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Ruth Han is not trying to burn down the university, but she is trying to make sure her children can pay rent.

Han, a licensed therapist and mother who posts as @ruthhantherapy on Instagram, has built a sizable following by offering blunt advice on topics such as parenting and college. She has been open about how strict she was with her own children regarding their choice of a major. She limited them to a narrow list: accounting, computer science, nursing, and engineering. Parents, she argues, are not obligated to bankroll ninety-thousand-dollar-a-year voyages of self-discovery. College, she says, should function as a “white-collar trade school” that delivers in-demand skills and a clear path to self-sufficiency.

Han is both riding a cultural wave and helping to shape it.

Across social media, podcasts, and parent forums, higher education is increasingly evaluated by a simple standard. Does it lead to stable, paid work? Platforms such as Degree Free and prominent voices like Mike Rowe challenge the assumption that college is necessary at all, often framing it as a poor investment or a scam. Their arguments travel widely online, shaping how parents think about majors, tuition, and student debt. The result is a noticeable cultural shift. College is no longer an unquestioned good. It must prove its economic value.

And, Washington is listening.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, for example, advanced this workforce-oriented turn by establishing the “Do No Harm” standard, which ties federal student-loan eligibility to graduates’ median earnings. Programs whose graduates fail to out-earn comparable non-degree holders for two out of three years risk losing access to Direct Loans, with broader aid consequences for institutions that depend on them. The Department of Education has recently finalized that framework, aligning federal policy squarely with employment outcomes. As Peter Wood and I argued, this path will undoubtedly result in cuts to liberal arts programs.

Economic realities have hastened the reckoning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and reliance on foreign labor are reshaping entry-level white-collar work, often to the detriment of young, native professionals. As I recently reported, unemployment among recent graduates now exceeds Great Recession levels, with warnings that it could climb higher. In that environment, parents like Han have little tolerance for programs that risk sending their children back to the basement after graduation.

Han’s guidance predated the worst of the AI wave, and she has revised it to keep pace. She no longer treats computer science as a guaranteed path to job security, but her core message remains intact. Parents, she argues, should take responsibility for steering college-bound children toward degrees that enhance employability.

Her message reflects a broader national shift in how education is understood, and colleges and universities will adjust to that understanding whether they welcome it or not. Programs closely tied to employment outcomes will be favored, whereas programs that are not—such as the liberal arts—will face increasing scrutiny.

I suspect that, as market-based evaluation becomes the governing standard for higher education, the liberal arts will come to be seen less as foundational and more as a luxury—an outcome not imposed from the outside alone. Liberal-arts departments weakened their own standing by diving headlong into political activism.

The silver lining is that retrenchment may force renewal. As liberal arts programs are cut back and later rebuilt, some may regain credibility by returning to what once justified their place in the university—the serious study of culture and civilization. That revival will depend not on federal policy or parental skepticism, but on whether the liberal arts can again demonstrate why they are worth preserving.

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