From what I gather, most people who get an undergrad degree in history do not become professional historians.

I did not declare a major my first year in college. My second year, the college was pressuring me to declare a major and I went with History because I had taken a bunch of history classes out of interest and it just so happened that my advisor was in the history department. I liked her and didn't want to change advisors. Declaring a history major was the easy answer.

I won some kind of award as, I guess, one of the top three sophomore history majors at the college. Then I dropped out of school. I later wrapped up an AA in Humanities because that was the easy answer for trying to lock in my old credits so I could go back to school some day without starting over completely from scratch. If you don't have any kind of degree, credits that are from too many years ago will not be accepted as transfer credit.

If you have a certain level of interest in the humanities, but no real desire to make a career of it, it is possible to slake that thirst these days without enrolling in an undergrad program to do it. This wasn't really possible a few decades back.

These days, you can "go down the rabbit hole" on the internet. You read an article and you find it interesting and you click on the links it contains to read more related material or you google up related info. Pretty soon, you can have 30 tabs open in your browser.

When I was a kid, the only way to do something akin to that was to spend hours and hours at a good library. (And you probably only had access to a good library and a good excuse to hang there all day if you were a college student.) The additional background info was not just a click away, with the author having handily provided you the link so you are absolutely sure he meant this use of the term and not some other use of it.

All I'm saying is that maybe the financial crisis alone is not the driving factor here. Maybe people feel freed up to prioritize getting an education that leads to well-paid work (or that they think will do so) because it is possible to get their hunger for other types of information met without pursuing a formal degree in it.

I want to be an urban planner or do similar work. Most Urban Planning degrees are Masters degrees. There are relatively few of them available at the undergrad level. So most professional planners have an undergrad degree in something else and humanities is fairly popular.

I'm a fan of the humanities and I currently pay my bills in part by doing freelance writing. I really enjoy writing and I do a lot of blogging. I am probably not the next J.K. Rowling. That's probably not the direction I will go.

But the reality is that if you have a certain level of interest, yes, you absolutely can get your need met by doing things like hanging out on Hacker News. For my purposes, Hacker News is better than going to a university. Most college classes do not provide the opportunity for vigorous debate.

I wanted to attend St. Johns in New Mexico.* It does a Great Books curriculum and has colloquiums. Most colleges don't have colloquiums. I have about six years of college education and have never taken part in one. But I can debate people on Hacker News and learn lots of valuable things from people who are well-read and knowledgeable on any number of subjects.

If I didn't have the internet, I would have to keep taking college classes to try to get my intellectual needs met. Given my medical handicap and other life details, that would be a problem. I would basically be losing my marbles from lack of ability to meet my intellectual needs.

I have good reason to believe this is true for a lot of people. For one thing, I was involved for a time in the online gifted community and it was a pretty common story.

If you have two needs -- one for a job that pays your bills and another more intrinsic need, such as intellectual hunger -- and a single path to meet either of them, the intellectual hunger may win out over the job aspirations. This is part of why we have the expression "starving artist." Never mind Maslow's Hierarchy, some people have a tremendous need to pursue certain things, and to hell with things deemed to be basic material needs.

If things change where a new path opens up to meet that intrinsic need, then it becomes easier to say "Oh, well, yeah, given the high cost of college and yadda, it only makes sense to pursue a degree that supports my desire to make an income that will allow me to live comfortably and I can pursue this other interest as more like a hobby."

* https://www.sjc.edu/