Posted on 03/12/2025 4:28:34 AM PDT by karpov
In any discussion of the state of the humanities, the first fact is a numerical one. In School Year 2021-22, while a little more than two million people earned bachelors’ degrees in the United States, only 33,429 of them majored in English. That makes for a rate of 1.6 percent of the whole, one in 60 undergraduates. In 1970-71, a high point for English, the rate was one in 13.
English used to be one of the most popular majors on campus, much more common than the now-thriving fields of biology, psychology, communications, and engineering/computer science. A half-century later, for most students, exposure to English amounts to a single requirement, freshman composition, a course that in most cases has no literary content. Instead, teachers highlight social themes, current events, and contemporary readings (op-eds, for instance). They sound more like social-science instructors than humanities profs.
The same abysmal numbers come up with foreign languages and linguistics, which draw fewer than one in 130 (!) undergrads to their fields, according to the NCES table cited above. The field of history shows the same sliding trend. The Humanities Indicators project counted 34,922 history grads in 2009 but only 21,572 in 2022, an astonishing collapse during a time of rising college enrollment. Philosophy and classics are in the same downward spiral. Students haven’t left English, the largest department, for the others. They’ve abandoned the humanities altogether. At this point, the fields of English, history, philosophy, and foreign languages combined draw only four percent of the majors in the United States.
People under 40 don’t realize the magnitude of the loss. They grew up and pressed through college hearing about STEM, the Digital Age, and business, hot fields where high-paying jobs would follow.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
I have several degrees and can say without reservation that if a grad goes into an employment office with a degree in any of the above, they will be categorized as "unskilled labor."
Nothing more useless than psychology, even at the graduate level. It's been corrupted by woke, liberals, and fags. An adequate metaphor is that degenerates have done for the field of psychology what they've done for Disney.
But, English is racist!
In my community’s school district, 50% of graduates must take remedial classes before they can attend the college-level course.
How can students major in English if they can’t read?
Humanities are marginalized... Isn’t it wonderful? I don’t think woke ideas came out of electrical engineering department
They didn’t get ‘marginalized’ on their own. These professors and college department politicized themselves.
All these things the leftists and Democrats have recently been shown to be beset with aren’t their faulty. Yahootie did it or somebody. Not me..
“Theory” took away the joy in reading and respect for the writing. Educational “reform” in the primary grades made students poor readers.
Then along came computer games and smart phones. Now students are slow and distracted readers with the attention spans and critical thinking of gnats. They not only don’t read books, they don’t read chapters. STEM classes have to be dumbed down for the majority of them as well.
It is far worse than most Americans realize.
College English departments have tried to adapt to such students.
Mostly the students just have to take a couple of dumbed down “composition courses”, but for those who think they like reading and might go a little further they actually teach “young adult” literature courses. A couple of generations ago that’s what average 5th and 6th graders read when they wanted a glimpse into high school life.
Now YA fiction is the only way college professors can hope to get more than the rare college student to actually read a whole book.
The study of “the humanities” was once the measure of an educated man. They taught the liberal arts, ie the skills a free man needed to discern for himself the good, the true, and the beautiful. In academics they were the first casualties of political pollution, and were terminal before they knew what had happened. The lethal blow was when they were over taken by women, and men conceded the high ground. This disease has begun to spread to the sciences, where female scientists devalue the search for the truth in favor of furthering social utility.
I take it you haven’t spent much time in modern academia?
The average male prof, especially if white, bends so far over backwards to prove his Marxist worthiness that he can’t see or walk straight.
Excellent point. Kids don’t grow up reading anymore either. It’s hard to major in English when you’ve never read a book. That said, I also agree with many, though not all, of the author’s points as well.
The push for AI is eliminating punctuation too.
The smaller state universities in Minnesota are undergoing a purge of their humanities programs and even tenured professors in disciplines like philosophy and English are getting the ax. My wife recently retired from one of these universities where we both received our graduate degrees. We have concluded the result will be these universities will become glorified trade schools turning out graduates in technical disciplines like nursing and criminal justice science, but with those graduates totally lacking in the diverse academics and scholarship that were the mark of a university graduate. Another likely outcome is that private liberal arts colleges and universities will become the only undergraduate option for those seeking graduate degrees.
Biology is a STEM major. It’s not unskilled labor.
College tuition is very expensive, so students choose majors they hope will get them jobs.
Whether true or not, the belief today is that you must major in STEM to find a good job.
I think that universities wanted to cover the full spectrum of education, probably to increase their profits. Separate facilities for the humanities and technical studies might have been a better choice.
Perhaps it would have been better to keep the humanities separate from technologies all along. A grounding in the humanities still is a major part of being a gentleman, in my humble opinion.
It sure is in a software shop.
Many biology majors work in labs. It’s not an easy major, but it might be one of the lowest paying, unless they go on to medical school.
No, it can be very difficult. It is clearly a science rather than a humanity. It usually requires knowledge of chemistry as well.
A university is supposed to be a collection of colleges. Things began to deteriorate when some colleges became more like trade schools. This seemed to happen when computer science degrees became necessary for employment as a programmer, since HR departments didn't know how to differentiate talent. Some software developers are a lot more technical than others; and, there are a number of "knowledge silos" within software.
I am an Embedded Software engineer, but I also design hardware. Most of the gadgets I make a scientific in nature, usually associated with labs or medical apparatus. That is a great deal different than a web/database developer.
Some software developers are purely mathematical in nature, and do not fall into either of the above categories.
The educational mess seems to result from reckless partitioning of STEM-like studies.
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