re: List of Possible Degrees Affected by Trump Banning Loans for “Liberal Arts” Degrees

I think it means the liberal arts degrees that are useless. Not all liberal arts degrees

The ones that provide decent salaries on average to justify the loan will remain

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You can describe economics, law, or English as "just learning a bunch of facts" too

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Of course you could reduce economics, law, or English to “learning a bunch of facts,” but that misses the distinction I was trying to make.

In economics the facts are generally components of broader models and relationships. The student must understand how incentives, tradeoffs, markets, institutions, and other concepts interact so that he can apply that framework to situations he hasn’t encountered before.

English works in a similar way. A student must learn vocabulary, grammar, conventions, exceptions, and patterns, but the value comes from being able to use those principles to communicate, interpret, and construct arguments in new contexts.

My point about history is narrower. I see much more of the undergraduate study of history as acquiring and organizing knowledge about particular people, events, places, and periods in the past. Obviously historians can and do develop analytical frameworks for interpreting a record of those events and historical study can teach valuable skills like evaluating sources, possible causation, chronology, and competing interpretations. But if we’re comparing the typical undergraduate learning experience I think history places substantially more emphasis on acquiring a body of knowledge than on learning a reusable system for solving new problems.

So I’m not claiming that history is literally “just memorizing facts,” nor that it has no analytical value. I’m saying that its knowledge is in my view, less directly transferable as a general purpose framework than the kinds of conceptual and analytical tools emphasized in economics, law, or English.