dumb question: what "advances that push society forward" has come from the humanities, in the past century?

Direct impact on policy and government: Historical analysis of subaltern groups has been a huge component of activism for women's rights, racial justice, and gay rights around the world. Foucault's work has enormously changed the way that people think about state power and its command over violence and surveillance, for example by updating Bentham's model of the panopticon for a modern world. This is critically important to understanding the two largest political powers (US and China) and their relationship with information and communication. And for better or worse, history and political science was a huge influence on the development of socialist and communist governments and their influence on the world.

Teaching the population: The humanities teaches empathy and media literacy better than any other field I know, and 20th century work has expanded that skilset dramatically. This is very useful for people who don't end up in "humanities careers" to have some experience with these practices, especially in the modern global world with deliberately crafted narratives all over the place.

Understanding technology: There is a moment in "the social dilemma" where the main activist (I forget his name) mentions that social media is not a tool because people are worried about its ability to damage civilization and he compares it to the bicycle, which he claims did not produce such worry. This is completely false, since the bicycle was absolutely a large concern since it enabled women to travel distances without their husbands. Had anybody involved in the doc thought to consult a historian of technology, they wouldn't have put forward such a terrible analysis and weakened their argument (and the proposed solutions). There are numerous such examples of this sort of error where a little bit of humanities background would enable us to develop technology more precisely.

It’s the efficiency vs serendipity discussion.

"Multiple areas" that could produce advances that can push society forward is still a much narrower category than "areas that are eligible for student loans".

> perhaps you want to be able to provide the opportunity to study a subject regardless of whether you can pay for it outright or not

Students can study any subject they want for free over the Internet. Major institutions have their entire curriculum available for free online. There is no reason why taxpayers should have to subsidize college tuition for that.

The greatest challenge I imagine to pure online is the possibilities to cheat during assessment/certification. They are rising anyway with the improvement in IT and are exacerbated by more virtual interaction. The Panopticon might be unavoidable.

More direct one-on-one time with professors, whether online or physical, could help. The professor as tutor, rather than researcher who gives the occasional lecture series.

I think it’s been that way at Oxford for a while.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/student-life/e...

Would also help with motivation, although one of the requirements of getting a college education is that the student demonstrates sufficient self-motivation to complete a program. It isn’t supposed to be super high school...although my impression is colleges were more like super prep schools before the introduction of the GI Bill after WWII changed/matured collegiate life for the better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill

This will be a Golden Age for the autodidact. I mean, like, wow.

Plenty of nations fund higher education as a basic investment in the quality of their future people.

That goal is not achieved by subsidizing college education in which students get to pick whatever major they want and have only a smattering of courses outside their major.

According to the people who structured the US public education system, secondary school (middle school and high school) was supposed to serve this goal, not college. And the US does provide free secondary education to all, in which the basic curriculum is dictated by the government and, while students do have some choice in what courses to take, their choices are much more limited than in college and they are unavoidably exposed to a much wider variety of subject matter.

It doesn't seem like many of them value it more than the US, and none value it all that much more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

In the US, 44 percent of people age 25-64 have a college degree; only 6 countries have a higher percentage and the highest is Canada at 54 percent, which isn't that much higher.

> they don't make people go into massive debt for it

It is true that many other countries have free college education; however, as shown by the numbers above, this does not seem to have resulted in a larger fraction of their people getting college degrees.

The more important discussion is how massive debt dilutes a lot of the value in the education.

That debt is unnecessary.

Objective data not provided by those who stand to benefit from a positive result.

Data that objectively identifies how that benefit is accrued and at what amount.

The kind of data that guided the development of every major industrial and service sector over the last 50 to 100 years and is inexplicably lacking in higher education.