Cuts to the Liberal Arts Will Backfire

Andrew Ollett, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, used to wear a t-shirt that read “Sanskrit or die (pāṇḍityaṁ śaraṇaṁ vā mē mr̥tyur vā).” Referring to an ancient language from South Asia, Dr. Ollett’s shirt captured the spirit of the institution. Students dub it the university “where fun goes to die” because of its heavy workload and commitment to serious study of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, especially 57 modern and dead languages. Given this reputation, the university’s decision to pause admissions to its humanities Ph.D. programs and consider reducing some language offerings has received national attention.

Though cuts sometimes ease budget shortfalls, those on the scale the University of Chicago announced this past summer would compromise the university’s business model and thus cost far more than they would save. Administrators typically justify cuts by citing enrollment data. The University of Chicago prides itself on teaching obscure and dead languages. Although most lack their own major or minor, the Classics Department—which offers ancient Greek and Latin—counts 12 enrollees, a number insignificant compared to a STEM subject like computer science, with 382 enrollees. Such numbers are typical at other elite universities: Harvard University’s 2024 graduating class included 10 classics majors and 184 computer scientists.

Why do students clearly favor STEM and other job-focused fields? Some may avoid the liberal arts due to concerns about political bias among faculty and departments, a genuine problem, but not enough to explain such low enrollments. Rather, most students are worried about the job market. Tellingly, the institutions that consistently retain a high number of liberal arts majors are the armed services academies, which guarantee a career after graduation.

The real question is why students continue to favor four-year liberal arts institutions when coding bootcamps and apprenticeships offer similar career benefits for a fraction of the time and money. Indeed, few institutions have become successful without strong liberal arts offerings: Even MIT has a humanities faculty that most colleges would envy and requires all undergraduates to complete “a minimum of eight subjects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.”

An aspiring computer scientist most likely chooses a four-year college like the University of Chicago rather than a non-degree program because he wants a liberal education but fears an arts major will harm his career. The best institutions—the University of Chicago is an outstanding example—require that students receive a rigorous education across the liberal arts in addition to their majors. After all, a graduate will benefit his whole life from studying ethics, whereas he must learn new computing technologies every few years.

Nevertheless, many institutions have succeeded in saving money by cutting humanities programs, albeit at an intellectual price. Cuts worked because STEM majors expect colleges to offer introductory classes in the humanities taught by well-regarded professors, but rarely need to worry about the breadth of upper-level humanities course options.

But universities will fail to meet even this expectation and will compromise their business models if they make cuts as severe as the University of Chicago threatened this summer. Elite universities attract computer science majors from across the country because of their reputations, in the University of Chicago’s case, built largely on its humanities and social sciences expertise. Since colleges rarely charge their listed tuition but bid down to attract the most talented students, they must offer ever larger tuition discounts if their reputations suffer when they cut their best-regarded programs. For example, the University of Tulsa announced heavy cuts to its humanities programs in 2019, seeking to become “STEM-heavy with a professional, practical focus,” and despite switching policies rapidly in the interim, it has ever since struggled to recruit students. Perhaps the recruitment struggles should not have come as a surprise: Who would pay private college tuition for basic job training?

Likewise, eliminating niche humanities fields will yield insignificant savings because even at the few institutions that house them, they are tiny. For example, the University of Chicago counts four tenure-track faculty qualified to teach Sanskrit, compared with 72 in computer science. The comparable figures at Stanford University are one and 70. At the University of Kentucky, a typical state flagship university, zero and 26. Cutting a small subject like Sanskrit will save little money but will disproportionately hit an institution’s ability to attract paying students. After all, one of the University of Chicago’s best advertisements is that it is one of the only institutions with the expertise to offer an introduction to, in Professor Ollett’s words, “the enormous amount of literature and philosophy” produced in Sanskrit.

As society balks at colleges’ return on investment, universities increasingly face a choice between two models. The Tulsa model involves a race to the bottom by offering shorter, cheaper, skills-based programs with pared-down faculty, effectively competing with coding bootcamps. By contrast, the new University of Austin has won broad respect and a new $100 million gift thanks to its commitment to “the preservation and transmission of humanity’s rich intellectual, scientific, artistic, and cultural inheritance.”

Asked about his “Sanskrit or die” t-shirt, Professor Ollett said, “I think the meaning is more ‘if I don’t do this I’m done for.’” That could go not just for him but also for the University of Chicago.

This piece was originally published by Real Clear Education on January 20, 2026.