News that the University of Galway is considering discontinuing its long-established general arts degree will confirm the worst fears of those who believe the study of the humanities is being systematically marginalised. The true picture is more nuanced.
Galway’s internal report notes a significant decline in its BA degree, down 35 per cent in registrations since 2019, a trend described as “not cyclical but structural”. Reform, rather than abolition, appears to be the actual proposal. The university says it is at an early stage of reimagining its arts offering.
Still, the overall direction of travel is unmistakable and the causes are not particularly mysterious. Students and their families, increasingly focused on what the report calls “direct routes to employment”, are gravitating toward STEM and business courses. Decades of official messaging have treated those fields as the economy’s natural priority, creating a feedback loop in which arts enrolments fall and the perception of diminished prestige deepens.
Ireland’s situation is not as acute as in the UK, the US or Australia, where the financialisation of higher education has made students hyper-conscious of the monetary return on their degree investment. The experience of other EU countries, where subsidised fees have slowed the decline, suggests that money is a significant driving factor. Ireland, with its flat student contribution, has been partially insulated. But the prohibitive cost of accommodation may be producing a comparable chilling effect, pricing students out of courses at institutions they might otherwise have chosen.
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None of this changes what the humanities are actually for. History teaches us that the present is not inevitable. Literature explores the complexity of human experience. Philosophy equips us to interrogate the assumptions embedded in the systems we build and deploy. In an age when artificial intelligence can produce outputs at scale but cannot determine what those are for, or whether they are true in any sense that matters, those capacities are not ornamental. They are essential.
