Illustration by Shelley Hanmo
WHEN JAKE MILLER GRADUATED from IUPUI in 2006, he believed in the college’s claims that it offered the best of both Indiana and Purdue Universities. Now the founder of a software development and consulting firm, he credits his success to the communication and critical thinking skills he learned as an English and linguistics major. “One of the most important things in any STEM job—or, really, any job—is communication skills,” says Miller. “What surprised me, working with a lot of engineers, is how weak most are in that area. It’s like society thinks we should either be math people or English people when, in reality, we need to be both.”
As of July 1, IUPUI split into separate Indianapolis campuses, a much-hyped endeavor. To seal the deal, state officials sweetened the pot with $60 million in taxpayer money for each university to build new facilities. But in all the hype, you won’t hear much about preserving the balance of skills that has, for example, allowed Miller to build a growing startup that employs 39 Hoosiers. Instead, the focus seems solely on STEM—shorthand for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Press releases boast additions to science faculty and laboratory space but fail to mention similar advances for social sciences, such as psychology, or humanities disciplines, such as history, English, foreign languages, or religion. The schools’ marketing centers around catering to business leaders’ demand for graduates with specific vocational skills rather than promoting themselves as training grounds for citizens of the world who can think and communicate for themselves and seek fulfilling careers and meaningful lives, not just a paycheck.
For Nicole Nimri, a national think tank project manager who graduated from IUPUI in 2018, the decline in funding for humanities comes at a time when our nation needs those courses most. “We’re living in a world today where we are so civilly unsound to each other,” she says, “and instead of teaching people how to think from other people’s perspectives, they’re slashing [those offerings]. That is very disheartening and really unwise.”
Some fear the breakup will be the death blow to a sector that’s already faced a steep decline. From 2013 to 2023, student enrollment in liberal arts at IUPUI declined by nearly half. By comparison, total enrollment at IUPUI dropped by 10 percent in those 10 years (from 28,461 to 25,497). But while funding for liberal arts was cut by 26 percent ($30 million to $22 million), the university’s total budget actually grew by 20 percent ($632 million to $758 million) during that same 10-year period, according to university finance officials. “Obviously, there are many factors that go into an increasing budget that go beyond enrollment,” says Mark Bode, spokesperson for IUI—the new shorthand for Indiana University Indianapolis. Those revenue extras include money from research grants and contracts, most of which go to STEM programs.
Illustration by Shelley Hanmo
Administrators at IUI say they are still “very committed” to liberal arts, but they won’t say yet how the university’s revised funding formula for the 2025–26 academic year will impact their liberal arts programs. The university “will always have humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, the arts, at its core,” says Jay Gladden, IUI’s interim executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer. “That will be a foundation for what every undergraduate student here at IU Indianapolis experiences.”
Faculty members, however, are not so sure. They report that in the last 10 years, the number of full-time faculty in liberal arts at IUPUI dropped from around 260 to about 150 and that the English department hasn’t hired a tenure-line faculty person since 2015.
In a letter to the IU board of trustees last fall, then-IUPUI faculty representative Philip Goff made an impassioned plea for the board not to forget the university’s liberal arts mission on the new IUI campus. “There are no biology courses that can analyze and prevent another January 6. There is no math course that teaches how the electoral college works. Computer science does not teach Socrates, the Stoics, or modern philosophy, all of which help us examine our own lives and how we live them. All of these are good and important majors, but we must ensure the vibrancy of the liberal arts alongside them to breathe life and leadership into our students.”
“It’s an education that ‘frees’ you, right?” says Tom Davis, a professor of religious studies and a former IUPUI dean for academic programs. “If you’re ever going to reach a situation where you’re not circumscribed by your circumstances [in life], you need to know things about yourself, about your community and the world around you, and the liberal arts will help you know those things.”
IUPUI’s general education requirements—six credits in life and physical sciences and nine credits spread across arts, humanities, and social sciences—used to be an important recruiting tool for liberal arts. “We picked up a lot of our majors from people who just came in not knowing what they were going to do,” Goff says. “They took a course, say, in the American Revolution and fell in love with history. Now, we don’t get those new students.”
Making matters worse for liberal arts recruiting, a growing number of students are now able to earn their general education credits at the high school level before they even enter IUI. And under the current funding formula at the university, known as Responsibility-Centered Management, department budgets for this academic year will again be largely determined by student enrollment. Gladden says the university is still calculating those numbers. “If [enrollment in liberal arts] goes up, there would probably be some more revenue there. If it goes down, there’d probably be a little less.”
Declining enrollment in liberal arts is a national trend that experts say shows no signs of reversing. With state support for higher education declining across the country, students are paying more out of their own pockets (or their parents’) and borrowing more money against their future incomes—so, understandably, they’re enrolling in majors touted to offer stronger job prospects and higher pay.
English and history have been hit particularly hard, with graduates of both majors down by a third or more between 2009 and 2020, according to a 2020 study from The Hechinger Report, a national nonprofit devoted to covering education issues. Meanwhile, in the past 20 years, business majors have gone up 60 percent, engineering majors have gone up 100 percent, and the health and medicine field has gone up by 200 percent.
With the expansion of STEM programs, administrators at the new IU and Purdue campuses in Indianapolis say they plan to significantly increase their enrollment, but faculty members say such growth is unrealistic given what has been called “the demographic cliff ” facing universities across the country. A report by nonprofit accreditation organization Cognia projects that by next year, America will hit a peak of around 3.9 million high school graduates. After that, the traditional college-going population is expected to shrink for the next five to 10 years by as much as 15 percent.
To help counter the decline, universities like IUI are trying to engage adults who started but never finished college (some 40 million nationally, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education) and high school students, especially those from historically and systemically marginalized communities.
Illustration by Shelley Hanmo
Liberal arts majors, however, may be a hard sell to students who fear they will not find jobs following graduation—which is the public’s perception of liberal arts–related careers. But academic experts who have looked at the national data say it’s not entirely true that liberal arts students face bleaker job prospects. A study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that at the 10-year mark, the average “return on investment” (the sum of income in relation to what the student spent on college) for liberal arts colleges is $62,000, or about 40 percent below the average return of all colleges. But 40 years after enrollment, or by retirement age, the average return for liberal arts colleges reaches $918,000, more than 25 percent above the average.
Davis says liberal arts majors can and do find satisfying employment after college, but they must start thinking earlier than students in more job-oriented majors about how they will put their education to practical use. An academic approach introduced seven years ago at IUPUI—Project-Based Education—is one good way for students to do just that. “You may be in a philosophy class, or you may be in a religious studies class, but you’ve got a real-world project that you work on,” Davis says.
In 2017, IUPUI also launched a Ph.D. program in American studies that embeds students in local cultural institutions—museums, historic sites, and performing arts organizations— while preparing them for jobs in the fi eld. Davis says encouraging students to build a portfolio of their undergraduate works, “particularly those that highlight their skills in solving problems,” is a growing movement in the liberal arts.
Illustration by Shelley Hanmo
Sarah Bahr, a 28-year-old senior staff editor at The New York Times who also writes about culture and style, is a good example of someone who put her portfolio at IUPUI to good use. A triple major in English, journalism, and Spanish, the 2018 graduate interned with both Indianapolis Monthly and The Indianapolis Star. Her liberal arts background and collection of published articles was enough to land her a job at America’s premier newspaper at the age of 25. “It was great to have this liberal arts background where I knew a little about a lot of different things,” Bahr says. “And from my science courses, I learned how to interpret data and to convey that graphically.”
Beyond preparing students for careers or for taking their place as thoughtful citizens in a democratic society, liberal arts degrees traditionally come with a “useless” component, as well—creating a thirst for knowledge for its own sake.
As the technocrats tell us, today’s fast-changing world demands we all become lifelong learners, and the technocrats are, of course, correct. But many people who study and value the liberal arts do so to enrich their souls, not just their careers, in pursuit of lasting truths to sustain them throughout their lives.
The return on that investment?
Priceless.
