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TUCSON, Ariz. — Olivia Howe was hesitant at first to add French to her major in finance at the University of Arizona, fearing that it wouldn’t be very useful in the labor market.

Then her language skills helped her land a job at the multinational technology company Siemens, which will be waiting for her when she graduates this spring.

“The reason I got the job is because of my French. I didn’t see it as a practical choice, but now I do,” said Howe, who, to communicate with colleagues and clients, also plans to take up German. “The humanities taught me I could do it.”

The simple message that majoring in the humanities pays off is being pushed aggressively by this university and a handful of others; they hope to reverse decades of plummeting enrollment in subjects that teach skills employers say they need from graduates but aren’t getting.

The number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities at the University of Arizona has increased 76 percent since 2018, when it introduced a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities that connects the humanities with programs in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. It also hired a humanities recruitment director and marketing team and started training faculty members to enlist students in the major with the promise that an education in the humanities leads to jobs.

That’s an uncharacteristic role for humanities professors, who have tended to resist suggestions that it’s their role to ready students for the workforce.

But it’s become an existential one.

Nationwide, between 2012 and 2022 the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in the humanities — English, history, languages, literature, philosophy and related subjects — fell 24 percent, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It’s now below 200,000 for the first time in more than two decades.

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In response, universities and colleges nationwide have started eliminating humanities departments and laying off humanities faculty as policymakers, parents and administrators put a premium on highly specialized subjects they believe lead more directly to jobs.

Efforts to revitalize humanities enrollment are widely scattered, however, with surprisingly few examples like Arizona’s, and no guarantee of widespread success.

“What we are up against is the constant negative storytelling about how the humanities are useless,” said Alain-Philippe Durand, dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities and a professor of French.

Higher education has largely struggled to counteract this. Presidents and deans use vague arguments that the humanities impart knowledge and create citizens of the world, when what tuition-paying consumers want to know is what they’ll get for their money and how they’ll repay their student loan debt.

“When you tell them we are teaching the life of the mind, they laugh at you,” Durand said over lunch at the student center.

“You have people saying, ‘Do we really need this?’ ” he said. “It should be the opposite: ‘Hey, did you know that in the College of Humanities we teach some of the most in-demand skills in the job market?’ ”

Durand’s department went so far as to put that declaration on a billboard on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, conveniently near the campus of rival Arizona State University. “Humanities=Jobs,” it said, with the college’s web address. Durand keeps a model of it on a shelf in his office.

The skills he’s talking about include how to communicate effectively, think critically, work in teams and be able to figure out a way to solve complex problems outside of a particular area of expertise. Employers say they want all of those but aren’t getting them from graduates who major in narrower fields.

Eight out of 10 executives and hiring managers say it’s very or somewhat important that students emerge from college with these kinds of skills, according to a survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Yet half said, in a separate survey by the Business-Higher Education Forum, that graduates are showing up without them, and that the problem is getting worse.

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What employers want “is people who can make sense of the human experience,” said Rishi Jaitly, who has developed an executive education program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute that uses the humanities to help mid-career managers be better leaders.

Along with Arizona, Virginia Tech is among a small group of universities taking steps to change the conversation about the humanities. A surprising number are technology-focused.

These include the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has also started drawing a connection between the humanities and good jobs at high pay. That has helped boost undergraduate and graduate enrollment in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts by 58 percent since 2019, to 1,884 students in 2023 — the most recent period for which the figure is available.

Before then, “we were doing almost nothing to explain the value of the humanities,” said Richard Utz, interim dean. That’s important at a technological institute, he said. “So we started to connect each and every thing we do with the values that these kinds of skills have for [students’] career preparation.”

A medievalist, Utz uses the example of assigning his students 15th-century Robin Hood ballads. “They read something that is entirely alien to them, that is in late medieval English, so they’re completely out of their comfort zone,” he said. Then they split into groups and consider the material from various perspectives. It makes them the kind of future workers “who are versatile enough to look at a situation from different points of view.”

To him, Utz said, “the future of the humanities is not being hermetically sealed off, as in, ‘You’re over there and we’re over here.’ It’s making clear that the skills of engineers and computer scientists increase if you include the arts, the humanities, the social sciences.”

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That’s also the idea behind a program in French for medical professionals at Washington University in St. Louis, which recruits students who took French in high school but may not have continued. For some, it leads to studying in Nice and interning at a hospital there, an unusual opportunity for undergraduates.

“These students, when they come back to the United States, they are accepted in the best medical schools because their dossiers are at the top of the pile,” said Lionel Cuillé, a professor of French who spearheads the initiative. “Those pre-meds take French because it is a clear added value to their first major.”

The participants in the humanities-focused executive education program at Virginia Tech — in the first two years, they’ve come from Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, Zillow and other companies — study history, philosophy, religion, classics, literature and the arts. They use these to consider questions about and qualities of leadership and see how what they learn can be applied to technology trends including data privacy and artificial intelligence.

“What I was observing around me in Silicon Valley and more generally was a world that was missing that story,” said Virginia Tech’s Jaitly, a former technology entrepreneur and founder of a venture capital firm whose own undergraduate degree was in history. “The superpowers of the future emanate from the humanities: introspection and imagination, storytelling and story-listening, critical thinking.”

He purposely picked “leadership” instead of “humanities” for the name of the program, he said. “To me, ‘leadership’ is a high-impact word to show and not tell the power of the humanities.”

With a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Emory University is helping faculty members redesign humanities courses to emphasize their relevance, said Barbara Krauthamer, dean of its College of Arts and Sciences. “We’re not denying the reality of career readiness, of real-world application and of the context of the world we live in now, which is increasingly technological and changing rapidly,” Krauthamer said.

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Central Michigan University in the fall began to offer a bachelor’s degree modeled on the University of Arizona’s, in “public and applied liberal arts.” It was added after the number of incoming students there who listed their intended majors as English, humanities and foreign languages fell from 179 in 2019 to zero in 2022 and 2023, according to university figures.

That trend “has a lot to do with the fact that even at a regional public [university], you need to know how you’re going to pay the bills after you’re done,” said Christi Brookes, assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. “It’s a question we’ve ignored.”

The new degree connects humanities courses with the “applied fields” of entrepreneurship and environmental studies. Future combinations are planned with fashion and game design.

The traditional argument for the humanities, Brookes said, has been, “ ‘Well, it will make you a better citizen and person.’ But what was left out was, ‘What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?’ What we’re trying to do is say, ‘Here’s the connection.’ ”

Another way some universities are doing that is by showcasing the successes of former humanities students.

The liberal arts college at Georgia Tech serves up a litany of alumni success stories on its website. Arizona’s College of Humanities has produced a video of graduate testimonials; it features a senior counsel at Netflix, a principal investigator for the first NASA mission to return rock samples from an asteroid, the head of corporate strategy at the meal-delivery service Blue Apron, a diplomat, a Broadway actor and Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr.

When they see examples like these, “You can see the parents visibly relaxing,” said Judd Ruggill, head of Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities.

The video is part of a relentless recruiting effort here, which ranges from a pop-up “humanities cafe” on the campus mall where faculty and advisers mingle with prospective majors to a mandatory two-day recruitment workshop training graduate teaching assistants to pick out humanities prospects among the students in required general-education courses. “Talent-spotting,” the college calls it.

“I think they know we need that push,” said senior Liliana Quiroz, who added Italian to her anthropology major after being prodded by a faculty member. Even then, she said, “My parents didn’t quite understand the benefits. There wasn’t that understanding of the skill sets that represented.”

But when she got an internship in a marketing department, she realized her humanities experience made her “confident enough to figure it out as I went.” She used self-reliance she learned taking on the challenge of a new language, Quiroz said, and analytical skills she developed reading literature in the original Italian.

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Howe, the University of Arizona French and business double major, may not have initially thought French would help her get a job. She simply liked it and wanted to improve her skills — something else that advocates of the humanities say is being lost as colleges keep dropping these programs.

“I definitely discovered ways that it helped me in my finance career later on, but at the outset it was my passion that drove me to French,” she said.

Fellow senior Peyton Broskoff combined business administration with applied humanities. She also took a humanities course for which she teamed up with other students to revitalize a community library. That taught her “intercultural competence — just being able to understand and work with people.” It will help her in a future job, she said. “If you can market to different people, that means you can sell more products.”

Arturo Padilla signed up for a joint program in religious studies for health professionals. The son of indigenous Mexican parents, he plans to use what he is learning to combine traditional wellness and healing with modern medical practices.

Maxwell Eller has gotten something simpler from his major in classics. “It helped my attention span in a world of YouTube and Instagram,” said the University of Arizona senior. “I felt my knowledge was pretty shallow. I wanted to wrestle with ambiguities.” And learning the grammatical structures of Latin and Greek helped him in his volunteer work teaching English to women in Afghanistan.

While their incomes in the 10 years after graduation are below the median of all college graduates, students who go to liberal arts colleges, over the long term, earn a total of about $200,000 more according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

With little overhead, the humanities are also comparatively cheap to teach. Producing a credit hour in English or philosophy costs only a little more than half of what it costs to produce a credit hour in engineering, a study for the University of North Carolina System by Deloitte and the Burning Glass Institute found.

Still, humanities departments at public universities including Arizona’s are funded based on the number of students they enroll, making their recovery a matter of survival.

“At some point, we had to do something,” said Matt Mars, a professor in Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities. “If we think innovation is important, then we need to be innovative.”

It may take more than that. Some legislators who control the budgets of public universities and colleges have been skeptical of the value of humanities departments, especially those that house such subjects as gender and ethnic studies.

Some humanities faculty also bristle at the idea that their work is relevant only when combined with more career-oriented disciplines, said Durand, at the University of Arizona. “But you have to be aligned with your students,” he said.

Younger humanities faculty “get it,” Durand said. “They are willing to do interdepartmental collaboration. They know we can’t do things the way we always have.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or [email protected].

This story on the liberal arts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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