Study of the Humanities Needs to be Reprioritized

A University of Toronto student argues that declining enrollment in humanities majors is harming workforce soft skills, citing a 2025 NACE survey showing 96.1% of employers value communication but only 53.5% rate workers proficient. The author calls for reprioritizing humanities education to cultivate skills AI cannot replace.

Education /us/basics/education Study of the Humanities Needs to be Reprioritized A Personal Perspective: Undergraduates increasingly disregard the humanities. Posted June 29, 2026 Reviewed by Kaja Perina /us/docs/editorial-process Key points - Employers rate the importance of communication as important within the workforce. - Only half of the current workforce is rated by employers as proficient in communication. - Humanities study cultivates the soft-skills that are important in workplaces. By Robbie Gray with Ran D. Anbar, MD The idea to write this blog post came to me during a peer grading assignment on a paper in my university Science and Social Choice seminar course. When I opened up my partner’s feedback, I was thoroughly annoyed and disappointed in the vacuous, very clearly AI written, feedback the other student gave me. The overly bulleted large language model structure referred to me as “the student” even though I knew my partner from our small seminar class. After some reflection, I came to see the assignment where my peer was meant to provide their own feedback, not as a moral failing on their part, but as a failing in the messaging of our educational institutions and job market. Employers need to do a better job of getting the word out about their sentiments regarding the importance of soft-skills, such as empathy, understanding bias https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/bias , and interpersonal skills. Also, educational institutions need to help students understand and implement that feedback better. The National Association of Colleges and Employers 2025 survey https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/the-gap-in-perceptions-of-new-grads-competency-proficiency-and-resources-to-shrink-it? found that 96.1% of employers rate the importance of communication as either very important or extremely important to function well within the workforce but believe that only 53.5% of their current workforce is either very proficient, or extremely proficient in this trait. Humanities are Critical for Career Development While there are many ways to improve soft skills, humanities study cultivates the soft-skills that are becoming increasingly important in workplaces at a time when the technical aspects of so many jobs are becoming automated by AI. Now more than ever soft skills will become the most important things we can offer as humans, which AI lacks. Unfortunately, societal admiration of the humanities—broadly defined as the study of language, literature, art, history, philosophy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/philosophy —and undergraduate students’ desire to study these fields are both at an alarmingly low point right now. The number of English majors, as of 2018, had fallen https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/ by nearly half since the late 1990s, and between 2012 to 2022 all awarded humanities degrees fell by about a third. The last extreme drop in humanities majors came on the heels of the economic anxiety https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/anxiety that surrounded the 2008 financial crisis, as many students believed that studying the humanities will lead to poor career https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/career prospects. This started a downward sloping trend in humanities majors that has persisted. While we are not currently in an economic recession, a collective feeling of an impending employment recession looms large in many undergraduates’ minds. I am a first-year student at the University of Toronto, a school with high academic pressure, where we have seen a 30% decrease in humanities majors from 2008-2020. Many other schools around the world have also seen large cuts https://bryanalexander.org/horizon-scanning/campus-cuts-closures-mergers-and-layoffs-for-winter-2025-2026/ to their humanities departments driven by enrollment declines, funding pressures, and shifting student demand — trends accelerated by the rise of generative AI https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/artificial-intelligence . Humanities are Crucial for Personal Development Increased technology presence in all parts of our lives, and overuse of social media https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/social-media especially in youth correlates with lower social skills later in life. Humanities courses are one of the most important tools that can be employed to help people develop these skills, as they often require engaged face-to-face discussions that prompt students to wrestle with understanding other’s viewpoints. One meta-analysis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10150636/ analyzing the efficacy of humanities study in medical school curriculum found that they were effective in improving communication with patients through narrative skills, while also improving empathy and ethical reasoning. Regardless of employment, I also believe that the ability to write about the world around us and understand ourselves is important in times of tumult. Education https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/education Essential Reads Mental health struggles are increasingly common among undergraduates as it is the first time in their lives when they lose almost all their parental guardrails and can easily fall into many more crises than they could in high school. In a 2021-2022 survey https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/college-students-and-depression 44% of American college students reported symptoms of depression https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/depression . I have struggled with my mental health in many parts of my life, most acutely in early high school, not coincidentally when I first got into writing. Journaling, poetry, and storytelling were some of the invaluable tools I used to help reframe and better understand my feelings about events and people in my life. These are the tools from which I drifted away in the beginning of my first year at University as all my classes at the beginning of the year were in non-humanities subjects. It wasn’t until I ran into issues with my mental health that I realized I needed to lean on them again. My experience is echoed in research https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.x that has shown that writing about stressful https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/stress experiences can help decrease negative psychological symptoms. Prioritization of the humanities is not only helpful for enhancing career related soft-skills. Studying the human condition, and what it means to search for meaning and purpose in one’s life, can help students cope with their emotional hurdles, and help them understand the larger context of their lives. Takeaway Universities need to reprioritize humanities courses, degrees, and departments to help students become effective communicators, have better career performance, and improve their mental health. I believe that a good piece of writing helps the author, more than anyone, develop newfound understandings. Undergraduates are for the first time meaningfully trying to piece together what kind of person they want to be as an adult, and what they want to do with their lives. They need this tool to help them figure this all out. Robbie Gray just completed his freshman year at the University of Toronto, where he is studying Global Health and Psychology.