The other astonishing point made in the article was how few grad students find academic jobs. Of the 15 phd candidates entering Princeton on 2012, ten years later only 2 had tenure-track jobs.
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According to rumors at the time, the UCLA English department used to pride itself on having a lower GPA than Econ. I chose English because I liked reading, was better at writing papers and analyzing, and hated multiple choice tests.
I don’t think English is taught as well overall. The book selections are dated and/or contain wrong guesses about what they think Gen Z wants to read. No one has to learn any vocabulary. There’s still a snobbery towards audiobooks (schools accept them now, but people still debate whether the audio “counts” as having read a book). Phones and computers make it more difficult to focus on reading books. Etc.
I hope they don’t get rid of English departments, but instead try to make them relevant for now.
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There’s so much contempt for liberal arts/humanities these days it’s no wonder they’re declining. Personally, I’m thrilled when I see someone who can put together a coherent email or who was interested in philosophy enough to study it! They tend to be the most interesting people to talk to. As a society, we need humanities majors as well as computer science majors. I say this as a mom with two successful STEM-majoring daughters.
Success is a function of privilege and common sense and hard work and luck as much as major. My son, about to enter high school, wants to go into computer science, and I feel SO strongly that he needs to be capable in “softer” subjects as well. It’s getting so rare these days.
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Any CS major (or other STEM major) should be able take quite a few non-STEM classes, so just choose wisely.
I think the days of the of the engineer who can only talk “ engineering” are over.
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Seems like many college students, even at Harvard, were gullible enough to fall for the latest crypto scam:
“And effective altruism”—a practice that calls for acquiring wealth and disseminating it according to principles of optimization and efficiency—“is a huge trend on campus, seeping into everything. It has probably contributed to a good number of concentrators and secondaries in the philosophy department.”
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Effective altruism and crypto are different things. And I wouldn’t call it a fad. It had some bad sponsorship/pr recently clearly.
But now having to remake itself with minors like “Professional Writing” which S took and found somewhat useful. I agree with you that grading can be tough, especially for non-majors: the non-fiction creating writing class was the only one in four years he took P/F because he felt that competition from the English majors was so strong there was a significant risk of not getting an A. I think that is a deterrent for social science students and pushes them more towards things like digital humanities (which is mostly about data science rather than writing).
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Those Harvard students struggling with The Scarlet Letter would drown in the Columbia Core Curriculum. My (non-elite public school graduate) S went to CU specifically for that extremely Humanities-based Core, and loved and excelled in all of it.
I sure hope it is never eliminated. It insures every Columbia student is grounded in humanities. The reading choices have somewhat changed over the years, but they remain foundational and challenging.
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An interesting read is a book by a Columbia professor titled “Rescuing Socrates: How The Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation” by Roosevelt Montas. Montas was director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum from 2008-2018.
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A high level CS education and a high level humanities education are orthogonal. One doesn’t preclude the other. And you don’t need to wait until college. High school is a great place to start.
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I tell people my degree is in CS, but it was really a multi-disciplinary major offered out of the philosophy department of all things. The core was CS, but I wanted to focus on AI which at the time (back in the stone ages) included a lot of psychology and philosophy.
I’ve always felt super-grateful for the well-rounded education. Along with learning how to write operating systems and compilers, I got to read Socrates and Plato, study personality theory and cognitive psych, and also learn some persuasive writing.
The humanities side of my education helped me every bit as much as the CS side, both career-wise and just in becoming a well-rounded person (I hope) with a sense of curiosity and a solid BS detector. I think STEM students who solely focus on the technical classes are really short-changing themselves in the long run.
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This week I have seen the FL Dept of Ed misspell ninth and twelfth. Then a picture coming out of the governor’s office misspelling the word governor in Arkansas.
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I really think that a class in critical thinking/logical reasoning should be taught to everyone. So many people fall for even simple logical fallacies.
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The article seems to overstate the degree of decline. In some cases, the specific numbers do not appear to be accurate. The NCES reports the following number of English bachelor’s degree recipients by year. There was a sharp increase in English degree majors in the late 1980s, with total peaking in ~2005, followed by a decline. The decline was steepest in the 2012 to 2015 period. Most humanities majors follow a similar pattern – a sharp increase, followed by a decline that became especially steep in 2012 to 2015. Expressed as a percentage of total degrees, there was a sharp increase during the late 1980s, followed by a slow and gradual decline since the early 1990s. It’s hardly “the end of the English major”, but the slow and gradual decline does not appear to have ended yet.
The reasons for this decline are complex and multifaceted. Some factors are the increased societal focus on STEM + societal pressure to choose STEM, the 2007-09 recession, an increased belief that there are better job opportunities for vocational trained fields than humanities, and the tech boom.
English Bachelor’s Degree Recipients (NCES)
1980 – 31k
1985 – 34k
1990 – 51k
1995 – 50k
2000 – 51k
2005 – 55k
2010 – 53k
2012 – 52k
2013 – 50k
2014 – 46k
2015 – 43k
2016 – 41k
2017 – 40k
2018 – 39k
2019 – 38k
The highly selective private colleges that are emphasized on this forum often show steeper declines, partially due to a larger portion of students choosing majors associated with higher earnings and more likely to have enrollment of majors than at US colleges as a whole.
I’ll use Stanford as an example since they have good records, going back several decades. Specific numbers are below. Stanford shows a different pattern that US colleges as whole, with the number of English majors dropping by nearly 40% in the 1 year period between 2000 and 2001. Note that this is major enrollment, not number of degree recipients. Something happened between 2000 and 2001 that caused a lot of people to switch majors and caused far fewer new students to declare majors. The 9/11 terrorist attack is a possible factor, but it does not explain why the number of English majors remained steady throughout the 2000-2010 period. The dot com bubble/crash may also contribute. There was a second more gradual decline begging near 2010, fitting more with the US national pattern (major declarations decline in 2010-13 matches national pattern of bachelor’s degree recipient decline in 2012-15). This decline may have slowed/stopped in more recent, post-COVID years.
English Bachelor’s Degree Majors By Year: Stanford
1990s-- Stable near ~210
2000 – 222
2001 – 138
2001-10 – Stable near ~140
2010 – 135
2012 – 116
2014 – 109
2016 – 93
2018 – 107
2020 – 83
2022 – 102
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Not really. A student who cannot Identify subjects and verbs will have difficulty getting a C in any English class, no matter how easy. On the other hand, some of the easiest courses in college and the simple Computer Science courses for non CS majors. Evidently, COMPSCI 105: Privacy and Technology is one of the easiest classes in Harvard.
Some of the, reputably, most difficult classes in Harvard are in Philosophy and History.
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I started a long thread on this topic just a couple of weeks ago.
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I’m of two minds about choice in reading material. I think common reading material across a nation (or at least a generation) is important, and I also think the skill of reading something you don’t like (or are bored by, or have trouble understanding) is important. But I can see how it’s also potentially important not to turn young people off of reading if you can avoid that by being flexible about content. Science and the social sciences have core material that’s the same across different high schools/different colleges. The lack of that consistency in, say, English Literature, is potentially a factor in how seriously people (perhaps employers) may take a degree with that major. I guess I’m saying that compared to 50 years ago, it’s possible the meaning of “I majored in English” has become less knowable to outsiders. Which is unfortunate.
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I’m not sure I understand. Which admission policies?
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Harvard pretty much has its pick of students from around the world to build its diverse student body. If they wind up with students that have difficulties finding “subject and verbs” it’s their own fault. Boo-hoo
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Perhaps you mean the most hooked students they admit: the A and some of the D in ALDC?
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