We hear a lot of negative news these days about the state of our colleges and universities: low-bar requirements for admission, the abandonment of such survey courses as literature and U.S. history, grade inflation, professors with a leftist agenda, censorship, and of course, ever-rising tuition and fees.
Less noted is the dramatic decline in liberal arts majors. Fewer than one in 10 students now pursue a degree in the humanities. Lump together philosophy, history, English literature, and foreign languages, and in 2020, less than 4 percent earned their bachelor’s in one of these fields.
Often neglected in this dismal news from academia are those institutions of higher learning, both secular and religious, that have remained bastions of liberty, free speech, and the liberal arts. Among these, we find schools such as Hillsdale College, Bob Jones University, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Hampden-Sydney College….