Giving Compass' Take:

• Smithsonian magazine notes that, since the Great Recession, the number of history majors at colleges and universities has dropped by more than 30 percent, mainly due to fears over job preparation.

• The numbers, though, don't suggest that majoring in history or the humanities will hurt employment prospects. And a knowledge of civics is as essential as ever, especially for those looking to devote their life to serving others.

• Here's how one history teacher gets in the trenches with students to spark engagement.

The Great Recession reshaped the United States in a number of ways, but a new analysis suggests it was strong enough to even impact the past. Writing for the American Historical Association's blog Perspectives on History, Northeastern University’s Benjamin M. Schmidt crunched the numbers and found that since the financial crisis hit in 2008, the number of history majors at colleges and universities has dropped by more than 30 percent.

According to statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 34,642 history majors in 2008. Fast forward to 2017, the count was 24,266. Most of that decline occurred after 2012, with a notable single-year drop of more than 1,500 between 2016 and 2017 ...

So why are students avoiding majoring in our shared past? Schmidt tells Emma Pettit at the Chronicle of Higher Education that post-recession, the trend is for students to pursue majors that appear to have higher job prospects rather than follow their academic interests. “Students and their parents seem to be thinking a lot more that they need to major in something practical, [something that is] likely to get them a job at the back end,” he says. The emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, he adds, has also led more students away from majoring in the humanities, in hopes of graduating with a degree that will land them a more lucrative job.

But that anxiety around job prospects from a humanities education isn’t necessarily rooted in reality ...

Read the full article about fewer people majoring in history by Jason Daley at Smithsonian.com.