At Stanford University, a school lauded as a leader in the field of technology, humanities programs have quietly fallen nearly to into irrelevance, a common issue at top colleges, the New York Times reported.

45 percent of Stanford's undergraduate faculty members teach humanities courses, but only 15 percent of the student body is enrolled in them. It should not come as a surprise, as Stanford occupied many top-5 lists regarding the fields of technology and science.

Still, as well regarded as their science and technology programs are, Stanford also has highly praised faculty in literature and English.

"We have 11 humanities departments that are quite extraordinary, and we want to provide for that faculty," said Richard Shaw, Stanford's dean of admission and financial aid.

This quandary is not exclusive to Stanford. Princeton recently adopted a program similar to its west-coast counterpart meant to attract high school students who display a strong interest in humanities.

"Both inside the humanities and outside, people feel that the intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences, that the important issues that people of all sorts care about, like inequality and climate change, are being addressed not in the English departments," said higher education expert Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences may have pinpointed a huge contributor to the decrease in interest. In a report last spring, the group found less funding for humanities programs amidst a rising interest in technology and science.

"In the scholarly world, cognitive sciences has everybody's ear right now, and everybody is thinking about how to relate to it," said Louis Menand, a Harvard history professor. "How many people do you know who've read a book by an English professor in the past year? But everybody's reading science books."

The issue is not only affecting the elite schools and is hitting the smaller ones even harder. Edinboro University in Pennsylvania recently announced it would discontinue degree programs in German, philosophy and world languages. Elizabeth City State University also recently announced it may be forced to close its history degree program for lack of funds.

At Stanford, humanities professors are still compensated comfortably, given access to the best of the best and work in a picturesque environment. Some just look at the rise in interest in science and technology as a challenge.

"You look at this university's extraordinary science and technology achievements, and if you wonder what will happen to the humanities, you can be threatened, or you can be invigorated," said Franco Moretti, the director of the Stanford Literary Lab. "I'm choosing to be invigorated."