Opinion: Do Universities prioritise STEM students over those in the Humanities?

By Matthew Geraghty

WARNING !!! This post is at times a first world problem rant and I acknowledge the incredible privilege it is to attend university at all, but I’m making the case that the educational opportunities should be the same for everyone as much as possible, enjoy…

Recently at my university (NUI Galway) it was ‘Engineering Week’. Five days full of events celebrating students of engineering and the objectively pretty good prospects that await them when they leave campus, after completing their subjectively tougher degrees than students in the humanities.

It got me thinking about the way students in the humanities get treated by educational institutions compared to students taking high points science, maths and technology degrees.

I think it is important to note that there a multitude of complex reasons why humanities students are not prioritised as much, and the reality is that universities often put more backing behind STEM students because it can lead to better employability results and increased funding for the university which they need.

But I don’t think that justifies the disregard for students in the humanities which I’ve seen so many times.

Disclosure: First World Problem Rant coming up.

The feeling of disregard hits home on a Wednesday evening in mid-November when you are waiting for your 6 p.m. lecture to begin in the freezing Arts Millenium building, or when the Arts Concourse (the main building for humanities classes on campus) is so overcrowded that you sit on the damp floor for an hour outside your lecture theatre to wait for the class to begin, hoping someone you know won’t spot you, wishing there was more seats around than the handful that are perpetually taken.

The feeling persists when as soon as the last class leaves you usher into the lecture hall only to notice that the row you were going to sit in has just half the seats it’s supposed to, the rest broken, and you have to remind yourself that its been like that since you started college, a year and a half ago.

When you eventually find a seat and the professor starts the lecture, the class is delayed for fifteen minutes because the overhead projector is, you guessed it- old as well- and won’t turn on, so instead of using the power-point presentation as planned the professor speaks to the class struggling to articulate the graph today’s lecture was based on.

You get the point, the humanities buildings on campus are pretty outdated, but even when they do build a modern space with state of the art lecture halls for humanities students, heating and seating are compromised.

However, this isn’t the case when I head to the Alice Perry Engineering Building on the other side of campus for my one class a week there. Nobody is slumped against the floor here, the building has lots of couches for students to sit on between classes, a healthy café and toilets with modern showers, along with multiple state of the art (and warm) lecture halls and spacious study areas. The fifty minutes a week I get to spend there feel otherworldly, compared to what I’m used to.

I’m not saying I know the solution, and as stated, there are other, complex reasons why STEM courses get better treatment than the humanities, but on a basic level I think the disparity is unfair. We know now more than ever given the damaging financial report that emerged late last year on NUI Galway’s expenditure that our university has the money, those in control just aren’t spending it on the right things.

Going to university is an honour, and one of the valuable things I’ve learned there is that everyone has the right to an education, but if those educational opportunities aren’t distributed fairly among the students are universities not just adding to educational inequalities?

Thank you for reading,

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