[rumdonut]

Since this downward trend started around 2010, when I was in middle school and it seemed people where first getting on the internet en masse, I wonder if this trend is due to higher internet exposure in kids bringing widespread awareness to the financial reality of a humanities degree. It’s common to hear humanities degrees being derided on social media sites, but social media is also the only place I really hear these attitudes. I think this trend could be due to being more informed, as well as social pressure.

[jimbo9991]

I think it's partly that, and mostly a reaction to the recession. We're a similar age and all my decisions and the decisions of my peers about what to do after high school were based primarily off of what we had seen during the recession.

I'm not sure if that will be enough to explain it in another couple of years though if similar trends continue, as it's getting to the point where college graduates will soon not have been old enough to remember their parents getting laid off and older siblings not being able to get their careers started.

If the current "tech recession" gets bad enough maybe things will even out.

Additionally, I'm not sure the financial reality of humanities degrees was always terrible. I haven't looked into it but surely there must have been a point where it was a more viable option? Otherwise it's tough to explain where the market for those degrees came from. That assumes that there is some sort of free market dynamic that impacts what people end up studying, which I believe to be the case.

[sokoloff]

Back in the 1950s, when only 10-12% of Americans over 25 had a 4-year degree or more, a humanities degree was a lot more valuable than today, because it marked you in the top 10-12% in terms of education.

Then “way more people should go to college” happened, which is by and large a good thing, but means that whoever has the least valuable degree is in a worse spot than that same degree would represent in 1955.

[hgsgm]

> it marked you in the top 10-12% in terms of education.

"Education" as in status/wealth. The humanities education wasn't what made them marketable.

[escapedmoose]

Do you have any data to back that assumption? A dedicated humanities degree would impart skills beyond what a typical high school graduate had. This should translate to higher marketability unrelated to status/wealth.

[ismokedoinks]

This is a guess although I work in "edtech" and wrote a thesis on institutional finance so it's a slightly educated guess--I think rising tuition rates coupled with stagnant real wages and increasing CoL change the cost-benefit on the value of any given degree. It's probably not a social pressure or potential increase in earning as much as a perception of CS/STEM being the only way to get by or else it's just not worth getting a degree since college enrollment is slowing or decreasing recently.