The Load-Bearing Degree
The skills the economy dismissed are the skills the machines can’t check. The market got the price wrong. It does that sometimes.
The pitch was simple. Learn something useful.
The economy needs engineers, not English majors. Data scientists, not art historians. The world is moving fast and the people who move with it will be the ones who learned to code, to model, to optimize. The humanities were beautiful, sure. Important in some vague civilizational sense. But not load-bearing. Not where the jobs were. Not serious.
A luxury. The first thing a serious person would cut.
So there were cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts.
Between 2012 and 2022, the share of bachelor’s degrees going to humanities majors dropped by a third. English departments lost tenure lines faster than any other discipline. Whole programs were merged, starved, shuttered. The guidance counselor version was gentle: Have you considered something more practical? The cultural version was not: What are you going to do with that?
And a generation listened.
They chose the practical thing.
They learned to code.
And then the code learned to write itself.
Artificial intelligence writes the reports, generates the models, produces the quarterly deck. The data synthesis, the analysis, the outputs that were supposed to be the safe bet, the practical choice, the thing you could point to and say: See? Useful.
AI can do much of it faster than you. Cheaper than you. And often, when steered well, AI can do it better than you.
What artificial intelligence cannot do on its own:
AI can produce outputs that look like all of those things. The skill is knowing whether the output is good. That’s the human part. And those are humanities skills.
Not exclusively. But foundationally. Close reading. Source evaluation. Holding contradiction. Knowing that the map is not the territory and the model is not the world. Knowing that a confident answer delivered at speed is not the same thing as a good answer, and that the difference matters more the higher the stakes get.
The people who learned to think that way,
are suddenly the people everyone is looking for (or should be, soon).
There is a term for this in the job listings now: Human in the Loop. HITL. The machine does the volume. A person does the judgment. That person needs a brain that went through some things. Slow things. Uncomfortable things. Things where the answer was not in the back of the book because there was no back of the book.
This is not revenge.
It is a market correction.
Here’s the other thing nobody quite says out loud: the STEM pipeline didn’t just displace the humanities. It also taught people to think of education as a transaction. You pay, you credential, you get a job title. The degree is a receipt.
But a receipt for what?
If the job the credential pointed to can now be done by a machine, the credential is a receipt for something that no longer exists. And the person holding it has a piece of paper and a loan payment but not the thing that was supposed to be underneath: the capacity to think.
The capacity to read a primary source and know what it is actually saying. The capacity to hold a position you disagree with long enough to understand why someone holds it. The capacity to recognize when the system you’re inside is shaping what you can see. The capacity to do the thing that doesn’t autocomplete.
That is not a credential. It is not a job title. It is not a six-week bootcamp.
It is an education.
And it takes time.
Which brings us here
BoopU is not a replacement for the departments that were defunded. Those were specific institutions, built by specific people, and their loss is real and ongoing.
What BoopU is: a proof of concept that the work those departments did can be done differently. In public. Without the credential theater. Without the gatekeeping. Without pretending that the thing you’re buying is a piece of paper instead of a way of thinking.
Every course in the catalog is built on the same premise: the outputs are automated now. The judgment is not. The judgment is the whole game, and it always has been.
The people who knew that were in the English departments and the philosophy departments and the history departments. They were right. They were defunded. Both of those things are true.
We’re building the next version of what they built.
The humanities were never decorative.
They were structural.
The building just didn’t know it was standing on them until the floor moved.
The floor has moved.
See also: The Longer Game, on what we’re actually building toward.