The liberal arts ushered in a wave of adjustment and cancellation! Is there any way out for liberal arts？
In recent years, the field of liberal arts seems to be experiencing an unprecedented wave of adjustment and cancellation. Zhang Xuefeng’s point of view seems to fall into one sentence. Not only the liberal arts students in China are facing the employment problem, but also the situation of the liberal arts students all over the world is getting more and more difficult.
The news that Harvard University canceled many liberal arts majors is like throwing a stone into a lake, causing ripples. The term "liberal arts is dead" quickly made its way to Twitter, and this "liberal arts escape" is sweeping the world and even turning into a kind of black humor. According to American media data, every time a liberal arts major is closed, the share price of relevant education groups will rise by 2.3%, which reflects the severe challenges faced by liberal arts majors.
In the fall of 2024, Harvard University cancelled nearly 30 courses belonging to more than 20 departments, most of which were liberal arts majors. This is not an isolated case. As early as a year ago, Harvard began to plan to merge minority language courses. In September 2023, the University of West Virginia in the United States closed 28 majors, accounting for 8% of its total majors, and dismissed 143 faculty members. Earlier in the same year, the school also cancelled 10 majors, most of which were liberal arts majors, and cancelled master’s degrees in English and humanities.
In March 2024, the University of Kent in the United Kingdom also announced the phasing out of courses in six subject areas, including arts majors such as art history, anthropology and journalism. In China, major universities also made the largest professional adjustment in history in 2024. Northwest University and China University of Science and Technology cancelled some liberal arts majors, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics cancelled the entire Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Sichuan University cancelled 31 majors in one breath. According to statistics, in 2024, the total number of professional distribution points revoked in major universities in China was as high as 1670, 25 times that of 10 years ago.
The adjustment and cancellation of liberal arts majors is not achieved overnight, but has a profound social and economic background. On the one hand, liberal arts majors are often at a disadvantage in running schools because they do not have direct economic benefits; On the other hand, the enrollment expansion strategy adopted many years ago to alleviate the employment pressure has led to a sharp increase in the number of liberal arts majors, but the quality is uneven. In addition, enterprises are more inclined to science and engineering graduates in recruitment, and the employment competition of liberal arts students is becoming more and more fierce.
However, the current situation of science majors is good. In China, the number of science majors in the direction of artificial intelligence alone has exceeded 100, which has increased 15 times in the past six years. The widening of this gap has undoubtedly aggravated the anxiety of liberal arts students.
In the face of the global wave of liberal arts closures, it seems to be an indisputable fact that the value of liberal arts students has decreased. However, human society is inseparable from the demand for humanistic literacy, and the power of liberal arts knowledge cannot be underestimated. For students and graduates who have stepped into liberal arts majors, it has become a top priority to change their employment concept and improve their professional quality and business ability.
Liberal arts students need to strive to build their core competitiveness and cultivate interdisciplinary thinking and ability. The knowledge and skills of a single subject can no longer meet the needs of the market and enterprises, and talents with compound abilities are more popular. Many colleges and universities have begun to plan and construct brand-new liberal arts majors, such as the "new liberal arts" major of Nankai University and the interdisciplinary integration field of Shandong University, aiming at cultivating more compound talents to meet the market demand.
In reality, there are also many precedents for liberal arts students to realize value through cross-border. For example, a graduate majoring in advertising successfully transformed into a data analyst through self-taught courses such as statistics and SQL language, and finally entered the field of game design, with an annual salary of 600,000. This fully proves that liberal arts students can also shine in the workplace if they can give full play to their liberal arts literacy and thinking advantages and combine them with practical skills of other disciplines.
When the news came that Harvard University had closed the Department of Classics, we couldn’t help asking: Where is the way out for liberal arts? In the era when ChatGPT wrote sonnets, the value scale of humanities has been recalibrated by the digital wave. However, the flame of humanity has never been extinguished. It is a compass for business leaders to cross the cycle and an operating system engraved in human genes.
Perhaps those abolished liberal arts courses are teaching us how to meet this uncertain world with dignity in an unexpected way. Liberal arts still has its irreplaceable value and outlet, and the key lies in how we explore and utilize it.