The sweaty palms and furrowed eyebrows that stain the composure of college students during a job hunt could well be the face of higher education at this point in time.
Job markets are saturated, yet the opportunity for job creation is immense. Competition among fresh graduates has never been more fierce, but the horizons for the future of youth have never been more broad.
Higher education institutes provide the real-world experience that all students dive headfirst into, sometimes with more worry than rational thought.
Deciding on a major to structure the rest of your life has always been a daunting choice. As years have gone by and led to this fast-paced technological world, I feel that decision has been masked by a sense of false advertisement.
Students are pounded by anxiety over future career prospects, and their views of liberal arts majors are tainted as a zone where opportunities dwindle down to zero.
According to the American Historical Association’s 2018 Majors Report, the pattern of undergraduate majors has been shifting dramatically since the 2008 economic crisis, and the number of students pursuing history majors has seen the sharpest decline of all of them.
The National Center for Education Statistics reported that there were 34,642 history majors in 2008.
However, more recent data from 2017 shows there were only 25,266.
The report also stated that this decline over the last decade is the major’s lowest point since the 1980s, in which there was a 66 percent drop between the years 1969 and 1985 after the higher education boom of the ‘60s subsided.
I first heard about this decline in history majors during a political science class.
My professor marveled at how a lack of enrollment in history programs is common in so many educational institutions today, because history was such a popular field of study when he was in school.
According to The Washington Post, The University of Wisconsin at Seven Points proposed in March that they would consider dropping 13 humanities and social science majors such as history, philosophy and sociology.
On the contrary, they wanted to add and build upon programs they thought had clearer career pathways such as chemical engineering, marketing and computer information systems, according to financial website MarketWatch.
In my political science class, we ended up discussing how political theory that applied centuries ago could still be applied now, with even more strikingly similar ideals than how it used to be a couple decades ago.
I was struck with the realization that our world is losing sight of something that should be treated with so much importance.
The mentality of steering away from certain majors because they are less lucrative or deemed to be of less value in this technology-driven world is a mindset I believe will bring about more harm than good.
Indeed, we live in a time with immense competition in the job market, but we also live in a time where careers are not just one-track paths.
Instead, careers are a platform to utilize all strengths and knowledge gained
from school.
Getting a degree in history does not mean ending up a history researcher or educator are the only options.
Historians can utilize their knowledge of the world and how it has changed to analyze the field of communications through jobs as journalists, documentary editors, multimedia producers or even advertisers.
They can also use this knowledge to analyze business markets through jobs as a historian for business corporations or nonprofit associations.
Historians can also be consultants and information specialists.
History has never been a popular subject among students, and it has been labeled as one that requires unnecessary memorization that does little to benefit the student at that point in time.
However, history is the blueprint that will allow our future to be the one it should be.
It is incredibly important to know the attitudes of civilizations that came before us so we can model the ideal attitudes that need to be adopted by our civilization today — to avoid mistakes and improve opportunities.
It is incredibly important to be aware of conflicts that created wounds that were detrimental to progress.
For these very reasons, it is vital to encourage students to dive deeper into the study of history and to be extensively involveds in comparing and contrasting recurring patterns of behaviors that have left their mark on global development.
As the world continues to shift dramatically from how it was even 10 years ago, and with unimaginable changes already attained in politics, technological development and climate change, we cannot afford to cut down on any area of expertise.
