alternative futures, to speak across difference. When we dismiss these capacities as secondary, we impoverish the civic and moral fabric of the world we inhabit. A generation taught only to compute and never to contemplate becomes capable of extraordinary technical progress and catastrophic ethical blindness. The humanities do not exist in opposition to science or technology; they are the grammar through which those achievements gain meaning. They ask the questions that algorithms cannot: What should we do, not merely what can we do? To abandon them is to create a civilisation fluent in innovation but illiterate in introspection.

There is also a quieter cruelty in how this devaluation manifests within the academy itself. As The Los Angeles Review of Books observed in 2024, “It is infuriating and disheartening to witness the real-time dismantling and destruction of the infrastructure that afforded scholars … a humanities education and secure employment.” The shrinking of the humanities is not only an intellectual tragedy but a human one: behind every defunded department lies a cohort of adjunct professors teaching for poverty wages, a generation of students denied mentors, and a society that silently consents to the erosion of its own reflective class. The neglect is not gender-neutral, either. In many universities, women constitute a majority of students and instructors in the humanities, meaning that when these fields are dismissed as “less serious,” the dismissal carries a distinctly gendered echo – the persistent undervaluation of women’s intellectual labour, as New University (2025) noted in its analysis of higher education inequality. Thus, the marginalisation of the humanities replicates the very power structures these disciplines exist to interrogate.

To restore the humanities to their rightful stature requires more than mere funding or rhetorical defense; it demands a reorientation of what we mean by value itself. We must learn again to see knowledge not only as a means to employment but as a form of stewardship – of culture, of memory, of conscience. Instead of asking, “What job can you get with that degree?” we might ask, “What kind of society will exist without it?” The humanities remind us that progress without reflection is not progress but momentum without direction. They give contour to our collective imagination, discipline to our empathy, and language to our doubts. To defend them is not to romanticise the past but to insist on a future that remains recognisably human.