A Quarter-Century of Majors at the University of Illinois

    No one variable can account for this large shift in human behavior. An obvious answer relates to employment opportunities. In the year 2000, 24.4% of Americans had attained a Bachelor’s Degree or Postgraduate Degree. The current number is 37.7%.⁶ Since the relative value of simply having a degree has diminished, the pursuit of more technical majors allows students to differentiate themselves. There are also concerns of decreasing educational standards and politicization of material, which I would assume would affect humanities the most. Another could be a consequence of increased international enrollment, as STEM students have relaxed student visa restrictions.

    Given these reasons, it is shocking that the Gies College of Business showed only a modest increase in enrollment. There may be local factors that resulted in this, such as a desire to maximize its prestige by keeping acceptance rates lower. However, the financial benefits of greater enrollment would be tremendous, both in terms of tuition payments and increasing the alumni base. It is possible the business school did not see the same increase in demand as other departments such as Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics for other reasons.

    A fundamental commonality in departments that either exploded or collapsed in enrollment is their approach to information gathering and reasoning. In fancy terms, their epistemological basis. Although difficult to prove precisely, I believe there is a social shift towards viewing quantitative analysis as a superior method to using more abstract qualitative skills. This is furthered by the embedding of digital consumer technologies into all aspects of our lives, where our daily behavior is encoded to be interpreted by ourselves, businesses, or governments.

    When looking at the graphs, the early 2010s marks the transition point for college curriculum. It also marks a major transition outside of the classroom. The 2010s is when smartphones went from being owned by a third of the American population to over 80%.⁷ At the end of the decade, the search term “data science” was 75 times more popular than it was at the start.⁸ Tech startups blossomed and cloud computing became embedded in corporate America. It goes without saying that these new technologies had immense impacts on culture and people’s worldviews.

    I worry that the proverbial pendulum may have swung too much in one direction. After all, it is our human reasoning that allows us to interpret the importance of numeric outcomes, creatively invent new conceptual frameworks, and understand the dynamism of individual people. I can explain concepts like derivatives, standard deviation, and an exponential function without using a single number, but I cannot describe the process of writing this article in an equation.