650,000 jobs

[dfrecore]

Or as they said, they're focusing on the degrees with the most students completing them.  I'm not sure what the deal is, this is the most perfectly natural thing in the world.  Schools should be looking at and getting rid of degrees all the time.  Every year.  Otherwise, they WILL go away because they're offering things nobody wants.

I think that schools/regions could cooperate so that not every school is duplicating the programs of the other schools.  There may not be enough interested students to support an Art History department at every school but systems could be developed to insure that it's an available option somewhere in the system.  That's one reason why I like state university systems.  They can manage this more easily.  Schools might become more specialized in this way, attract the best instructors and have a better chance of developing scholarly expertise within their respective areas.  I think you could pay attention to shifting demand and preserve low demand academic areas at the same time.

So, really, what happens, is that as a major becomes less popular, fewer schools offer it, and eventually you get a smaller number of schools that offer it, and people are funneled to those schools.  Also, as a major becomes less popular, fewer people take it, and then, eventually there are also fewer people teaching it, so schools couldn't offer it anyway.  This all makes 100% sense.  It's the market at work.

Schools have limited budgets, so they have to try to offer things more people want.  They also have to specialize and offer a few things that fewer schools offer.  So not everyone can offer everything, and that would just be silly.  Instead, they have to balance it all out.