This is Joseph.
Mark mentioned this briefly yesterday but I thought it was worth a full post.
There are more philosophy majors than in these fields!
In the United States there has been some controversy about student loan forgiveness and the modest amount of debt relief that was recently given. I understand the reasons why it was good to do something and also why the time isn’t optimal as it could have an inflationary impact. Still, the amount of inflation, according to Paul Krugman, is about 0.2% and much larger sums were forgiven for business support in covid-19. It is quite reasonable that the lockdown could have made student loans worse than expected for some people and so forgiveness is a reasonable policy.
It was then attacked for funding very left wing educational opportunities — the exact phrase being “lesbian dance theory“. Now, one thing to consider is that very few students take classes in identity. Here is a statistics from the far more left wing province of Ontario in Canada:
That’s less than 1%. As expected, in the United States it is even lower:
Looking at the linked tables from the Department of Education (USA), we see that the top two majors are business and health sciences, together making up 32% of bachelor degrees (that is 1/3). There are five times as many students studying agriculture than “Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies” which is lumping a lot of different things together (are (Read more…)