These days, there’s probably one question English majors hear more often than any other: “What are you going to do with that degree?” Maybe that’s tied with “Are you going to work at McDonald’s or Burger King when you graduate?”

Students have been led to value “practicality” as a top priority in our education. We’re told that what we learn in school needs to foster job security, and we’re told that the future is in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. It’s no accident that the most popular majors have become career tracks like business, pre-medicine and the hard sciences.

In turn, the number of literature, history, arts and philosophy majors has plummeted in the past several decades. In 2010, humanities majors comprised 11.5 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, fewer than half of the 1967 high, according to a study published in 2012 by the Humanities Resource Center. In contrast, 30.5 percent and 21.5 percent of 2010 undergraduate majors were in science and business, respectively.

The dominant national education initiative in the recent past has been a push for better STEM education through projects like Race to the Top and Change the Equation, which provide ample funding and extensive training for STEM programs and teachers. These pieces of legislation were passed after reports came to light showing that the United States lagged behind European and Asian countries in math and science. Yet people rarely hear about how American students actually scored the lowest in the subject of history, a cornerstone of the humanities.

Education cannot push for science at the detriment of the humanities. In addition to not addressing American students’ trouble with history, in 2011 Congress approved a 40 percent cut on Title VI programs, which fund foreign language and culture studies in public schools across America. As Americans are pushing for STEM improvement, China and Singapore are struggling to improve their liberal arts departments—it would be a shame to lose ground in one field while trying to beef up the other.

Along with increased emphasis on STEM, experts believe that the 2008 financial crisis is a contributing factor in the drop in humanities majors. However, if anything, we should be demanding more study in these disciplines.

In an interview during the recession, Yale professor Anthony Kronman said investment of resources in fields like philosophy, literature and history are more important now than ever. Citing the pervasive greed, irresponsibility and deception that had led to the financial meltdown, he advised the nation to reexamine “what we care about and what we value.”

Concerned parents and skeptical peers are quick to criticize the humanities as impractical, and to an extent they’re right. It’s true that after I graduate from college I probably won’t ever in my life touch my 10-page paper or my comparison of Pip and Batman; however that is not the sole purpose of studying humanities.

Even if reading Fitzgerald or studying the Depression-era policies aren’t “practical” in the sense of directly advancing the economy, the skills English or history majors acquire after prolonged analysis of complex open-ended problems is transferable, supremely useful and crucial. Study in the humanities provides students with the education to become informed citizens of the world, ready to tackle the world’s most trying issues, not cookie-cutter graduates molded for single-minded careers.

No, study in the humanities prepares us to be thinkers. Do not just take my word for it: the college course that contributed most to Steve Jobs’ technological revolution before he dropped out was calligraphy; general David Petraeus studied international relations; Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize-winning director of the National Cancer Institute, majored in and earned a master’s degree in English. Incidentally, all of our founding fathers were Enlightenment-era humanities experts.

In a day and age when rhetoric centers around practicality and STEM education and taking the safe route, we can’t forget our roots in the liberal arts. You can do much more than you think with a degree in the humanities, so don’t be afraid to pursue an interest in comparative literature or a passion for cultural anthropology—the rewards of a universal education will prove those who questioned your degree choice wrong.

Victor Xu is the editor in chief of the HiLite. The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach him at [email protected].