Before I understood politics or human rights as fields of study, I understood that ideas have consequences.
My parents were journalists in Turkiye. We came to the United States as the political and economic climate there changed. They left behind the work they had built, and the people they built it with.
Growing up, I heard stories not only about their own experiences but about colleagues and friends who were imprisoned for their work. Those conversations changed the way I saw history. It stopped being a collection of distant events and became something deeply human, something that reaches into families and communities through individual lives. Behind every political decision and every debate about rights are people whose lives change as a result.
That is what first drew me to the humanities, and it is what keeps me there. History isn’t just a sequence of events, politics isn’t just policy, and human rights aren’t just ideas written into law. Each is shaped by the people and arguments that came before it.
But I am seventeen, and this year I am applying to college. I am thinking about political science, the humanities, women’s studies, and how all of it might lead toward law. I write partly to figure out what I think, and choosing a major has become the hardest thing I’ve had to think through.
I don’t have much help with it. I am a first-generation immigrant. I don’t have a grandmother who can tell me about the presidents she lived through, or an aunt or uncle who can say what a degree in one field or another actually leads to. The history I inherited happened somewhere else, in another language. So I am doing this between two cultures, trying to choose something that will hold my interest, mean something, and make my family proud, and hoping those three things point in the same direction.
That search is why I notice how these subjects get talked about. STEM, STEM, STEM — it’s the answer to every question about the future, repeated so often it stops sounding like advice and starts sounding like instruction. For most of my education, I have been told, sometimes directly and more often quietly, which subjects count: the ones with clear career paths, the ones with measurable outcomes.
I notice who disappears in that sentence. We, the girls, my friends, and many others, who want anthropology, art history, women’s studies, philosophy, sociology, or psychology, who want to spend their lives on how people have lived and what they made of it, are treated as though we’ve chosen something charming and easy rather than something serious. As if wanting to understand people were a smaller ambition than building things. Somewhere in all of this, we stopped using the word intellectual as a compliment.
The numbers show how far that thinking has gone: between 2012 and 2022, the share of American college graduates earning humanities degrees fell by nearly a third, from 13.1 percent to 8.8 percent, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Students my age are steered away from these fields before we ever reach a campus.
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Part of the reason is that we live in a culture that trusts what it can measure. Test scores, salaries, job placement rates, and technological breakthroughs all produce visible evidence of success. The impact of the humanities is harder to quantify. Reading philosophy won’t produce an invention. Studying history won’t raise anyone’s productivity next quarter. What these subjects build is slower and less visible: the way we think, question, and understand one another. Their value shows up over a lifetime, which makes them easy to cut and hard to defend.
The case for them is not sentimental. The humanities teach a specific and difficult skill, skepticism toward easy answers. History rarely unfolds from a single cause. Social problems are almost never as simple as they are made to sound. Studying these subjects trains you to look past the headline, weigh competing explanations, and ask what was left out. I believe if an information is constant and context is missing, that is not a soft skill. It is the one that determines whether the information is of any use to you.
This matters most for democracy. A functioning democracy depends on more than elections and institutions. It depends on people willing to stay informed, question what they are told, and recognize the forces shaping the society around them. Without those habits, citizens become easier to mislead. The collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic did not happen in a single moment; it happened through the gradual erosion of institutions and the willingness of ordinary people to stop asking questions. Studying how authoritarian governments rise, how discrimination becomes policy, and how rights are won and lost lets us see current events as part of a pattern rather than as isolated shocks.
It also changes how we see each other. We form opinions about people, communities, and entire countries without knowing anything about the experiences behind them. A headline gives us a number; a statistic gives us a scale. Neither tells us what it was like to be the person inside it. This is why I’ve come to see empathy as more than an emotional reaction. It is a way of thinking. Understanding someone’s perspective doesn’t require agreeing with it, it requires being willing to listen before deciding.
Technology will keep giving us more information than any generation has had. It cannot do the interpreting for us. That responsibility stays human, and it is exactly what the humanities train us to carry.
These subjects don’t hand us every answer. They teach us how to look for better ones. The facts are usually available to anyone who goes looking. What’s harder to find, and what I keep looking for, are the stories between them.
Sources
American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Humanities Indicators, “Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities” (overview, includes 2024 data).
