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I usually do a “state of the nation” post on July 4th, but I was traveling to Japan today, and the wifi didn’t work on the plane, so I’ll have to do it tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought I’d repost a fun post that I wrote back in 2022, about how an excessive boom in higher education, coupled with a saturation in the markets for many humanities-based jobs, might have contributed to America’s era of unrest.
Three years later, I think most of what I said in this post still looks right. The decline in college enrollment suggests that Americans might have collectively realized that a bachelor’s degree isn’t an automatic ticket to a comfortable lifestyle. But we may still be in for a second round of elite overproduction, because the “practical” STEM majors that lots of students shifted into in response to the humanities bust are now seeing higher unemployment:
This is due in large part to the crash in tech sector hiring over the past two years:
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In fact, unemployment is now higher for recent college graduates than for the general public:
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Some people think these trends are due to the rise of generative AI; others disagree. But whatever the reason, the failure of STEM to provide a secure alternative career path in the wake of the big humanities bust might be setting us up for more unrest among the youth.
Anyway, here’s that original post from 2022:
“We're talented and bright/ We're lonely and uptight/ We've found some lovely ways/ To disappoint” — The Weakerthans
Here’s an eye-opening bit of data: The percent of U.S. college students majoring in the humanities has absolutely crashed since 2010.
Ben Schmidt has many more interesting data points in his Twitter thread. To me the most striking was that there are now almost as many people majoring in computer science as in all of the humanities put together: