Some critics think that to merely step foot on an American college campus today is to be immediately assaulted by gender studies speakers and decolonization posters. Each and every student, it appears, is caught in a web of woke studies from which there is no escape.

But spend a cozy evening nestled by the fire with the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics portal and you will be reassured. I estimate that only 35% of the 5.1 million degrees conferred at the associate’s level and above for the 2020–21 academic year were in fields that are plagued by wokeness, or more generic far-left ideology. And while it is true that the vast majority of American professors lean left, those who teach the other 65% of students are far more limited in their ability to impose ideological litmus tests on graduation.

The two charts below show the 1.8 million degrees conferred in fields dominated by wokeness, and the 3.3 million degrees conferred in other fields. They are a bracing reminder of what actually goes on at an American college or university, most of which is practical and applied training for useful careers. For all the abuse heaped on grievance studies degrees (black, ethnic, native, gender, women’s, queer, etc.), they are gnats in the great pond of higher education. More students earned degrees in AV support services (14,300) than in grievance studies fields (12,656) in the 2020–21 academic year. And while the history wars rage on in the public square, there is no reason to suppose that academic historians are fully to blame. More people graduated in construction trades during this academic year (34,238) than in history (29,937). While some professors might dream of construction workers who recite Marxist history like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, a better bet is that those graduates are Trump supporters.

To be sure, there is a creeping ideological agenda in the unwoke fields. Medical schools, for instance, seem more focused on micro-aggressions than microscopes. Fitness and parks, architecture, criminology, and even math have been subject to the cultural gusts from the illiberal left. But this is, I believe, more of an effect than a cause of woke illiberalism in the public square. The degrees themselves can hardly be blamed, since they are still overwhelmingly, and by necessity, centered on knowledge and training for specific tasks.

While publications like The College Fix and Campus Reform are essential reading to keep up with the intellectual blitzkrieg of woke studies, they are, by definition, not covering the entirety of higher education. The biggest news about postsecondary instruction these days is the emergence of new and interdisciplinary programs in areas like cybersecurity policy and technology management. There is little time for woke indoctrination in such programs.

Thinking of the dynamism and rapid growth of unwoke fields reminds me of how China solved its bankrupt state enterprises problem. Rather than engage in heated critiques of the problems of socialism and state ownership, the pragmatic Chinese let them die by neglect. Better opportunities were available in the private sector, and only the most agile and high-quality state firms could survive.

This may be a good way to think about higher education reform. As subsidies for woke studies departments dwindle, and as their graduates realize the declining earning power of their intellectually bankrupt learning, those departments will die off like so many East Is Red Number 26 Cathode Ray Tube Factories. Only the most intellectually robust liberal studies departments will survive, and they will be far less dogmatic than today. Until then, Long Live Parks and Recreation Studies!

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