EMBRACE THE HUMANITIES, NOT ONLY STEM
Renae Townsend| Opinion-Editor
Imagine you’re walking around on campus, taking a sip of coffee from the Student Center. Somebody walks up to you and says:
“Hey! What’s your major?”
You respond:
“Oh, it’s Engineering.”
The usual response is, “Wow, that’s amazing!”
But imagine if you say,
“It’s Philosphy and History.”
“Really? What are you even going to do with that?”
Over the last few years, there’s been a significant shift in how we perceive what someone wants to study at college. Majors like Computer Science and Biology are praised, while wanting to study philosophy or communication is seen as a waste of money. This is not a competition between STEM and humanities—rather it’s an argument for embracing and integrating STEM and Humanities.
Majoring in STEM is a very impressive thing to do, and jobs that require a STEM degree are definitely needed in our society. Nevertheless, overpopulating technical fields can sideline the importance of liberal arts, like having ethics, and being creatively disciplined. A humanities degree offers efficient portable skills like critical thinking and commination. Classes in these fields build strong students with complex solving abilities that employees need to find a good job.
And yet, the cost of being alive is steadily rising, and students are trying to pick up career paths that will allow them to be financially stable. Planning to work in health, engineering, or technology, is becoming increasingly popular—STEM graduates typically earn higher starting salaries compared to most humanities majors. But as our world is becoming increasingly dependent on Artificial Intelligence and healthcare—especially in America—becomes increasingly divisive, I wonder if what the word needs more liberal arts thinking.
To be sure, anxiety is understandable. College is expensive, and students deserve a clear return on their investment. Why pay money for a degree that will only end up putting you in more debt?
There’s a false binary going around that an individual with a humanities degree equals unemployment or a low-paying job. But humanities graduates work spans out in diverse fields like law, education, management, and marketing. The career path of your major is rarely linear, and having a background in humanities makes the world your oyster.
Steve Jobs said, “...technology alone is not enough...it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”
It’s impossible to have technological advances without humanities. For any new creation, someone should have the guts to ask, Yeah, we may be able to do this, but should we? People in fields like AI, bioethics, and healthcare should require people with human context, not just a technological background. Science builds the tool; and humanities ask, should we? Code without context, data without storytelling, and engineering without ethics lead to flawed solutions.
Whether you’re a college freshman thinking about switching majors, or a senior in high-school debating between STEM and humanities, ask yourself why can’t do both. Boaden your horizons and gain a diverse, impressive background to wow your future employers. We don’t have to choose between functional bridges and meaningful stories. We need engineers as well as historians and philosophers.
The next time you’re walking around campus, and someone asks;
“Philosophy and History? What are you going to do with that?”
Don’t shrink away from your answer. Whether you are building bridges or analyzing the words that tell us why those bridges matter, remember that progress requires both. We do not just need people who know how the technological world works; we need people who can figure out what it is worth.
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