In case David Brooks’ call in today’s NYT for more old-fashioned humanities and cheap morality depressed, scared or annoyed anyone, Ben Schmidt, a graduate student in history at Princeton, gives numbers and explanations that provide better food for thought. He gives a number of graphs. I like this one showing humanities degrees between 1948 and 2010:

What is an aberration, Ben Schmidt writes, is the bulge of humanities degrees in the seventies (beginning at the very end of the sixties). The real trend: between 1948 and 2010, the percentage of Humanities degrees as a percentage of the US college-age population increases from 1.5% to 2.5%. The story looked more dramatic with a graph starting in 1970: