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[quote=Anonymous]I'd like to encourage us to disambiguate a couple of categories.

1.  Humanities vs. not-STEM

"Not STEM" does not equal "humanities," and "humanities" does not equal "distribution requirements."

Traditional humanities disciplines include languages and literatures, history, philosophy, and even art history and musicology.  Some folks would also legitimately include political theory, especially but not only pre-modern political theory, and the research side of drama.

Psychology, sociology, and anthropology (for example) are not strictly humanities fields, although they can overlap and intersect with the traditional humanities in very interesting ways.  And the methods of the social sciences have been productively informing the study and practice of history, for example, for quite some time.

Architecture, music, studio art, and theatre are also strongly humanities-adjacent in that the humanities inform much of the theory in these areas.  But strictly speaking architecture is a professional area of degree study (with major technical elements), and the other fields are fine and performing arts.

2.  The cost of a traditional (four-year, residential, young-adult age group) college education vs. the study of the humanities

Grant overhead ( = money that a university skims off for itself as an internal revenue share from major grant awards) is a terrific income stream, especially at R1s, but below that narrow band of institutions it is only part of the financial mix.  It is much more expensive to operate STEM fields than most people realize, given the needs for up-to-date facilities and equipment, and even the sheer costs of licensing the necessary technology.

The humanities are cheap.  I mean _really_ cheap.  Humanities faculty are typically paid less than everyone else (except for the artists) and have some of the heaviest teaching loads.  And when they are teaching distribution courses they teach a _lot_ of students.  What makes humanities feel expensive is that having distribution requirements in the first place - any requirements - makes college longer.  That is why there are so many 3-year bachelor's degrees in other countries and why the distinctive American education makes that same goal take 4 years - the distribution requirements add the time, but they also make the degree a different experience.

Folks who do not want those distribution requirements can find any number of ways to avoid them - dual-enrollment, AP, early college, community-college transfer agreements, colleges and universities with more flexible curricula.  College is expensive, make no mistake, but it is not the humanists who are driving up the prices - it is a wide variety of factors.[/quote]

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