How do you expect people to study humanities if you're making it inherently impossible?
You can study all the humanities you want for free. What people (irrationally) want is to study them in a big building and then get whatever job they want on the basis that they know what some dude wrote 300 years ago in Germany
- Undergrad level: Reading stuff that other people have already summarized books/blogs/etc and digesting it a bit. These days you might not really need to go to school to do this.
- Grad level: "studying" as in researching. I'm not in the humanities but I'm assuming that becoming a leading expert in "Germany 300 years ago" is a lot easier when it's your full time job.
Most of the responses here seem to be assuming the first case, whereas the case that is "fundamentally impossible" without some support is the more nuanced synthesis you get from the second case. And in our current system, half the purpose of undergraduate classes is to subsidize the higher level research.
I don't mean to make value judgements on whether further synthesis of "Germany 300 years ago" is needed, but until we come up with a better system killing undergraduate courses in field X is also a huge blow to the research there.
Though I'm a little salty because my wife bought in to the lie that studying the humanities is what you do for a career, yet her acquaintances who "made it" mostly have low-paying but high prestige jobs and a spouse who covers the bills for what is, in effect, a hobby.