Because not everybody wants to be in STEM. And because even those who are in STEM need to know that humanity does not live by STEM alone. (We'd like our STEM to treat people like humans, rather than like machines.)
A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.
That's from the more idealistic side of me. Now here comes the cynicism. Why? Because people still want to major in them, so that they can say that they have a college degree without having to major in something rigorour. And those people pay tuition. And the colleges like getting paid.
Plenty of non stem majors are very rigorous. Philosophy is particularly so. My undergraduate roommate wrote a 50 page paper that had to have original ideas that was critiqued by professors who are quite adept at spotting fallacies and picking apart arguments.
> Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.
Sure, but we shouldn't assume that college is the appropriate place to do so or that the way colleges teach the humanities is effective. If your supermarket forced you to do aerobic exercises before entering, I'm not sure a good justification for it would be "well, aerobic exercise is good for you and not everything is about buying food."
I guess it really depends on what you think the purpose of college is. To me, that's exactly what college and high school should be for -- learning things that don't have a direct economic impact but that make you a more educated/well-rounded person. They shouldn't just be about job training, which should be focused in technical schools, and it actually saddens me that so many think the purpose of university/high school should be job training (really, that should be the companies themselves, but of course they don't want to pay the money to invest in their hires).
We get a bit sidetracked by terminology here - if we suddenly called a college a technical school, would it suddenly be fine to remove the humanities from the curriculum? One of the big problems when we discuss these things is that there's so much inertia stemming from our preconceived notions of what a college is. It stops us from examining what are actual goals are, and if what we're doing is effective in achieving them.
I don't think the early comment that humanities is approached better as a hobby is necessarily wrong. It's quite possible that other approaches, like the Chautauqua movement, would be much more effective (my personal experience suggests it would).
A "liberal education" originally meant that those who pursued it were free. They weren't pursuing an education of mere techniques, which was for slaves. Even today, there is a place for learning things that don't have a direct economic impact, as part of becoming an educated person.
That's from the more idealistic side of me. Now here comes the cynicism. Why? Because people still want to major in them, so that they can say that they have a college degree without having to major in something rigorour. And those people pay tuition. And the colleges like getting paid.