Education, at all levels, has a primary purpose: to produce young adults with marketable skills. Every level of education should be directed at that primary purpose, from kindergarten through graduate degrees. Every subject, from reading, writing, and arithmetic, and, yes, civics, should be directed at ensuring that young skulls full of mush are transformed into young skulls full of knowledge that enables them to become productive members of the great tapestry of the American society and economy.
That's how things ought to be, anyway. Too often, most notably in higher education in the United States today, there are classes and even degree programs that are nothing more than the enormous shoveling of horse squeeze that does nothing whatsoever to produce young adults with marketable skills. There is no place in the modern workforce for a Gender Studies graduate, and yet the university systems keep producing them.
That may be changing. A recent piece from Campus Reform documents that, at least at one midwestern university, the enrollment in these programs is crashing and burning. That's exactly what should happen, too.
Northeastern Illinois University’s enrollment in its gender studies degree program has remained below 10 students for five years running, the school’s data shows.
The university maintains a page tracking five-year enrollment trends every spring. The data reveals that gender studies is not a popular major at the school.
You don't say.
In spring 2021, only two students were enrolled in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Bachelor of Arts. That number rose to six students in spring 2022 before declining to five students in 2023 and four students in both 2024 and 2025.
The university had an enrollment of 3,749 undergraduate students in spring 2025, which means that 0.11 percent of the student body was enrolled in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies degree.
That's an encouraging statistic, although it begs one primary question: Why is Northern Illinois University still offering this corral's litter to be taught? Why have they not simply closed the programs down and redirected the resources towards something sane?
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That's a good question. Here's the thing: Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies aren't the only garbage degree this university offers - and it's not the only one with enrollment in single digits. There are nine others, among them "Urban Community Studies," "Latina/o/x & Latin American Studies," and "Global Studies." These are, again, enormous outpourings of the kind of stuff one finds in small heaps in pastures where cattle have been grazing. And the electives may be even more ridiculous.
A description for “Feminist Activism” says that students will “create and participate in activist projects during the semester.”
Options for electives include “Contemporary LGBTQ+ Literature,” “Studies In Women’s Literature,” “Re-Thinking Race And Gender,” and “Latina/x Feminisms & Social Media.”
The hard part about writing on this topic is that one finds oneself running out of pejoratives.
It is belaboring the obvious to note that the employment prospects of someone who wasted four (or six, or eight) years studying these topics is essentially nil, unless they are willing to enter into a career with ample prospects of asking, "Can I supersize that for you?"
It's not just Northern Illinois University that is seeing its numbers in these programs crash and burn. Campus Reform has more:
A Campus Reform public records request revealed in July that the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s gender studies minor had 42 enrolled students for the 2025–2026 academic year out of almost 20,000 students at the school.
The low-enrollment programs come as some universities are raising tuition or reducing staff while citing broader enrollment declines.
Temple University announced a 3.4 percent tuition increase and staff reductions in July due to low enrollment.
Good. That's how it should be.
Of all these horse squeeze programs, though, it's hard to imagine one that would be more useless than Gender Studies. It's not completely impossible that someone who took a Latin American Studies degree may find employment, say, as a low-level staffer in the United States embassy to Nicaragua. But Gender Studies? The only possible hope for employment that doesn't involve a Starbucks apron might be getting a job teaching Gender Studies, and, given the crashing university enrollment, that seems one of the longest of long shots.
Still, for all the microscopic enrollment, there are, according to one source, still 123 universities offering bachelor's degree programs in Gender Studies, another 93 offering bachelor's degrees in Gender & Sexuality Studies and possibly another 276 offering similar curricula in bits and pieces.
But the crashing and burning in enrollment may be changing all that. Already, several institutions, including Georgia State University, the New College of Florida, and Wichita State, have already round-filed their Gender Studies programs, mostly due to catastrophically low enrollment.
That's good news all around.
Education, again, has one primary purpose: to produce young adults with marketable skills. That's what these young skulls full of mush, their parents, and all too often, the taxpayers, are shelling out their hard-earned for. And, all too often, the primary education and university systems have utterly failed. But torching a few of these garbage degree programs would be a step in the right direction, and the collapse in enrollment for these programs says a lot about how they are regarded, even by students. That's one of the few encouraging notes we've seen out of American academia in some time.
