Humanities education, once considered the very backbone and heartbeat of American intellectual life, is fast losing its place in the national imagination. What was once cherished as the essence of a well-rounded university experience is now being pared away, sometimes quietly, sometimes with explicit clarity. The slow erosion and blurring of lines is not hypothetical anymore; it is unfolding before our eyes.

This past summer, Indiana University Bloomington, one of the country’s premier public universities, announced plans to eliminate or consolidate over 100 academic programmes. Art History, Comparative Literature, Religious Studies, and French, disciplines that moulded the contours of students’ minds, were uprooted from the curriculum. The decision was not born from academic irrelevance, but stemmed from arithmetic: A new state law requires departments to graduate an average of ten students annually to justify survival. In one sweep, entire traditions of inquiry were deemed dispensable.

The economics of disposability

Indiana is hardly an outlier. Across the United States, both public universities and struggling private colleges are making deep cuts, crumbling under the pressure of falling enrollments, declining revenues, and a national obsession with measurable “return on investment.” West Virginia University has trimmed off foreign language majors; Boston University recently suspended admissions to a dozen humanities PhD programmes; and the University of Chicago has paused several graduate offerings in the arts and humanities.

The policy environment has only accelerated this retreat. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21) ties federal graduate funding to post-study incomes and caps loans, effectively penalising disciplines not aligned with immediate workforce returns. In such a calculus, the humanities are reduced to expendable luxuries, useful only if they generate quantifiable dollars.

The data confirms the direction, according to Forbes: Enrolments in STEM soar while those in the humanities collapse. The danger, the vulnerability, is not measured in numbers; it is existential. A society governed solely by productivity metrics risks amputating the very disciplines that help us form an opinion, question, interpret, and reimagine what it means to live together.

The new aristocracy of liberal arts

Yet, the good news is that the humanities are not becoming extinct; it is being redirected as the privilege of the elite. As enrolments shrink, the proportion of students from the wealthiest one percent rises. Philanthropic largesse underscores this divide: $75 million from industrialist Peter McCausland to the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences; tens of millions from the Hewlett Foundation to Stanford; Joseph Bae’s endowment for Harvard’s government and history departments, as reported by Forbes. For the affluent and rich, history and languages remain a cultural inheritance, an asset passed down to enshrine intellectual breadth in a narrowing world.

The phenomenon mirrors broader cultural patterns. Irony brims and reaches its peak when Silcon Valley parents, who built the very platforms of algorithmic living, famously send their children to screen-free schools, privileging books and the arts over decades. In such choices lies a bare and hard-hitting truth: What becomes scarce does not vanish; it becomes exclusive. In future America, recognising a Caravaggio or parsing Jane Austen may no longer be a democratic possibility, but a class marker.

Why humanities matter

The decline of the humanities is not just an academic concern; it is a democratic one. To study philosophy is to wrestle with justice; to study history is to learn from the follies and triumphs of humankind; to study languages is to see the world through another’s eyes. These are not ornamental pursuits. They are the sinews of civic life, the “best defense against tyranny,” as Thomas Jefferson once argued.

Without the humanities, we risk raising generations of brilliant engineers who can build systems but never question their ethical boundaries; economists who can model outcomes but never grapple with their human costs; technologists who can optimise efficiency but never imagine justice. The erosion of humanity is, in truth, the erosion of our collective moral imagination.

A future written in exclusion

Elite universities are responding with grandeur. Oxford’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities promises to intertwine AI and ethics; Princeton has launched a humanities initiative linking literature and philosophy to global crises; UCLA recently secured a record $31 million to globalise Japanese humanities. These are bold gestures of resilience, but they also expose the widening gulf: While wealthy institutions double down, public universities, the engines of mass opportunity, retreat.

The future of the humanities in America is thus not a question of survival but of distribution. They will survive, but for whom? For the heirs of privilege who can afford intellectual curiosity untethered from economic anxiety, or for the broader citizenry that once saw in the humanities a pathway to civic belonging?

History offers a chilling parallel. In ancient Rome, fluency in Greek and knowledge of Homer were not merely signs of erudition—they were emblems of class. America, once proud of its democratic experiment in liberal education, risks walking the same path.

The choice before us

The crisis of the humanities is not simply about budgets or enrolment figures. It is about whether we believe education is only a marketplace transaction or a public good vital to democracy. To let the humanities die out in all but elite spaces would be to concede that only some Americans deserve the ability to interpret, to question, to dream.

The question is not whether the humanities will endure. The question is whose children will inherit them—and whose voices will be left unheard in a nation that once believed knowledge belonged to all.