Humanists
have done a fair amount of teeth-gnashing over the past couple of weeks
over the alleged decline in the number of humanities majors. A closer
look at the data, though, suggests that the crisis is largely a
fabrication based on faulty statistics. For example:
1. The
changing proportion of college students majoring in the humanities is
skewed by the massive increase in the proportion of college students
generally (i.e., a much larger percentage of young Americans are
attending college now than 40 years ago). The boom in college
enrollments partly reflects a trend in various industries (most notably
health care, but also law enforcement and others) to prefer or require
four-year degrees for jobs that were previously done by non-college
graduates. So where young people bound for such professions once skipped
college, they now get pre-professional degrees, which means that the
related degree programs have seen big boosts in enrollment. The
much-discussed decline in the proportion of humanities majors stems at
least in part from this change in the size and composition of the
college-going population. The proportion of the 18-22-year-old
population as a whole majoring in the humanities has remained relatively
steady. For more, see Nate Silver: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/as-more-attend-college-majors-become-more-career-focused/?_r=2
2. Blogger Ben Schmidt has gone to the trouble of extending the
degree-preference data set backwards into the 1940s, and points out that
the purported starting point of the humanities' decline (ca. 1970) was
actually the peak of a fairly short-lived bubble: prior to the 1960s,
the proportion of humanities majors was if anything lower than it is
today. For about a decade (roughly surrounding the baby boomers' arrival
in college), the proportion of humanities majors surged. Then it
plunged, bottoming out in the 1980s, then rebounded slightly in the
1990s, and has remained more or less steady since then. As a proportion
of all college graduates, more people major in the humanities now than
in the 1980s, and as a proportion of the traditional college-aged
population (see above), humanities majors are more prevalent now than in
either the 1980s or the 1950s. http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2013/06/some-long-term-perspective-on-crisis-in.html
3. In two subsequent posts, Schmidt presents a convincing case that the
decline in humanities majors since that peak in 1970 can be attributed
entirely, or almost entirely, to the changing degree preferences of
women. The proportion of male graduates majoring in the humanities has
declined only slightly, but the proportion of women has plummeted.
Schmidt suggests (and I agree) that this disparity undercuts arguments
from David Brooks and the like that the humanities have lost popularity
because of changes in the content of humanities teaching, such as the
shift toward race/class/gender etc. Instead, the
shift more likely reflects widening career opportunities for women. In a world where
women's post-college options were limited to a few lower-status
gender-typed occupations (such as teaching), and/or finding a male
breadwinner to support them, female students quite understandably
focused on fields more closely related to education and/or perceived
cultural refinement, or eschewed four-year degree programs in favor of
technical training in the female-gendered occupations like nursing or
secretarial work. As previously-male-dominated professions opened up to
women (and, I would add, as more female-dominated professions required
four-year degrees), women spread out into a host of pre-professional
majors, as well as the social sciences (the natural sciences, though,
have been slower): http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2013/06/crisis-in-humanities-or-just-women-in.html
I'm not sure that Schmidt mentions it, so I will add that the 1960s
boom in humanities majors corresponds very neatly to the changing gender
ratio among college students generally. Prior to World War II, the
gender ratio among college graduates was roughly even, but a much lower
proportion of the population attended college. That began to change with
the GI bill, but male enrollments grew much more quickly: shortly after
the war, male college students outnumbered females by over 2-1. The
ratio began to even out a bit in the 1950s, but the big influx of women
came in the 1960s and 70s. By 1980, the numbers were even again, and
today of course there are significantly more women in college than men: http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ321/orazem/goldin_college.pdf
So rather than reflecting a reaction against the supposed irrelevance
or over-theorization of the humanities themselves, the apparent decline
in the proportion of humanities reflects larger structural changes in
both higher education and society at large. The high humanities
enrollments ca. 1970 (the starting point of the supposed decline) were a
short-lived bubble resulting from two factors: the limits on women's
career opportunities and the influx of a higher proportion of female
students with the baby boom. During the 1970s and 80s, women's career
options and ergo selection of majors expanded dramatically, and a number
of professions (including female-dominated professions) started to
expect four-year degrees for jobs that hadn't required them before. None
of these changes resulted from changes within the humanities
themselves, and if anything the causal relationship went the other way:
it's no coincidence that humanists began studying gender more closely in
the decades after an influx of female students overturned the postwar
gender imbalance on campus and entered formerly male-dominated professions.
Now, we humanists can certainly
profit from an ongoing discussion of how best to explain the value of
our work for students, employers, and society at large: I'm all for
that. But contrary to the media hype, students have NOT fled from the
humanities in droves. The proportion of young people who major in the
humanities has remained relatively steady for the last 60+ years,
notwithstanding the linguistic turn, etc. etc. The supposed decline took place chiefly because American universities (and humanities majors) opened up to
women a little more quickly than male-dominated professions (and the related pre-professional majors).
