Read­ing the press late­ly, you’d think the Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem is the next mort­gage mar­ket. And the human­i­ties? They’re tox­ic debt. Here’s a quick recap of the grim parade of sto­ries:

• Last week, The New York Times set the stage with this: an arti­cle detail­ing how stu­dents are drown­ing in debt, which rais­es the ques­tions: Can stu­dents still afford Amer­i­ca’s expen­sive uni­ver­si­ties? And will banks keep mak­ing these loans? The Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er goes fur­ther and blunt­ly asks: Is a High­er Edu­ca­tion Bub­ble about to Burst?
• Next, in The New York­er, a wide­ly-read arti­cle offers this fac­toid: Dur­ing the com­ing decade, most of the sec­tors adding jobs in the US won’t require a col­lege degree. So some aca­d­e­mics (yes, aca­d­e­mics) are left won­der­ing, “why not save the mon­ey and put it towards a house?” Or, put dif­fer­ent­ly, is a col­lege edu­ca­tion real­ly worth the mon­ey?
• The meme con­tin­ues yes­ter­day with David Brooks mus­ing in an opin­ion piece: “When the going gets tough, the tough take account­ing. When the job mar­ket wors­ens, many stu­dents fig­ure they can’t indulge in an Eng­lish or a his­to­ry major. They have to study some­thing that will lead direct­ly to a job.” “There already has been a near­ly 50 per­cent drop in the por­tion of lib­er­al arts majors over the past gen­er­a­tion, and that trend is bound to accel­er­ate.” So why both­er with a human­i­ties edu­ca­tion? Brooks tries to make his best case, and it’s not a bad one. But I’m not sure that a younger gen­er­a­tion is lis­ten­ing. And if you lis­ten to this 2008 inter­view with Harold Bloom, they maybe should­n’t be.
• And just to top things off: Stan­ley Fish launch­es his own defense of a “clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion,” even if it “sounds down­right ante­dilu­vian, out­mod­ed, nar­row and elit­ist.” You get the drift. Anoth­er sign that the human­i­ties is in a bear mar­ket.