The reasons for this national shift are many, but most academics attribute it mostly to the lingering effects of the Great Recession. One of the earliest memories for the generation entering college right now is of Americans losing their jobs and sometimes their homes. Financial security still weighs heavily on the minds of these students. Indeed, a long-running annual survey taken of new college freshman has found in the past decade that the No. 1 reason students say they go to college is to get a better job; for the 20 years before the recession hit in 2008, the top reason was to learn about things that interested them.

Unlike automakers, which can swiftly switch production lines when consumers start buying SUVs instead of sedans, colleges can’t adjust their faculty ranks as quickly in response to public demand. Often, schools wait for professors to retire to reassign those openings to disciplines with the greatest need. Even then, small schools might only recruit a handful of new faculty every year. When they hire, most colleges also need to keep a balance of professors across departments to teach introductory classes that are part of a core curriculum. Macalester, for instance, hired 11 full-time faculty members this year—four of them in computer science and statistics. “We have vacant positions in history and English, and we decided not to fill them,” Rosenberg says.

Read: What can you do with a humanities Ph.D., anyway?

With that pace of hiring, it’s nearly impossible for many colleges to keep up with increasing enrollments in popular majors while maintaining small classes. What’s more, faculty members hired for tenure-track positions who eventually earn tenure are essentially promised lifetime employment at the college. “When you put labor in position for 30 years, your ability to respond to future trends becomes really challenging,” says Raynard Kington, the president of Grinnell College, in Iowa. Grinnell expects 70 students to graduate with computer-science degrees this spring out of a class of around 400; four years ago, it graduated just 15 computer-science majors.

To avoid further slippage in humanities majors, elite colleges and universities have resorted to an all-out campaign to convince students that such degrees aren’t just tickets to jobs as bartenders and Starbucks baristas. Colleges are starting early with that push. Stanford University writes letters and sends brochures to top-notch high-school students with an interest in the humanities to encourage them to apply, says Debra Satz, the dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. Prospective students can also take humanities classes at Stanford while still in high school.