This article was brought to my attention as it shows the decline in the number of students dong humanities degrees in the US (1948-2017). There have been at least two articles that comment on it.
It seems that employment related thinking is likely to be behind the decline. And that we are reaping what we’ve sown in short-term perspectives:
In an Apollonian culture, eager for “Useful Knowledge” and technical mastery and increasingly indifferent to memory and allergic to tradition, the poet and the novelist and the theologian struggle to find an official justification for their arts.
The way forward, I think, requires us to slow a little, to zoom out a lot, and get a sense of ourselves, both individually and collectively. That is, we need, as Ross puts it:
a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes and wrongthink.