The Major-Minor report, along with broader Ashokan discourse on employability, objectifies and distances institutional changes, fostering passive lamentation rather than constructive engagement.
In 2017, Sanjeev Bhikchandani, one of Ashoka University’s founders, reflected on its guiding philosophy: “Our decision was to focus solely on Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, staying away from professional courses popular in middle-class India, as they maximise job prospects.” This statement, opening the Major-Minor report published two weeks ago, frames the shift among Ashokan students toward employability-focused majors such as Economics with inherent moral attributions, creating a sense of loss or decline from our original liberal arts focus. I make the case, however, that this portrayal is an oversimplification that overlooks global forces and depends on superficial value judgements. Nostalgia, in this context, is usually a form of amnesia — an attempt to cling to an idealised past that forgets the inherent dynamism of institutional growth and the challenges that come with change.
While the changing popularity of student majors is a clear and relevant trend, it is neither new nor uniquely local. The report points to a clear shift toward employability–focused majors over the past decade with around 37% of the undergraduate batch of 2024 majoring in Economics-Finance or Psychology, up from much lower numbers in earlier years. Conversely, the proportion of students majoring in English, History, and Political Science has dropped from 37% in 2019 to just 20% in 2024.
Yet these trends extend beyond our campus. Over the past decade, global data show a shift towards majors with clear career pathways, such as health, business, engineering, and computer sciences, in response to market demands for technical and professional skills. Meanwhile, majors in the humanities and social sciences, such as English, philosophy, and social sciences, have seen declines despite overall growth in college graduates.
These trends are not new, extending to a (multi) decade-long trend following the 2008 financial crisis affirmed by COVID-19. According to studies in higher education and labour economics, the pandemic reshaped student priorities, pushing many to seek majors that offered direct routes into stable, high-demand careers, such as STEM, health sciences, and business. The shift towards these disciplines emerged alongside the rise of remote learning and reduced campus interactions, which limited the organic cross-disciplinary exchanges characteristic of a liberal arts environment. The recognition that trends in student major choices tie to both immediate material realities and broader societal rhythms implies that while current trends may prioritise pragmatic, employability-driven majors, these patterns will eventually shift.
A key point from the report, made by a thoughtful Ashokan, was that the students of initial batches came from “generally from more socio-economically privileged backgrounds” but as the student body has diversified, so have their career ambitions and pathways. This ties in with the global phenomenon of increasingly diverse student bodies opting for degrees with tangible career benefits as a pathway to financial stability.
The report, however, frames this shift as a decline in the liberal arts framework of Ashoka with some students raising questions like, “Am I truly a liberal arts student today?” The implication here is that a ‘real’ liberal arts student would not be driven by employability, positioning such a shift as a betrayal of Ashoka's founding ethos or a moral failing. The issue lies not just in the value attribution to student choice being driven by employability, but also in the assumption that this shift leads students into rigid intellectual siloes. This tendency to catastrophise the move toward more employable disciplines oversimplifies the situation and unfairly attributes a sense of moral decline to a more complex, evolving educational landscape.
Moreover, the nostalgia for Ashoka's early years, when students were perceived to be more engaged in ‘genuine exploration’ free from the constraints of employability, romanticises vagueness. Abstracting the idea of a ‘liberal arts student’ into something almost mythical evokes a sense of loss in the joy of exploration that is supposed to define the liberal arts experience. Yet, this idealised notion, apart from being jarringly general, overlooks the real-world motivations and the complex, multi-faceted nature of student decision-making. The shift in major choices is not necessarily a crisis of values or a descent into utilitarianism but rather part of a cyclical, adaptive process. Overly dramatic characterisations of this trend fail to provide a meaningful understanding of how and why these shifts occur, and in doing so, obscure the legitimate reasons students are drawn to more employable disciplines.
Viewing our evolution through this lens compels us to recognise that no moment is permanent or irreversible. The perceived loss of our liberal arts ethos is a fallacy of limited thinking, painting Ashoka to be "stuck in a bad equilibrium" with fixed, unchanging values. We are not stuck, nor is the current moment inherently “bad”. Our ethos, if there is such a unified thing, is simply evolving. Heraclitus’ maxim that one can never step into the same river twice reminds us that both the individual and the river will always already be changing. This applies to every Ashoka student who has come, is here, or will come. And of course, most crucially, to the institution of Ashoka.
The writer is the co-editor of Opinions (AY 24-25).
(Edited by Srijana Siri and Madiha Tariq)
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