“So what are you going to do with a history degree?”
My realtor recently asked me this when I went to sign my lease for an apartment. When I told him I wanted to work at a nonprofit or a think tank, he shook his head.
“You need a path,” he told me. “You should become a lawyer.”
Most people don’t understand why I’ve decided to dedicate my four years of college to a degree that supposedly gets you nowhere in life.
It wasn’t always like this. The 2008 financial crisis pushed parents and students to pick majors with a clear and secure path. The interest in STEM and social science increased, and history stopped being seen as a practical major. Universities shifted from institutions of diverse learning to training schools. The economic pressure to find a reliable career after college has pushed long-standing and versatile majors like history out the window.
In other words, the history major was on the verge of being history.
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, for example, will eliminate history along with other liberal arts programs in favor of classes with a greater emphasis on profit-making jobs. The number of students studying history at UCLA is lower than it has been in the past, drawing into question the department’s future.
History departments across the U.S. are in decline. As a leading university with one of the top history departments in the country, UCLA should be doing more to support its department and raise its enrollment numbers to pre-2008 levels. History is more than just cracking open archives. It has wide applications in a variety of fields, and losing out on the study is detrimental not just to UCLA, but to the broader community.
UCLA’s history department has experienced a significant reduction in history students, though the trend seems to be moving in a more positive direction in recent years, said Andrea Goldman, associate professor and vice chair for undergraduate affairs.
“When I arrived fall 2007, our majors were at the highest numbers we’ve had, at around 1,500. As of this fall, we have 830,” Goldman said. “At our lowest, we were down to 700 majors. 830 is an uptick from around four or five years ago.”
Goldman said UCLA’s broader curriculum changes around the financial crisis left the history department strapped for students.
The College of Letters and Science implemented Challenge 45 in 2009, an initiative that refocused attention on core courses in each department and a target of 45 upper-division units. This means departments across UCLA trimmed down their units and altered prerequisites, which consequently changed the requirements for many different majors. History classes once included in a variety of majors – the main way the department brought in prospective students – were removed.
But that was 10 years ago, and historical literacy is all the more necessary a skill for a functioning society. A history degree teaches people advanced critical thinking and research skills necessary to dissect important events in today’s world. Studying history informs students how authorities make decisions and affects our politics, judicial system, businesses and even medical practitioners.
Carla Pestana, chair of the history department, said the study of history is essential to a functioning society.
“The way we learn through the study of history to assess sources of info and documentation to support assertions – those are fundamental skills for functioning in society as an informed citizen,” Pestana said. “The lack of those skills has an impact that is easy to see.”
The department has launched new initiatives to combat the decline in the number of students. It is now easier to declare the history major: a student only needs to take two general education history courses to declare it. In addition, a new history minor has opened up to encourage students who want to pursue a more technical degree while studying history. Quarterly newsletters, yearly conferences for history students and an advisory board made up of history majors have created a sense of community in this tightly knit department.
These changes are great for the students who are in the major already, but they don’t do anything to bring in new students.
There should be more workshops and panels that change the narrative surrounding history and allow history majors to find out about careers, especially considering students are led to believe history isn’t a viable degree for a career.
But history can be just that. For example, Patrick Yu, a third-year history student, said he hopes to go into dentistry and is using his history background to examine the medical field and the 200-year stagnation of dentistry tools.
“Even though stereotypically history majors don’t have the job security, a lot of it has to do not with the major,” he said. “A lot of students don’t have the resources to understand what it means to market themselves and spin the major into the career.”
It might seem like the decline in history students is something that will naturally level out. However, if universities continue to let history students drop like flies, we could end up with more situations similar to UW-Stevens Point and more history departments across the country being defunded, de-staffed and deleted. If we stop caring about a decline in history students, we stop caring about the department’s future.
And if that does happen, there won’t be any history students to help you understand how we got here.