The college experience has greatly shifted in the past thirty to forty years. The necessity of having a degree in order to get a “good” job has grown exponentially. Rather than higher education, the university experience is now an essentially mandatory component of one’s education just like high school. Virtually everyone is encouraged to attend. This has made for more specialization. A wide-ranging education that is supposed to expose the student to as many things as possible is now out of the norm, and people pigeon-hole themselves into one subject. Students at universities take one science class, one English class, one history course, etc. just to fulfill a general education requirement, not to learn. The biggest problem of all, however, is that it is seen as a waste of time to learn as much as possible.
The study of humanities is seen as a waste of time because it isn’t “practical.” Degrees in business, engineering and medicine, while valuable and necessary, are seen as useful and productive while degrees in history, English and art are seen as useless and impractical. There is no problem in pursuing any of these degrees, the problem is the way the college experience works now, in that students are only exposed to their own majors. College has been bastardized away from the idea of higher education and exposure to a wide range of subjects to simply a transactional process where you do some work in exchange for a degree. People aren’t coming to college anymore to learn, they are coming to get their degree.
Intellectualism has been de-emphasized as a virtue because people aren’t coming here to learn. In order to justify the idea of a “useful” or “practical” degree, intellectualism as a whole has been deemed impractical and a waste of time, much like the degrees and majors listed before. Intellectualism today is seen as pretentious and highbrow, and has been slowly phased out of the values of the collegiate experience. Humanities have been defunded year after year, the programs shrinking and professors put out of jobs. In an increasingly, purely transactional society, the value of humanities has been lost.
People tend not to realize the value of many of the translatable skills like close reading, interpretation, writing, research, etc., that one can learn in degrees like English, History, etc. These are things you can learn on your own, but getting a variety of perspectives you may otherwise be unable to find that you can have access to in college is an invaluable experience. Getting rid of this kind of education in favor of alleged “more useful” programs is a travesty. There is a reason attention span has shortened, reading levels lowered and writing skills have worsened. It’s because of a de-emphasis on these subjects because they aren’t seen as ‘practical’.
