Student numbers tripled in forty years, yet the humanities are losing ground

For years alarming figures and headlines have circulated about the humanities: they are described as obsolete, elitist and useless for the challenges of the 21st century. For the first time the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences set out to check how much of that is true, commissioning the Zurich research centre Econcept to study the statistical trend from 1980 to today. The results were taken up by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

The first finding is clear growth. Over forty years enrolments in these faculties have more than tripled, from 18,000 to almost 60,000. The creation of the universities of applied sciences in 1997 also contributed. Today, at both universities and universities of applied sciences, students in the humanities and social sciences form the majority.

The other side concerns proportions. Over the past twenty years the weight of these disciplines within the total student body of the twelve universities has fallen from 40% to just under 30%. The picture worsens if one isolates the humanities in the strict sense, meaning history, philosophy, linguistic, literary and cultural studies, excluding economics, law and psychology. The latter, with its large numbers, helps mask the decline, but it now has little in common with the classical disciplines: it has become a laboratory science.

For some fields the picture is sharp. Theology is holding steady, with a constant figure of around 1,200 students since 1980. Historical and cultural sciences, by contrast, have lost almost a third of their enrolments: from nearly 8,000 in 2005 to 5,300 today. The fall mainly affects history, languages and literature.

The causes and a bet

Among the explanations, Lea Haller, secretary general of the Academy, points the NZZ to the growing number of students with a migration background, who tend to prefer internationally renowned institutions such as ETH Zurich and to choose STEM subjects, meaning mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and engineering. These are fields favoured by years of promotion policies that are now bearing fruit.

Haller nonetheless looks to the future with optimism and sees artificial intelligence as an opportunity for humanities skills. «Le competenze delle scienze umane sono indispensabili in un mondo che si sta orientando in modo dirompente verso l’IA. Il pensiero critico e la capacità di formulare buone domande diventeranno più importanti» (the skills of the humanities are indispensable in a world shifting disruptively towards AI; critical thinking and the ability to formulate good questions will become more important), she says.

The precondition, however, lies further upstream. To make humanities subjects attractive, Haller warns, investment is needed in compulsory schooling and in recovering reading and writing skills, which are declining among pupils. It is a public investment that yields no measurable results in the short term, and it concerns those who reach university without the tools to make a real choice.