By William Fry
Bronze bust of William Curry Holden located in Holden Hall. Photo by William Fry.
Richard Verrone sits with one of his students, notebook in hand, as they work on a list of the pros and cons of switching majors from history to finance.
Verrone, a history professor and graduate program coordinator for the Department of History at Texas Tech, said he has personally seen fewer history majors in his classroom.
“I have around 80 students in my survey class, and only four of them are history majors,” Verrone said.
Over the past decade, the number of total history degrees awarded by Tech has decreased by 43%, per university data. Verrone said he believes the decline can be attributed to multiple factors, with the biggest issue being job prospects.
“You’re not going to make a lot of money working at a museum, teaching high school or being a college professor,” Verrone said.
Isaac Cisneros, a freshman history major and music minor from Arlington, Texas, shared a similar sentiment.
“You can only really go into teaching or academia for the most part, and a job isn’t really guaranteed,” Cisneros said.
Sean Cunningham, a history professor and the associate dean for administrative affairs at the College of Arts and Sciences, said the enrollment decline at Tech can be seen on a national level.
“If you’re thinking about the decline of history majors at Tech, we actually bucked that trend,” Cunningham said. “Yale, for example, was losing history majors long before Tech did. But now we’re all in the same boat moving in the wrong direction.”
According to a 2021 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of history degrees awarded in the U.S. has decreased by 32% from 2010-2021.
Cunningham said he believes most of the decline can be observed across the humanities as a whole, not just in history degrees. The humanities are an umbrella term for disciplines that study human society and culture, per the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
“What’s happening, I think, is the public narrative that the humanities and some of the social sciences are worthless,” Cunningham said.
The number of social science and history degrees awarded across the U.S. has declined 15% from 2011-2022, according to a 2022 study from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Cunningham said one of the biggest issues concerning the humanities is funding. He said he believes funding is harder for the social sciences since they do not create tangible items.
“History is all a part of a thoughtful process that creates nothing, except intelligence,” Cunningham said with a chuckle.
Cunningham, who has published three books covering American political culture, said he believes the politicization of academia might negatively affect funding as well.
“The legislature is increasingly interested in policing what is and is not said in the classroom, and making certain things illegal,” Cunningham said. “Which is scary to me in a number of ways.”
Pivoting from external factors, Cunningham said he believes historians in academia have a “PR problem.” He said historians are not innovating enough to reach students and need to do more online teaching.
“Instead of consuming 400-page books or 2-hour lectures, we need to think about the way we’re meeting students in the 21st century,” Cunningham said.
He said historians should focus on making their content more digestible by delivering elevator pitches for their work on websites such as YouTube.
Although the number of history degrees has been declining, posting content on YouTube could introduce prospective students to the idea of pursuing the field. A 2024 study by the Pew Research Center reported that 93% of adults aged 18-29 use YouTube.
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