Humanities have existed since historical records began, from the time of Aristotle and Plato. In 1932, the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, warned of a world focused on science where arts and humanities courses will become obsolete. Working in the higher education field, where I process numerous applications from different countries, I have noticed that applications for humanities are generally rare. So why have humanities courses declined? If we consider the 1980s, we can see that the number of humanities courses rapidly increased, but then began to decrease after the 2008 financial crisis, when humanities started to go in a backward direction. History courses have seen a decline of approximately 45 per cent from their 2007 peak, while English courses have fallen by nearly half since the late 1990s. This may be because students realised that the world was no longer safe, and that a financial crisis could happen at any time. Compared with the number of jobs for science and business graduates, jobs for humanities graduates have undergone a sharp decline. The rapidly changing nature of the world means that we might awaken one day and see that humanities have become part of history without even noticing they have disappeared. International students do not have the freedom to pursue their passions because it is only controlled passions that will fill their pocket, no matter which country they choose to live in.

Speaker: Yasmin Mohamed

Published in: London International Conference on Education (LICE-2022)

• Date of Conference: 14-16 November 2022
• DOI: 10.20533/LICE.2022.0008
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-52-5
• Conference Location: Virtual (London, UK)