Rise of the humanities
At the height of growthism, policymakers had relied heavily on human capital theory, a new branch of economics, to justify their own (and students’) investment in higher education, rather narrowly interpreted as an investment in economic growth. The swing away from science forced them to broaden this interpretation, accepting that returns from higher education registered not only as direct investment in the economy but also as ‘social returns’ (improvements in individual and collective wellbeing not easily measured in monetary terms) and, most importantly, as a ‘consumption good’ – that is, ‘one of the decencies of life’ – or, as a couple of economists put it rather innocently: ‘people… want to go to university because they enjoy the education process, irrespective of the financial return to a degree’.
.. Their efforts to steer students into the sciences were really a return to earlier, socialist ‘manpower planning’ in favour of certain industrial sectors. In both cases, students had their own ideas of what to study. In both cases, they didn’t respond to government incentives. They were following different signals.
.. But deep down there was also the lurking suspicion that a mass constituency just didn’t want or need the humanities, especially in the US.
.. A multi-ethnic population was likely to be hostile or indifferent to European high culture, on which the humanities still depended. Above all, though often only sotto voce, humanists worried that democracy was challenging their authority. And these fears persisted despite the mounting evidence that a mass higher education system was no more inimical to the humanities than an elite one.