By The Star Staff
It is the end of history as we know it for the Cayey campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR).
The UPR board of trustees recently voted to stop accepting students interested in pursuing a history degree at its Cayey campus, according to a certification.
“If it becomes pertinent to reactivate the program in the future, it will be done through a proposal showing the need to reinstate the offer and that all of its contents was evaluated and put in line with standards and other proper requirements,” the resolution reads.
The decision made in late September is in response to a sharp decline in the number of history students.
The decline of students was part of a trend that the Chronicle of Higher Education article had noted back in 2018 in a story called “Why Are Students Ditching the History Major?” The study of the change in college degrees awarded over a span in the 2010s showed history at the bottom -- a 34% drop in degrees awarded. Science and engineering crested at the top, which is why you shouldn’t mention the word STEM to history department administrators unless you want to hear a stream of invective on how they are sucking up all the resources and how they churn out published articles by rearranging the names on the same data sent to different journals.
The New York Times, The New Yorker and other voices have said humanities degrees are seen as not worth the $250,000 prize tag of the average private university tuition. Certainly, articles that repeated that argument didn’t help to attract more students, according to published reports.
The UPR board, meanwhile, has voted to create a masters degree in creative writing.
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