Questions about pragmatism have, for a long time, plagued the humanities. Fields such as English and fine arts have historically been intertwined with the “starving artist” trope—the image of someone willing to give up their financial wellbeing for the pursuit of creative passion. Meanwhile, internet videos of graduates of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study have recently gone viral, with users mocking the practicality of their self–designed humanities majors. In response to BA concentrations such as “Art as a Social Mechanism” and “Care Politics,” some social media users commented on the unemployment and debt that the graduates would face, while others simply called NYU Gallatin a “clown school.”

With the cost of college constantly rising, securing a career that offers a return of investment is important to many undergraduates. Amidst Gen Z’s growing anxiety to fight increasing prices, high housing costs, and massive student loan debts, financial comfort is no doubt a key factor in selecting a path of study. According to Penn’s Interim Department Chair of Religious Studies Jolyon Thomas, a “growing sense” that it is not possible to make money in the humanities—which Thomas says is not actually true—has deterred students from pursuing them in higher education.

The practicality of studying in the humanities isn’t just a concern among students and families: It’s also a concern among university leaders. Thomas says that humanities fields in higher education have been threatened as politicians have begun to cut funding for public universities. “The politicians have generally made it very clear that they like STEM a lot and that they're not so keen on the humanities,” Thomas says. 

Part of this reason is because the humanities are able to foster a type of awareness of the world that other fields cannot. They give students the tools to understand history, people, power, and ethics. According to Thomas, this can imbue in students a sense of historical injustices and the desires to rectify them. 

“We haven't perfected the American dream, but we could,” Thomas says. “And the ways that humanists have suggested that we might do that I think are threatening to other aspects of people's political and sometimes economic agendas.”

Structural funding issues, coupled with declines in demonstrated student interest, have put humanities on the chopping block in many colleges across the United States.

In 2023, West Virginia University cut 28 of its academic programs—the majority being humanities degrees. Some of the programs that were cut included degrees in art history, music performance, legal studies, jazz pedagogy, and linguistics. WVU also discontinued all of its foreign language majors, which included Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French, and German studies. 

Gordon Gee, the president of WVU, stated that the shift came in response to a declining student population and more competitive job market, which left the school in a $45 million budget deficit. According to Gee, the university will aim to lean more heavily on technology and healthcare fields in order to keep up with post–pandemic changes in the job market. In efforts to “fight a pervasive narrative that a college education no longer holds the same value,” the university will focus on research in astrophysics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robots. 

This isn’t unique to West Virginia University. Across the country, humanities programs are shrinking. According to The Hechinger Report, many rural public universities—which include the University of Alaska, Eastern Kentucky University, North Dakota State University, Iowa State University, and the University of Kansas—have begun to cut their humanities programs. Missouri Western State University plans to phase out majors in art, theatre, journalism, history, philosophy, and English, among others. Henderson State University has cut 25 of its degree programs including studies in history, communication, English, and Spanish.

Even as the humanities are disappearing from universities across the country, they remain mostly untouched at “elite” institutions like Penn.

Thomas says that Penn has been “mostly insulated” from these events as a fully private institution. He explains that, for the most part, the humanities at Penn get more support than they do in equivalent departments at state schools. This is partially because the University cares more about how many students are served by a department than the number of majors a discipline produces. Thomas references his own department, Religious Studies, which he states has a very small number of majors while serving a large number of students. Penn requires students across all four of its undergraduate schools, from the Wharton School to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, to take humanities classes before they graduate.

Although it is often dubbed as a stronghold of “preprofessional” culture, Penn offers an incredibly robust variety of humanities programs. In addition to religious studies, it also provides majors and minors in fields across ethnic and area studies, the arts, foreign languages, and more. From comparative literature to theatre arts, classical studies, linguistics, and ancient history—the list goes on. The University also has one–of–a–kind research centers for the Advanced Study of India, Programs in Contemporary Writing, Experimental Ethnography, and Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies. Meanwhile, its Wolf Humanities Center is just one of many resources that provide research funding to students and faculty working in the humanities. 

The humanities thrive at Penn. This is true of many other highly selective, private institutions such as Harvard University, Yale University, and Stanford University, which rank within the top global universities for arts and humanities education. This is not to say that these universities haven’t felt the effects of falling student interest in the humanities. At Harvard, the amount of humanities degrees awarded is half of what it was 50 years ago. At Penn, there was a 37.18% drop in awarded humanities degrees from 2003 to 2017. However, for those that do want a humanities–based course of study, Penn has the funding and resources to provide one to them. Its $22.3 billion endowment allows it to support programs that many universities, particularly smaller rural ones, cannot.

The trend is clear: People are majoring in the humanities less. But do such trends signal a shift, one in which the humanities exist in an endangered academic space? Or are the humanities simply becoming less affordable, a privilege of well funded institutions like Penn and the select few who are able to attend?   



Beyond being a school with ample humanities degrees, Penn also has a wide range of support for its humanities students outside of the classroom—sometimes even before they arrive. Through a creative writing recruitment program, the school seeks out and brings promising high school students to the home base of Penn’s writers, the Kelly Writers House. As the associate director for recruitment, Jamie–Lee Josselyn serves as a liaison between young writers, faculty, and the admissions department.  

“We at Penn have unique advantages to engage with students before they matriculate as undergraduates via our recruitment work, which involves partnerships with high schools, meeting with prospective students on campus, our residential summer program for high school students, and other opportunities,” Josselyn says. “Students arrive at Penn already knowing where their creative home base can be, which also enables them to connect quickly with like–minded peers and mentors.”

Writers house recruits and writing enthusiasts convene in the Kelly Writers House, a quaint cottage turned into a vibrant hub for programming, student projects, and other creative endeavors. The house is a unique chance for students to engage with the humanities and arts. Come into the KWH any day and you’ll find students lingering in the kitchen, making tea or rummaging through a fridge adorned with posters from old poetry readings and open mic nights. Or, find the house’s arts cafe packed with visitors there to hear guests like Patti Smith and Ross Gay read.

Élan Martin–Prashad (C ‘27), who is a creative writing recruit, says that she chose to come to Penn because she felt that its humanities programs were better connected and offered greater resources than the schools in her home country of Canada. Élan, who is majoring in cinema and media studies, says that she likely would have added on what she calls a “plan B major” in economics if she had stayed in Canada. She cites the career resources available at Penn, in addition to chances for interdisciplinary study, as factors that make her more comfortable with her choice to major only in cinema and media studies. 

Coupled with her major, Élan is minoring in French, consumer psychology, and creative writing. She has also applied to the RealArts@Penn internship program, which matches students with industry leaders in various creative fields and funds their work. Such opportunities, she says, make her feel more secure about her career prospects as a student in the humanities. As such, Élan is able to go all–in on her passion.

Although students in creative fields might not be the first to come to mind when thinking of Penn’s culture of careerism, Josselyn says that they can be pre–professional too. “While certain disciplines are, for better or for worse, labeled as ‘pre–professional,’ just about every student at Penn is pre–professional in the sense that they are hoping to have a career following graduation,” she says. And to help students with their post–grad plans, there are programs like RealArts@Penn and the Summer Humanities Internship Program, which both offer funded internship opportunities.



Not all humanities programs at Penn, however, seem to be created equal. Kyuho Lee (C ‘25) is pursuing a major in design and a minor in computer science. Kyuho says that he has noticed a clear difference in the funding and resources available to students in the two different disciplines. “There's been a constant struggle of trying to find facilities and overall funding for our projects,” he explains about his experience as a design major, which is a newer program. In contrast to the pre–professionalism that is prevalent in many other areas of Penn life, he notes that the design program has not offered him much support for his specific career goals. However, in terms of post–graduation plans, Kyuho says that there is “a nice safety net” within the alumni network, which he feels students can tap into regardless of their major. 

For many students, simply having Penn connections could be a deciding factor in making the leap to major in a humanities field. That was the case for Mark Hellwig (C ‘26), who came to Penn to major in philosophy, politics, and economics with the intention of finding a job in the business sector. Mark began to deviate from his initial plan when he started to feel that career pathways related to finance and consulting were unfulfilling to him. After an English class in his freshman year piqued his interest, he decided to take more courses, leading him to declare an English major. 

“The idea that I would be well–positioned for grad school admissions because of the quality of the department was also an important factor,” he explains. “If the English program here were not as good as it is, I may not have majored in it regardless of my interest in the field.”

Penn’s reputation and connections also open up opportunities for students to pivot into fields that might not always be associated with their major. “The idea of studying English was made a lot more palatable by the fact that Penn’s name reputation would probably allow me to find a job in an unrelated field if I needed to,” Mark says. “That was an explicit part of the decision–making process.”

Varied career choices subvert the starving artist stereotype commonly placed on the humanities. In 2024, 38% of Penn English graduates with full–time employment worked in consulting—making it the most popular industry among these students. The top hiring employer for English grads that year was McKinsey. This continues a trend of students across the Ivy League flocking to business–related fields, regardless of their majors. In 2022, 50% of Penn graduates with full–time employment worked in finance and consulting. At Harvard, the number was 40%. This is likely influenced by the way that institutions like Harvard and Penn are generally considered “target schools,” which benefit from the focused recruitment efforts of Wall Street firms.  

Connections, career networks, funding, and resources bolster the humanities at “elite” institutions like Penn. The humanities are not necessarily an impractical field, but it sometimes depends on the school you attend. As access to the liberal arts begins to skew towards private, well-funded universities that only a select few—oftentimes, a wealthy, privileged few—can attend, the humanities are becoming a luxury good. 

However, as a humanities professor at Penn, Thomas fears that recent federal actions have put the humanities at all universities in danger. He cites the Trump administration’s decision to cancel $400 million in funding to Columbia University. In the administration’s messaging, it directed Columbia to put its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies departments into academic receivership, using federal funding as leverage to potentially breach academic freedoms. 

“If that can happen at Columbia, then that can happen at any other institution,” Thomas says. Recent federal actions are a sobering reminder that, regardless of the school, the humanities face their own perils. Penn’s graduate departments have already had to slash their numbers, rescinding acceptances as a result of millions of dollars in federal funding cuts. Its schools have had to change classes and programming to comply with 1968 Wharton graduate and President Trump’s call for universities to terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The humanities are in a vulnerable spot. However, Thomas thinks that this is all the more reason to defend them. According to him, the humanities offer a chance to understand art, history, and people in ways that other fields do not. 

“I am more bullish on the humanities than I ever have been. I am feeling almost this deep need to tout the value of the humanities more than ever, to shout it from the rooftops. Because I feel like what we offer is what a lot of people seem to be wanting and missing,” Thomas says.

The humanities are more than just whimsical hobbies and unserviceable interests. They are a formative measure in processing who we are and how we interact with the world around us. Yet, as they are seemingly pushed further and further into a liminal academic space, their status lies in limbo. 

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