Are University Humanities Graduates Dumber Than They Were 30 Years Ago?

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As I sit at my desk, thumbing through an electronic stack of essays riddled with grammatical errors, unsupported arguments, and the faint whiff of ChatGPT, I can’t help but wonder: are university humanities graduates dumber than they were 30 years ago?

They can’t keep off their phones in class. I get class protests when they are assigned 20 pages of reading, and most seem very determined to stay on the front end of any difficult learning curve.

It’s not an idle question but one born of concern, tinged with a hint of despair. Universities were once sanctuaries of intellectual rigour, yet now they seem like credential factories where critical thinking is traded for convenience and learning for LinkedIn profiles. As John Stuart Mill once said, “A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for… is a miserable creature.” Today, that fight might be for the soul of education itself.

At the heart of the problem lies students' unwillingness—or perhaps inability—to engage with substantial texts. Thirty years ago, assigning a hefty volume like like War and Peace was daunting but not impossible. It’s not just a bitter old guy saying that because I was tortured by having to read Joyce’s Ulysses, so you must also suffer. Students today don’t want to read. And I won’t assign Ulysses. I’m not that cruel.

But suggest anything longer than a few pages, and you get, “Can’t you summarise it?” Or they just don’t read it.

The issue isn’t simply laziness but distraction. A generation tethered to their phones struggles to focus for more than a few moments. Research by Maryanne Wolf in Reader, Come Home (2018) warns of a digital environment rewiring brains for skimming rather than deep reading. The result? Students who can quickly parse memes but cannot wrestle with complex ideas. Socrates feared writing would weaken memory; he wouldn’t be enthused about TikTok if he were alive today.

This decline in reading isn’t just an academic problem; it’s a cultural one. A nation that doesn’t read cannot think, and as Thomas Jefferson wisely noted, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” Without deep reading, we lose critical thinking skills and empathy—the ability to understand lives unlike ours.

In a baffling twist, many students now wear their refusal to buy textbooks as a badge of honour. I’m not saying that they say this on the sly to their friends. They tell me this. It’s like bragging that you haven’t worked out in three years and thus struggle with two flights of stairs even though you’re 21.

“It’s too expensive,” they argue, often while clutching a phone worth $1600. While the cost of textbooks is a legitimate concern—textbook publishers can be scandalous in their pricing—the solution isn’t to skip the material entirely. Engaging with assigned readings, however tedious, is foundational to learning. Publishers now make students buy e-versions with embedded quizzes that count for marks.

Yet, in a consumerist education model, students see their tuition fees as payment for a degree, not an education. When they complain to department heads or support staff with annoying titles like “Student Success Officers,” such officers often offer naked advocacy with the implicit message, “They paid, and they have tried a little, so they deserve to pass.”

This attitude treats knowledge as a transaction rather than a pursuit. The consequence? Graduates who lack the depth of understanding necessary to navigate a complex world. And don’t get me started on the 15% of students who have ADHD accommodations; they get double time in university, not coaching on how to be more effective in their allotted time. I don’t think asking for double time because you are special will work in the workforce. I have ADHD, “they” say now (actually tested), but I can’t retroactively go back to university and ask for accommodations.

Most of my professors have kicked the oxygen habit.

This shift in attitude is part of a broader trend: the commodification of education. Increasingly, students view university as a stepping stone to a job rather than a place to cultivate intellectual curiosity. They focus on the credentials rather than the learning, ticking boxes rather than opening minds.

Education should not be only about career preparation but character development, as they say, the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail. I think “they” is Yeats. I did a liberal arts degree, and though I recognise its value, I wouldn’t suggest it to my daughter, and perhaps that makes me a hypocrite.

But you can do critical thinking in any discipline. The problem is if one frames the benefit as only having extrinsic value (a clear outcome and benefit) and no intrinsic value (learning for its own sake), the beauty of learning, its unlimited upside, is being constrained as the student’s mind is going,

“How can this lesson be directly applied to help me in the future?”

They have put binders on learning.

This isn’t entirely their fault. The job market rewards degrees over abilities. Employers often treat a degree as a key to the door, caring little about what a graduate knows. It’s easy, and it's what they did. Perhaps they should just ask for evidence that the applicant was accepted to university and worry less about completion.

Universities, eager to maintain their fill rates, cater to this mindset, focusing on employability statistics rather than genuine education. The result? Humanities graduates with impressive CVs but scant ability to analyse, question, or innovate.

As Oscar Wilde quipped, “Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In the rush to secure a degree, the intrinsic value of learning is lost.

Let’s be honest: universities themselves are complicit in this decline. Once bastions of intellectual exploration, many have become businesses in all but name. Administrators obsess over fill rates, revenue streams, league table rankings - rankings that access institutions on everything, including the quality of dining on campus, whether the residence has granite countertops and if the gym offers Pilates.

Departments are pressured to pass students, retain them, and keep them happy, often at the expense of academic standards.

Non-tenured faculty—those poor souls on precarious contracts—bear the brunt of this shift. Lacking tenure protection, they are incentivised to inflate grades and avoid student complaints.

A critical essay might receive a mediocre mark, but if a student protests, some administrators will quietly ask for a revision upwards. After all, unhappy students could mean bad reviews, which hurt the bottom line. Students are not stupid; they will find some non-grade-related spin to re-frame their complaints, but if their grades were 10% higher, those complaints would strangely evaporate.

This undermines not only academic integrity but also students’ potential. When we indulge students with inflated grades and minimal challenges, we rob them of the resilience they’ll need in the real world.

As Winston Churchill once said, “To each, there comes in their lifetime a special moment… What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

Grade inflation is the dirty little secret of modern academia. Thirty years ago, a first-class degree was a rare achievement reserved for students of exceptional ability. It’s increasingly common today that employers demand a degree to consider candidates. The devaluation of grades mirrors that of currency: the more you print, the less it’s worth.

But this inflation isn’t benign. It creates a perverse incentive structure in which students feel entitled to high marks for minimal effort and faculty feel pressured to comply. Research by Johnson (2019) highlights how grade inflation undermines critical thinking as students learn to prioritise performance over genuine understanding.

In the long run, it’s not just academia that suffers; it’s society at large.

This brings us to the heart of the matter: can we survive as a nation that doesn’t read? The short answer is no. Reading isn’t just about consuming information; it’s about developing the capacity to think critically, empathise, and imagine alternatives.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” Without these skills, we risk becoming a society of passive consumers, easily manipulated by algorithms and demagogues.

A humanities education is supposed to inoculate students against this. It teaches us to question assumptions, analyse arguments, and appreciate complexity. Yet if our graduates lack these skills, we will have a generation unprepared to tackle the challenges of a fractured world.

All is not lost. Some students still possess a genuine thirst for knowledge, a hunger to understand the world in all its messy complexity.

Moreover, there’s growing recognition that the current system is unsustainable. Books like The Coddling of the American Mind (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018) and initiatives promoting critical thinking and media literacy suggest that change is possible. Revaluing the life of the mind will require effort—not just from universities but from society as a whole.

With administration support, department heads must force faculty to focus on learning, deal with grade inflation by mandating acceptable course grading averages, etc.

But until university administrators, who worry about teaching and operational costs but turn a blind eye to the fastest rising costs, which are their administration and non-teaching costs, are willing to practice the literal function of leadership, which is going out in front, there won’t be change.

Administration is frequently too concerned with political gamesmanship, building their fiefdoms, making sure they all get their assistants, hiring more diversity officers or the flavour of the week, working from home, ‘what exactly would you say that you do’ jobs than they are at steering the institution toward a port called learning and away from the port called academic activity and tuition collection.

So, are humanities graduates dumber than they were 30 years ago? Perhaps not inherently, they are certainly less prepared, challenged, and willing to engage deeply with ideas.

This isn’t just an academic problem; it’s a societal one. If we continue down this path, we risk becoming a nation of surface thinkers, bereft of the intellectual depth needed to navigate an uncertain future. We open ourselves to exploitation from demagogues.

But there's hope if we can rekindle a love for learning, a respect for rigour, and a commitment to truth. After all, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, “The greatest proof of wisdom is the continual reference to it.” Let us strive to create graduates who are not only credentialed but also wise, not only employable but also thoughtful. Our future depends on it.