In my first month at Dartmouth, I’ve been asked about my major and “what I plan to do with it” more times than I can count. The latter is asked with poorly masked skepticism when I answer the former with the slew of humanities disciplines I’m interested in. While my STEM counterparts are met with eyes widened in awe or impressed nods of approval, I find that I am expected to defend my choices in a way that students pursuing more obviously career-oriented subjects are not. Beyond that, my defense is always expected to come in the form of the job I plan to have and the money I plan to make with a college degree majoring in the humanities. Why must we prove that humanities are economically useful to establish that they matter?
Measuring the value of education primarily through its economic returns reduces learning to a transaction rather than a pursuit. If you’ve ever found yourself only perking up in class when you hear the content will be on the test, you’ve probably also witnessed the accompanying sigh of disappointment from your teacher when they notice this shift. The classes for which you require a grade-based incentive to apply yourself are also the classes that you remember the least and have the least impact on you as a student and a person.
The classes in which grades are our primary motivation are often the ones in which we engage most superficially.
We recognize, at least in the classroom, that learning loses something when its sole purpose becomes achieving a particular tangible outcome. Yet we seem so often unwilling to apply this same logic to college. Many measure the worth of a degree through graduate salaries and employment rates, treating education as something valuable insofar as it can be converted into economic success. This is not to say that economic usefulness is not a legitimate consideration, but it should not be the sole measure of educational value.
If we should not find the value of the humanities in prospective salaries, even though we certainly can, where should we turn instead?
The humanities matter not because they supply immediately useful answers, but because they teach us to interrogate the questions, assumptions and values that organize our lives. Philosophy teaches us what constitutes truth, justice, knowledge and a meaningful life. Literature exposes us to experiences different from our own. History reminds us that the institutions and social norms we consider natural or inevitable are products of particular circumstances. All in all, the humanities change the way we understand the world. The United Nations wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, defining 30 fundamental rights and freedoms to be universally protected. The declaration states that education should be directed toward “the full development of the human personality” and should “promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” Notably absent from this declaration is any mention of employability, earning potential or economic productivity. Instead, education is understood as a means of developing the individual and cultivating mutual understanding. The humanities push us beyond our own experiences, challenge our inherited assumptions and encourage us to recognize perspectives other than our own.
Beyond the intellectual and social value of the humanities, there lies the intrinsic value that resists measurement and understanding altogether. What is the practical return for spending sleepless nights studying a philosophical question that has remained unresolved for centuries? Why do we preserve centuries-old poems, paintings and novels when they offer no obvious material benefit? Perhaps these questions are misguided to begin with. We do not demand that love, friendship or joy produce measurable outcomes to acknowledge their worth, so why should intellectual curiosity be held to a different standard? There is value in reading a poem simply because it moves us, in contemplating a painting simply because we find it beautiful and in pursuing a question simply because we find it fascinating. To insist that these experiences justify themselves through some external benefit is to misunderstand what makes them worthwhile in the first place.
None of this is to suggest students should disregard their financial future when selecting a major. College is expensive and it is, therefore, only practical to think of it as an investment. Career preparation is a legitimate purpose of higher education. We also cannot ignore that the freedom to pursue an education without regard for its economic returns is itself a privilege. For students without a financial safety net, choosing a less directly career-oriented path can carry greater risks. But acknowledging these realities is different from accepting that economic returns should determine the worth of an education. The humanities can certainly be professionally useful, but their usefulness is not what makes them worth studying.
The next time someone asks me what I plan to do with my major, I doubt I’ll have a particularly satisfying answer for them. I might offer some vague career aspirations or attempt to justify how the skills I’m learning will open up so many doors for me professionally. But in doing so, I’ll be missing the point of why I chose to study the humanities in the first place. We should not have to prove that understanding the world will make us more productive before deciding that the world is worth understanding.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
