[dguest]

I think people are confusing two types of studying:

- Undergrad level: Reading stuff that other people have already summarized books/blogs/etc and digesting it a bit. These days you might not really need to go to school to do this.

- Grad level: "studying" as in researching. I'm not in the humanities but I'm assuming that becoming a leading expert in "Germany 300 years ago" is a lot easier when it's your full time job.

Most of the responses here seem to be assuming the first case, whereas the case that is "fundamentally impossible" without some support is the more nuanced synthesis you get from the second case. And in our current system, half the purpose of undergraduate classes is to subsidize the higher level research.

I don't mean to make value judgements on whether further synthesis of "Germany 300 years ago" is needed, but until we come up with a better system killing undergraduate courses in field X is also a huge blow to the research there.