You don’t need a degree in the humanities to recognise a faulty argument, but it does help if you want to make such an argument in a newspaper. “We should cheer decline of humanities degrees” ran a headline in the Times last week above Emma Duncan’s column on the economic woes of university graduates (I know, I know, someone else writes the headlines).
Young people, Duncan writes, feel betrayed by older generations. Their housing costs are surging, they are burdened with student debt, and incomes for all but those in the highest-earning professions are too low for a comfortable life. The solution is to avoid studying English literature – which is “lovely stuff”, apparently, but “not a way to earn your bread”.
