Cost-cutting pressures shrink liberal arts offerings and undermine double majors

Evidence

Students are pressured by families and cultural norms into choosing business, engineering, and preprofessional majors over those in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences. Meanwhile, universities search incessantly for ways to trim costs by compressing time to degree and making extensive use of summer and online courses taught by casual academic labor, moves that in turn exert pressure to trim breadth and general-education requirements and also discourage double majors—the latter is significant, because many public-university students currently finesse the “practicality” problem by combining a preprofessional major with one in the arts or humanities. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 372

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Market metrics weaken scholars’ capacity to defend the liberal arts — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 392; Financial constraints reduce creative production’s capacity for critique and diversity. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street…, 23

Broader Connections

• Market metrics weaken scholars’ capacity to defend the liberal arts #corroborates (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 392
• Financial constraints reduce creative production’s capacity for critique and diversity. #corroborates (0.82) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 23