Latest news with #humanities
Forbes
17-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Tech Jobs Dry Up While Healthcare And Trades Boom: How To Pay For School
Editorial Note: We earn a commission from partner links on Forbes Advisor. Commissions do not affect our editors' opinions or evaluations. An April report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York revealed the most employable college majors, which may come as a surprise to 'starving artist' types. Contrary to the stereotype about a creative's unemployability, the study's findings revealed that prospects with a humanities degree, such as English, art, and history majors, are looking up, and increasingly so, while formerly lucrative fields, like tech and finance, may be on the downturn. For college students, it means that humanities degrees are viable, and with a proper strategy to minimize college loans, financing your education doesn't have to put you in debt. New graduates are fighting an increasingly hostile job market. While the headline numbers from the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report show the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.1% for June—compared to 4.2% in May—a separate report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows unemployment for recent grads at 5.8% for the first quarter of 2025, the highest rate since 2021. What's worse, underemployment, defined as the percentage of college graduates working in jobs that typically don't require a college degree, had risen to 41.2%, according to the New York Fed report. Fields that used to be lucrative five years ago now appear to be locked in job deserts. A separate February analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York revealed that tech jobs, which boast high salaries, are much harder to come by in 2025 than a few years prior. BLS projections predict that from 2023 to 2033, computer programmers will see a 10% decline in job prospects. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the companies at the forefront of generative AI, told Axios in May that he predicts AI will wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, as well as increase unemployment to 10-20% over the next five years. Tech layoffs in 2025 have been abundant, with 150 companies laying off approximately 74,400 workers by July, according to a tech layoff tracker. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said on 'The Joe Rogan Experience' podcast in January that the company plans to automate tasks formerly carried out by midlevel engineers, making the roles redundant. 'Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code,' he said. Other high-earning fields, like finance, saw lower unemployment rates than humanities majors. According to the NY Fed's most recent numbers on the labor market for recent college graduates, finance majors sat at a steady 3.7% unemployment rate, compared to performing arts majors (2.7%), ethnic studies majors (2.6%), and social services majors (1.7%). Economic majors also ranked high on the list of unemployment (4.9%), alongside industrial engineering (4.6%) and business management (4%). Meanwhile, majors like philosophy (3.2%), art history (3%), and elementary education (1.8%) fared better. The most employable majors were, by far, those in healthcare and the sciences, as well as trade engineers. Electrical Engineering (2.2% unemployment), chemical engineering (2%), aerospace engineering (1.4%), and civil engineering majors (1%) saw healthy employment after graduation, as well as earth science (1.5%), nursing (1.4%), early childhood education (1.3%), and nutrition science majors (0.4%), which came out on top as the most employable field of study. The employment industry pivot marks a culture shift in the perceived value of a humanities degree. Barthélémy Kiss, CEO of Powder, an AI-powered video clipping system for gamers, said that new hire priorities have changed in the face of the AI boom. Kiss has hired an architect-turned-front-end-developer who brought 'unique' skills to building app interfaces, as well as a former film director who leads product vision and social media for Powder. 'As the developer of an AI video editor that automates and assists creativity for gaming creators, we need to develop a product that is very human-centric,' he explained. 'The two main skills [we're looking for] are curiosity and adaptability. There is a sense that if you rate high with both of these characteristics, it's even more important than your credentials. The best indicator of success on our team isn't what you studied, but how fast you learn and how deeply you think.' Smart planning for a prospective student's college education can take a lot of pain out of the process. Consider putting earnings into a 529 savings account, which allows contributions to grow tax-deferred. Withdrawals from a 529 account meant for education are tax-free when used for qualified education expenses. Contributions to 529 plans are seen by the IRS as gifts; in 2025, you can gift up to $19,000 per child for single filers or $38,000 for joint filers without the gifts counting toward your lifetime gift tax exemption. If you have the funds and want to catch up on any missed contributions, 529 accounts can be funded for up to five years at once, meaning that an individual can contribute up to $95,000 per child in a single year to a 529 plan in 2025. After maxing out the five-year contribution cap, funds will start to count against an individual's lifetime gift tax exemption, which caps out at $13.99 million in 2025. States offer various 529 account offers, with residents often offered additional benefits. Compare 529 plans by state and get the most out of your contributions.
New York Times
17-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much.
University students, we're told, are in crisis. Even at our most elite institutions, they have emaciated attention spans. They can't — or just won't — read books. They use artificial intelligence to write their essays. They lack resilience and are beset by multiple mental health crises. They complain that they can't speak their minds, hobbled by an oppressive ideological monoculture and censorship regimes. As a philosopher, I am most distressed by reports that students have no appetite to study the traditional liberal arts; they only understand their coursework as a step toward specific careers. Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa's Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I've seen little evidence of these trends. The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum. Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students. Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university's new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must 'go in a different direction.' That meant eliminating the entire dean's office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. (A spokesperson for the university told The Times that while it had 'restructured' the Honors College, the university believes that academics and student experiences will 'remain the same.') The stated reason for these cuts was to save money — the same reason the University of Tulsa gave in 2019 when it targeted many of the same traditional forms of liberal learning for elimination. Back then, the administration attempted to turn the university into a vocational school. Those efforts largely failed, in part because of lack of student support for the new model. An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It's not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it's out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won't fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
ABC News
03-07-2025
- Business
- ABC News
The University of Tasmania confirms up to 13 academic jobs will be cut as part of arts, humanities restructure
The University of Tasmania (UTAS) has confirmed a dozen jobs will be lost as part of a restructure of its arts and humanities courses. UTAS has said the proposed changes, flagged in May and which include the creation of a combined school of humanities and social sciences, were sparked by financial challenges and declining student enrolments across a range of arts and humanities offerings. On Thursday, the College of Arts, Law and Education's interim academic lead, Lisa Fletcher, said the creation of a combined school of humanities and social sciences would enable "a more coherent offering for our Bachelor of Arts students". Professor Fletcher said "two distinctive schools across the creative arts" would also be created as part of the restructure. Those will be the school of creative and performing arts, the home for art and theatre, and the re-establishment of a stand-alone conservatorium of music. Professor Fletcher said the final structure had been informed by five weeks of consultation, and that the university was "deeply committed to the viability and the strength of our disciplines across the creative arts and humanities and social sciences". She said there were "no courses being discontinued", but that some "adjustments" were being made to programs within the Bachelor of Arts. "Adjustments" include combining politics and international relations into a single major, and no longer offering German. The university's Indonesian offerings were initially flagged as being at risk, but will continue for at least six months. Professor Fletcher said roughly a dozen roles would be lost through the restructure, through a combination of targeted and voluntary redundancies. The voluntary redundancy process is underway. "We need to be committed to a viable offering across creative arts, social sciences and humanities, and in the proposal there are a range of redundancies proposed, up to 12 [full-time equivalent positions]," Professor Fletcher said. She said the redundancies would come from academic roles. "We will need to achieve those savings at the scale of around 12 to 13 FTE [full-time equivalent]," she said. National Tertiary Education Union division secretary Ruth Barton said the job losses were devastating for staff. "It's a great blow to the university and I think to the Tasmanian community," Dr Barton said. "These are people who have spent up to 40 years at the university, 25-40 years many of them. Dr Barton said staff feedback from the consultation period had not been reflected in the final product. "Staff have said that they need to have these jobs retained, they need to have these disciplines retained, they need to have an organisational structure that reflects what staff want. Instead they've had one imposed on them." Tasmanian University Student Association president Jack Oates-Pryor said student voices had not been sufficiently heard during the consultation process. "Of course we see key university leaders valuing student feedback and responses, responding to those emails directly. "However, that's not structural integration and embedding of student voice into this decision-making," he said. "Students are fundamentally impacted by these decisions that are being made. Professor Fletcher said the university's consultation process had been "genuine" and directly influenced the final plan. "And we will continue, and are committed to continuing, to work with our students and our staff to listen and to hear from them," she said.
Globe and Mail
20-06-2025
- Globe and Mail
In the AI revolution, universities are up against the wall
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations. It's convocation season. Bored graduates everywhere will be forced to listen to earnest speeches about how they should make their way in a world short on decent jobs. I've given a couple of those orations myself. Here's the one I won't be giving this year but would have if asked. Hey guys! You've probably heard that philosophers are in the habit of declaring their discipline dead. Thinkers are forever claiming that everyone before them had the wrong ideas about time, being, or knowledge. Great – it's a vibrant patricidal enterprise. But I'm here today to tell you that philosophy is dead for good this time. So is humanistic education in general, maybe academia itself. The murderous force isn't just anti-elitist, Trump-driven depredation. No, as Nietzsche said of the death of god, we have done the killing. Smartness destroys from the inside out: The AI revolution has signalled the demise of the university as we know it. After all, how do we teach undergraduates philosophy, history or anything else when it's now so easy to fake the whole process? Students still think it might be wrong, or maybe risky, to have an algorithm write their essays wholesale. But increasingly they don't see what's wrong with using programs to take notes, summarize readings and create or correct first drafts. Reading, meanwhile, is tedious and hard, and so the idea of assigning entire books – even novels – is sliding out of academic fashion. Average attentions spans have shrunk from several minutes to about 40 seconds. You won't counter that by putting Aquinas's Summa or Spinoza's Ethics on the syllabus. At the same time, these same students resent knowing that professors might use countervailing programs to grade their work. They also dislike the idea that somebody in authority might consider them cheaters. Indeed, some students now resort to surveillance-society mechanisms, once the bugbear of free citizens everywhere, to prove that they are not cheating, including YouTube videos of them composing their guaranteed-human-origin essays. So: programs for recording screen activity or documenting keystrokes are now being asked to view performative acts of being-watched. And programs for cheating on essays confront programs designed to catch cheaters but also programs designed to counter the need for human grading altogether. These countervailing programs produce and consume each other; they watch and are watched, cheat and are cheated, pursue grades and are duly graded. I'm not the first to notice that there is no further need for human middle men here. Students and professors alike are extraneous to the system. A techno-bureaucratic loop enfolds them, then snips them off as messy loose ends. We have created the ultimate state of frictionless exchange, a circulating economy of the already-thought, the banal, the pre-digested, where every Google search leads to a fabricated source that eventually bounces back to base. Peak efficiency, with net gains in eliminated boredom. Yay! So why resist assimilation? Recently I sat in a seminar organized by my colleagues to consider ways of testing students in class, as a foil to chatbot cheating. The proposed tests involved various small-scale fact-finding exercises, truncated arguments, and the logic-skills equivalent of a magazine puzzle page. One professor suggested that actual written essays should be reserved only for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, if anyone. Fine, I suppose, but how would those upper-level students ever learn how to write in the first place, let alone write well? Forget AI essay cheating. Basic writing ability, always prone to deterioration, is now disappearing faster than map-reading skills and short-term memory. You can no longer assume that first-year students know how to compose even the most basic 'hamburger' essay (bun, lettuce, tomato, patty, bun). And still we believe – do we not? – that clear writing is the foundation of clear thought. Alas, that faith no longer seems so warranted. Writing seems more and more surplus to requirements. It can be off-loaded as a dreary chore, like so much dirty laundry sent out for cleaning. I recently wondered, not for the first time, if I had been labouring under a mistaken notion of philosophy, and teaching it, all along. If the subject can be distilled down to a roster of positions, specific argumentative moves and technical terms – which is how I believe some of my colleagues see it – then we can indeed dispense with sustained discursive engagement, and the clunky old-fashioned fraud-prone essay with it. But then, what would education be like? What would it be for? Good questions. Maybe the current proclaimed academic death-rattle is actually an opportunity to go back to first principles, inside the walls and out. In my discipline's case, the issue is not so much the end of philosophy, in other words, but the ends of philosophy. Like most teachers of the subject, I have long been conflicted about our mechanisms of assessment. Essays are a slog for everyone, even when they're legit products of individual minds. In-person final exams can control for essay cheating, most of the time, but they are a poor method of gauging the depth of philosophical insight. The old joke from Annie Hall makes the point: 'I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam,' it goes. 'I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.' Like many philosophy professors, I prefer discussion in seminars, close reading of textual passages, and face-to-face assessment over both essays and exams. I ask for short, ungraded weekly reflection papers that my students seem to enjoy writing and I certainly enjoy reading. But these small-bore tools are not scaleable for our vast budget-driven enrolments. And always, grades loom far larger than they should over the whole enterprise. Once you start questioning assessment, you slide very quickly into uncomfortable thoughts about the larger purpose of any teaching. The irony is doubled because asking 'What is the use of use?' is one of those typical philosophical moves. Updated version for the age of neo-liberal overproduction: What is the use of asking what is the use of use, when large language models can do it for you?' I admit I get impatient when, at this stage of things, people invoke some vague notion of distinctive humanness, a form of species-centric superiority. I mean those hand-wavy claims that there is something about what we humans do that is just, well, different from AI versions of things. Different and better. No AI could ever match the uniqueness of the human spirit! Well, maybe. But let's be serious: This line of argument is ideological special pleading. There are some 8.2 billion unique human souls on the planet. Yes, a minority break free of the sludge of mediocrity, and we celebrate them. We also cherish the experience of our own lives, however mundane. But we're now forced to realize that some, even many, sources of human pride can be practised as well, if not better, by non-human mechanisms. Art and poetry fall before the machines' totalizing recombinative invention. Even athletics, apparently deeply wedded to the human form, are being colonized by cyborg technology. You might think this is just griping from another worker whose sector is destined for obsolescence. True, neoliberal overproduction and dire job prospects have likely produced more philosophy teachers – and many more student essays – than the world needs. From this angle, AI's great academic replacement is just a market correction. It completes a decades-long self-inflicted irrelevance program, those thousands of punishing essays that nobody reads, the best ones published in journals that are, more and more, pay-as-you-go online boondoggles. I still think those abstruse debates are important, though, and you should too. We are at a transitional point that demands every tool of critical reflection, human or otherwise. Anxiety about the future of work and life is pitched high, for good reason. For now we are still mostly able to spot uncanny AI slop, bizarre search-engine confabulations, and bot-generated recommendations for books that have been invented by bots – presumably so that other bots can then not-read them, scrape the data for future reconstitution, and maybe submit unread book reports for academic credit somewhere. We can even, for the moment, recognize that non-bot government bans on actual books, and state-sponsored punishment of legacy liberal education, pose a threat to everyone's freedom. But I still think we are losing, in the current murk, something that only philosophy can provide. It's something that has always been posthuman in the dual sense of transcendent and transformative. I don't just mean a critical-thinking skill set, or body of facts, or even the basics of media literacy and fallacy-spotting – though these are essential tools for life. I mean, rather, the things that animate the hundreds of students who still come to our classes: the value of self-given meaning and purpose, the pleasure of being good at hard things for their sake alone, a consuming joy in the free play of imagination. A desire to flourish, and to bend the arc of history toward justice. I don't know if those things are exclusive to humans; I do know that they are threatened and in short supply among existing humans. The love of wisdom can't really be taught, for it is a turning of the soul toward the beautiful and good. You can't justify the value of that turning to someone who has not yet felt the necessary shift in value. That's the paradox of all philosophy, and of all philosophy teaching. There will be no exam after this lecture, graduates. The real test is no more, but also no less, than life itself. You are a speck of dust in an indifferent universe. Now make the most of it. Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks Will AI go rogue? Noted researcher Yoshua Bengio launches venture to keep it safe Stopping the brain drain: U of T professor aims to launch 50 AI companies with new venture studio Axl AI adoption is upending the job market for entry-level workers In Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin argues that the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world have usurped our ability to dream of better futures. But it doesn't have to be that way. She spoke with Machines Like Us about what could be done differently.
Fox News
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
How a keffiyeh-wearing keynote speaker sparked boos for Jews at my UCLA graduation
Print Close By Isabella Brannon Published June 18, 2025 The purpose of seeking a humanities education is to learn the great texts and ideas that have stirred the soul of civilization since antiquity. It is a discipline that teaches reverence for nuance, a chastened appreciation of history, and intellectual humility. But you wouldn't know that from the keynote speech at UCLA's recent Humanities commencement ceremonies. Caribbean Fragoza took to the podium donning a keffiyeh, declaring "From the river to the sea" (a slogan widely recognized as a call for the eradication of Israel and the Jews within it) and delivering a lesson in solipsism and sophistry. This hateful message emboldened the audience to boo when graduates in Jewish Studies and Hebrew were called to the stage. ANTI-ISRAEL PROTESTERS TORCH DIPLOMAS OUTSIDE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ON GRADUATION DAY Fragoza's speech was laced not with intellectual nuance, but with the rhetorical certitudes of the picket line. She introduced the issue of Palestine, without irony, by recalling an episode in which she explained a watermelon-themed art project to her five-year-old with the words "Free Palestine." She submitted the child's understanding of the issue as proof of its moral simplicity. But what she actually revealed was that the epistemology of a kindergartner animates her schema. The graduating class, supposedly trained in reasoned disagreement, great ideas, and the study of virtue ethics, responded with eruptive applause. The same crowd that spent their college years hosting illegal encampments centered around the idea that "anti-Zionism" isn't antisemitism, booed Jewish and Hebrew studies when the departments were called after hearing the words "Free Palestine." Fragoza signposted her hateful message well before taking the podium. The keffiyeh she wore is not some neutral garment, or some multicultural kumbaya accessory. Following the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, it has become a political symbol—one inseparable from Arab nationalism -- that grew in popularity after the 1936–39 Arab Revolt. Yet, when Fragoza arrived draped in a keffiyeh, no dean or faculty member stopped to ask whether graduation was the time for political costume. The speech itself was rife with hatred and hyperbole. Jews know too well that the chant "From the river to the sea" is not a poetic abstraction but a blunt instrument of maximalist ambition, calling for the elimination of the world's only Jewish state. When Fragoza sought to subtly liken Donald Trump to a fascist, no administrator wondered whether such commentary, directed at a graduating class that likely includes many Trump supporters, was divisive or inflammatory. And when she declared that "brown" student, regardless of immigration status, could expect to be rounded up and deported at the state's discretion, no professor flagged it as the straw-man fallacy it so clearly was. Instead, political hyperbole became the university's parting message to its students. The animating metaphor of Fragoza's speech was fire. She invoked the Rodney King riots not as a tragedy, not even as a cautionary tale, but as a righteous blaze. She affectionately recalled the looting of "free TVs" as though they were trophies of justice. It's becoming commonplace: Families that travel great distances to honor their loved ones are often subjected to such political theater. Gone are the days of Mary Schmich's "Wear Sunscreen" speech, when graduation speeches were meant to celebrate or inspire. The UCLA students received a sendoff soaked in paranoia and propaganda. For Jewish students, including some who did not know whether their loved ones in Israel had survived Iran's recent missile barrage targeting civilians, it was all too raw. That such rhetoric passed without objection is not merely a failure of decorum. It is an indictment of the academy itself. Nor was this an isolated incident. At UCLA's many graduation ceremonies this weekend, it was the norm. When student leaders read the School of Public Health's oath, students in the crowd chanted "except in Palestine" in call-and-response, without reprimand. According to an official club in the School of Public Health's social media, a bulletin was passed out to graduating students declaring "ACAB," the acronym for "All Cops Are Bastards," "All I.C.E. melts eventually," and "THE STRUGGLE FOR PALESTINAN LIBERATION IS ANTIRACISM WORK." CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION At UCLA's Labor Studies ceremony, a speaker declared the illegal encampments that roiled campus last year to be a highlight of his academic career and accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. At the World Arts and Cultures graduation, the student speaker wore a keffiyeh, similarly accused Israel of genocide, and claimed to have failed out of her original major, earning applause, not concern. In each of these instances, the speeches were either approved by UCLA administrators or abetted by those who refused to step in when speakers went off-script. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP The descent of UCLA's commencements into ideological theater is not just an embarrassment. It is a wake-up call. If the academy is to be redeemed, it will require students, faculty, alumni, and citizens to insist once again that education be an act of elevation, not indoctrination. The integrity of the humanities, and the humanity they claim to serve, depends on it. 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