Persuasive Essay: Humanities is Just as Meaningful as Its Stem Counterparts

I remember sitting down to have the talk with my parents. No, not that talk, but it sure was just as awkward. The one about... college. The talk in which my mother said: “I’ll never choose a career path for my children. It’s their responsibility to choose which medical school they’ll graduate from.” Thanks mom; left me with a ton of options there. I’m sure I’m not the only one with parents, relatives, siblings, or even teachers who put a strong emphasis on selecting a STEM major in college. A STEM major is said to open doors to a world of opportunities and even guarantee high paying careers. Meanwhile the punch line for humanities majors is that you only pursue humanities if you have a desire to end up homeless. Society today has created this false notion that a humanities major will end up without a bright future in today’s modern world. What we’re all forgetting though, is the power of humanities and among the robots and computers and soon probably flying cars, studying the humanities is more important than ever. Now the point of my speech isn’t to tell you that STEM is bad. The highways and roads I crossed to get here, the next elevator I get on, the next smartphone I buy, please, let’s hope that there’s an actual engineer behind them.

However, in this essay I will argue that the humanities side of academia is just as meaningful, rigorous, and worthy of respect as its STEM counterparts. The study of humanities is just what it sounds like: the study of human society and culture. The field consists of a broad range of information and topics, all going back to this universal theme of understanding the human experience. To name just a few common ones, history, English, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and political science, are some of the majors that fall under the humanities umbrella. But why study these topics? After all history is just about what some old guy in a big wig said a bazillion years ago right? And who cares about critically analyzing literature classics; the writing isn’t even that deep right? And my favorite one. Philosophy is just for people with long beards who sit on a rock and ponder about the universe right? Wrong. Every single one of these assumptions is wrong (although I’m not sure about the beards and philosophers thing). The humanities give us the context of our world and forces us to think critically, especially because it’s so unstructured unlike the sciences. Science will offer the hows of things, but it’s the humanities that explains why we’re doing it and what it is that we’re doing. They give us the language in which we use to convert our emotions into communicable thoughts and actions. The humanities make us us: human. And as for the jobs you can get with a humanities degree? Well there are the obvious ones. Teacher. Author. College professor. Teacher again. Although these careers are all respectable and chosen by a lot of humanities majors, the notion that these are the only options available is entirely false. A humanities degree also has value in other fields, even ones like technology, which at first glance may seem completely unrelated. Uber was hiring psychology majors to deal with unhappy customers and bad reviews. Hiring managers at Opentable, an online restaurant reservation company, sought out English majors to present data in an exciting way to restaurateurs. The most sought after skills by employers in 2019 are creativity, persuasion, collaboration, and people management, all skills heavily embedded within a humanities major.

A humanities degree doesn’t limit you to only a small set of jobs. Yes, a software company will have its computer science majors and yes, doctors will have their medical degrees, but that doesn’t mean humanities majors are completely barred from these fields. This diversity in majors is not only needed, but rather demanded. In fact, after looking at job openings for the biggest tech companies in America such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, 65% of their job openings are completely unrelated to tech. Ignoring the apparent need and the value of this field of study, the push for a STEM-centric education in this country is fierce. Since 2009, STEM majors have increased by 49% while the number of humanities majors has remained stagnant. Past president, Barack Obama has dedicated over a billion dollars towards STEM education at the expense of these crucial other subjects. Our current president redirected 200 million dollars of Department of Education funding into computer science, once again at the expense of other subjects. These campaigns coupled with the booming tech industry, create the assumption that our future workforce will be dominated by STEM, causing kids to stray away from studying anything else. I get it. On paper it makes sense and it’s tempting. But these assumptions are totally overblown. Historical context, real world experience, and judgement are critical skills that aren’t going away for as long as we’re all…. well human. The sciences and humanities are equally important and they’re both just as hard. To fall into this paranoia, that our future will be exclusively STEM is foolishness.