Does A Decline in Humanities Majors Have Anything To Do With The Declining Interest In Wine From Younger Generations?
Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself all weekend: does the steep decline in the number of humanities majors at American universities have anything to do with a declining wine interest among younger generations?
A recent New Yorker piece titled The End Of The English Major by Nathan Heller reaches deep (because it’s the New Yorker) into addressing why more of today’s college students are foregoing a classic liberal arts education, choosing instead to focus on STEM majors: science, tech, engineering, math. According to Heller, only 7% percent of recent Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from 20% percent in 2012, and nearly 30% percent from the 1970s. At Columbia, English majors declined from 10% of graduates to just 5% between 2002 and 2020.
What’s going on, you ask? A growing shift in thought about the purpose of college and the pragmatism behind an education. English isn’t seen as a very practical field of study by today’s student market. At Arizona State University, the number of English majors has declined by almost half over the last decade. Ohio State’s humanities department fell by 46%. Tufts lost 50%. Boston University declined by 42%. “I would never say this to any of my friends, but I always thought that those majors were a joke,” snipes one university student interviewed by Heller.
Why are humanities majors considered a joke? Because today’s students don’t believe they can be financially successful with a humanities degree and the cost of attending college isn’t worth paying for otherwise. “There’s this desperation for being able to make money at a young age and retire at a young age,” another student opines; “I’m twenty-one. People my age have crypto. People have agents working on their banking and trading. Instead of working nine to five for your fifteen-dollar minimum wage, you can value your time.”
For much of the second half of the 20th century, an undergraduate interest in the humanities was taken for granted for American universities. Throughout the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, you could always count on a certain percentage of college kids to be drawn towards literature and the arts. When I was in college, the students who could wax philosophically about Sartre or Hegel were both intimidating and intriguing. I wanted to be among them; so I joined them. “Being able to appreciate a Theolonius Monk record or a Miller play or the wild sprawl of a Pynchon novel was a widely held objective,” Heller writes about students of that era; “The idea of shared knowledge of challenging art is powerful, and by mid-century it had been framed as a route to upward mobility.”
For undergrads in the 21st century, however, the route to upward mobility doesn’t involve high culture or pedantic party knowledge. Having read and understood Infinite Jest doesn’t move the needle in a circle of twenty-somethings who have never heard of David Foster Wallace, let alone attempted to climb his magnum opus. The humanities aren’t viewed as necessary or even functional by many of today’s students who take on a massive amount of debt to attend these universities. “I view the humanities as very hobby-based,” one student quips; “My parents instilled in me the very great importance of finding a concentration that would get me a job.”
As a liberal arts major with an MA in German language and literature, I was fortunate to come of age in an era when college was still affordable and financial support came by the way of my parents, both of whom wanted me to find my passion rather than my career. I chose art and literature because, like many students of the 20th century, I shared a desire to understand the great works of creativity and insight. To be able to discuss them, debate them, critique them, and translate them into larger conversations was both exciting and intoxicating. It was that same burning desire that eventually led me to wine.
In my mind, drinking wine for fun on a Tuesday night is no different from reading a paperback page-turner: both activities are highly enjoyable and require little more than the ability and desire to do so. But to sip the great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy—more importantly, to truly understand them and squeeze every bit of value and meaning from the experience—is an entirely different endeavor. Comprehending their beauty requires time, discipline, research, conversation, and practice; all of which are aspects that I loved about the humanities. You can’t just pick up Nietzsche and expect to have any context, no more than you can pop a bottle of 1995 Pichon-Baron and appreciate why it costs what it does.
One could argue that the rising price of both wine and education, coupled with a choppy economy, is at the root of their declining interest among younger generations. Heller sees a much bigger problem, however. “For decades, the average proportion of humanities students in every class hovered around 15% nationally, following the American economy up in boom times and down in bearish periods,” he writes; “Enrollment numbers of the past decade defy these trends, however. When the economy has looked up, humanities have continued falling. When the markets have wobbled, enrollments have tumbled even more. Today, the roller coaster is in free fall.”
Adding my own experience to Heller’s research, the issue at hand seems more like a generational divide in aspiration rather than practicality and price. Who are today’s university students trying to be and why do they aspire to that role? Answering that question is paramount to understanding why their desire to study humanities and consume wine is weakening. If it’s no longer cool to be well-read and well-cultured among today’s college kids, then it follows that fine wine would also cease to be desirable, as the pleasures that define its experience are rooted in the same ethos. To be well-versed on French or Italian wines is an aspirational goal akin to understanding the works of Proust or Dante. The yearning to grasp and commune with the achievements of the humanities and the wine world is a cultural phenomenon born out of a shared value system.
My aspirational effort to understand wine is tied to the same motivation that drove me to learn guitar, play baseball, and ride a skateboard. I saw other people doing it, I thought it was cool, and I wanted to do it, too. Practicality never crossed my mind and that reasoning remained unaltered well into my late thirties. By that point, I was well into a career in the alcohol industry, one that spawned from the sheer will of that passion. That’s not to say that anyone can make it in this industry, but rather that my gravitation towards wine was never stymied by that risk.
To subjugate one’s interests for the sake of a more pragmatic alternative isn’t entirely foolish. As one student states: “You don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving.” That being said, today’s university students clearly fear that money spent on passion will be a waste. One Harvard student asks: “Am I just putting myself in a position where, in four years’ time, I’m going to be earning less money than the people I went to school with?” With a mindset so intensely practical before the age of twenty-one, is it surprising that these generations have yet to be inspired by something as impractical and unnecessary as fine wine? How can they enjoy anything remotely romantic when they’re being told to maximize every opportunity or face disaster?
Drinking habits are prone to change and giving way to temporal fads isn’t something aging industries do well. I know many wine industry colleagues who see the ascent of natural wines, coupled with the decline of interest in classic wines like Bordeaux and Barolo, as writing on the wall for the business. Heller notes a similar sentiment in English departments. “The age of Anglophilia is over,” one professor opines; “It’s like thinking back to when Latin was the center of the world—the memorization of lines and competing with your friends at Oxford and Eton in quips.” It’s true that young people today have as much interest in old Bordeaux as they do in old Latin. But is today’s wine industry incapable of inspiring them?
Gucci was one of the most stale couture brands in the industry until 2015 when Allessandro Michele stepped in to redesign its image. As a result of his vision, my twelve year old nephew asks to visit the Gucci store each time he visits me in Los Angeles. Michele found a way to inspire the youth culture and his success transformed an entire industry. Meeting younger generations where they are is vital to the evolution of any field, including academia and the world of fine wine. “The question we should be asking is not whether the humanities have any role in our society or the university in fifty or a hundred years,” states one enthusiast Harvard humanities major; “It’s what do investments in the humanities look like—and what kind of ideal future can we imagine?”
Investing in aspiration should be of paramount importance to any brand, let alone an entire field or industry. Becoming the world’s most interesting person has lost its luster because students believe being cultured and being successful is an either/or proposition. From where I sit, the fine wine industry as a whole needs to focus less on telling young consumers what to drink and answer a far more existential question: why should they want to drink wine in the first place? More importantly: where might it lead them?
-David Driscoll