The New York Times tells us today that undergraduate interest in the humanities is fading. The basis for the claim is the reduction in interest at Stanford, where the humanities claim 45 percent of the faculty but only 15 percent of the students, and Harvard, which has seen a 20 percent decline in humanities majors over the last ten years.
But Stanford and Harvard are both special cases, and Stanford is especially special.
And as my co-blogger Ari Kelman points out, the overall numbers for the humanities don’t look like they’re in quite a crisis. As Ari says, “in 1970-1971, 17.1% of students who received BAs in the United States majored in a humanities discipline. Three decades later, in the midst of the crisis in the humanities we hear so much about, that number had plummeted to 17%.”
Ari’s numbers come from the National Center for Education Statistics, which shows something more genuinely resembling a crisis in the social sciences, which over the same period have gone from 23% of bachelor’s degrees to 16.4% of bachelor’s degrees.
But the NYT article is right about one thing – some administrators and faculty sure want there to be a crisis in the humanities, because that means they can cut the humanities.
A graph of the NCES data appears below the fold. Clearly the big growth area is undergraduate business and “other” majors.
{ 19 comments }
adam.smith 10.31.13 at 6:58 pm
amusingly, this had been pre-bunked on the pages of the NYTimes itself: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/quants-ask-what-crisis-in-the-humanities/
Eric 10.31.13 at 7:05 pm
That’s awesome.
ZM 10.31.13 at 7:25 pm
I am unsure about the title of the OP. Is it meant to be ironic or point to misdirection in some way that goes over my head? On the one hand you write there is no crisis in crisis-mongering, but then on the other hand you point to “something more genuinely resembling a crisis in the social sciences” and point to the underhandedness of some administrators who might exploit or manufacture a crisis to cut funding to the humanities…
adam.smith 10.31.13 at 8:08 pm
ZM – I think you’re over- rather than underthinking this. Read the title as “There is no shortage of crisis-mongering”
ZM 10.31.13 at 8:09 pm
But then the OP brings up crises?
sean matthews 10.31.13 at 9:00 pm
Given that Homi Bhabha is head of the English department at Harvard, is it really a surprise if they are having a problem filling the classrooms?
Kaveh 10.31.13 at 10:05 pm
Comment on Ari’s blog post makes a good point–that decline is just majors, but what about enrollments? If Stanford humanities enrollments are in fact closer to parity w/ # of faculty, then what you have is a school with a lot of science majors, who tend to have a very healthy interest in the humanities. Maybe their parents pressured them to major in something “practical,” but their interests are elsewhere, or they are interested in both, but find the science credentials more important relative to the content of the courses…
mud man 10.31.13 at 11:02 pm
Meanwhile, Education majors limp along at the back of the pack. But that doesn’t mean university education, does it?
What are all those “others”? Cosmetology? Is “other” a reasonable thing to have for the mode of a meaningful distribution??
js. 11.01.13 at 12:56 am
Didn’t Bérubé demolish the crisis-in-humanities a while back? Maybe more than once? (This is not to take away anything from this post or Kelman’s takedown; just noting that this practically seems to be a “Zombie”-thesis, in something like JQ’s sense. Maybe.)
Aulus Gellius 11.01.13 at 1:08 am
“in 1970-1971, 17.1% of students who received BAs in the United States majored in a humanities discipline. Three decades later, in the midst of the crisis in the humanities we hear so much about, that number had plummeted to 17%.â€
But if you leave out BSes, this isn’t going to be a sufficient measure, is it? (I note that the graph at the bottom refers to “Bachelors’ degrees”, so it doesn’t have the same problem.)
LFC 11.01.13 at 2:04 am
@sean matthews:
Given that Homi Bhabha is head of the English department at Harvard, is it really a surprise if they are having a problem filling the classrooms?
I don’t know too much about Bhabha and ordinarily I probably wouldn’t comment on this thread since I don’t follow closely the humanities-in-supposed-crisis-yes-or-no thing. But sean matthews happens to be wrong: Bhabha is not the head of the English department; he’s the head of the humanities center. Two different things.
Kenny Easwaran 11.01.13 at 3:23 am
mud man has a good point. I think it’s clear how the “other” categorization came about – up until the ’80s or so, this was a useful catch-all for things that didn’t fit into the familiar categories, and even though it was getting large, if there aren’t one or two sub-categories that could be broken out in a useful way, it made sense to keep together. But nowadays it looks like it should at least partly be broken out the way “natural sciences” and “computer science and engineering” are from each other.
Or is it really a total mix?
John Quiggin 11.01.13 at 8:13 am
It’s not just that Harvard and Stanford are special cases. The Ivy League/elite/liberal arts secto as a whole is effectively irrelevant to the problems of higher education in the US, except insofar as it sets patterns that are copied elsewhere. As I’ve pointed out before, this sector educates a tiny and declining sliver of the undergraduate age cohort. Given that enrolments haven’t changed noticeably since the 1950s, while the institutions have prospered massively, it’s highly unlikely that this will change. And the same is true, to a lesser degree, of state flagships. All the action is in second tier state unis, community colleges and for-profit degree mills.
https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/20/the-eye-of-the-needle/
Ben Schmidt 11.01.13 at 3:53 pm
I’m a big booster of the “no crisis” thesis, but table 289 is practically useless. NCES uses “humanities” as a catchall.
Only about a third of those degrees are the disciplines that would be funded by the NEH. (And they don’t include history). Another third are performing arts degrees. The rest are in general or interdisciplinary fields, a few of which are humanistic but which include things like “biology and chemistry” and “nutritional science.” It’s fine for polemical purposes, but not much else. The 2011 breakdown in graphical form….
Matt_L 11.01.13 at 5:40 pm
Go ahead, cut the humanities. Most category two universities use the college of liberal arts to cross-subsidize the vocational degrees like nursing and engineering. At my university the College of Liberal Arts accounts for 60% of our graduating BAs. So please do cut all those history and sociology majors so you can charge the nursing and engineering majors the full cost of their degrees. I am sure they and their parents will be thrilled with the tuition increase.
Sebastian H 11.01.13 at 5:56 pm
“The Ivy League/elite/liberal arts secto as a whole is effectively irrelevant to the problems of higher education in the US, except insofar as it sets patterns that are copied elsewhere.”
This is true, BUT you ‘except’ is an enormous exception. One of the big problems of higher education is that the Ivy League/elite sets lots of inappropriate patterns that are copied elsewhere. The biggest being, rarely growing the number of seats and keeping it that way by charging higher and higher tuition (also screening out by having an enormous sticker price and ‘discounting’ it). These things work for Harvard, I guess, but they are counterproductive for students in most schools.
” As I’ve pointed out before, this sector educates a tiny and declining sliver of the undergraduate age cohort.”
This is a problem too, as we still seem to live in a ridiculous world where you have to go to one of those schools to be eligible for certain very important government positions (see especially the Supreme Court), but it is probably a problem for another day.
Robert Halford 11.01.13 at 10:48 pm
Doesn’t it depend on what the “crisis” is? It’s possible that there has been a significant recent decline in the relative prestige of the humanities in the most-elite US institutions, while, at the same time, the total number of majors in US colleges as a whole has remained relatively constant over the past 40 years. (For instance, my rough sense is that the super-elite institutions had, in general, substantially higher percentages of humanities majors in the 1970s).
Of course, that’s not a crisis in total number of majors in the educational system as a whole. And, of course, it’s absolutely true that it’s important not to conflate Ivy League educational problems with the educational issues affecting the overwhelming majority of students. But it would be fairly short-sighted, I’d think, to assume that a decline in prestige/enrollment in the super-elite institutions is not a “crisis” for the humanities in the US. First, there may be an effect on post-college employment of humanities majors throughout the system if the degrees lose prestige at the elite level; if an English degree from “even” Stanford is seen, increasingly, as useless and/or unattractive to employers, it may be the case (though it’s not necessarily the case) that the effect trickles down to, say, Michigan State. Second, and maybe more importantly, the super-elite universities both(a) train the professoriate and (b) for better or worse, act as a model for the less-elite institutions in terms of what to prioritize, aspire to, etc.; if “even Stanford” is cutting its humanities department, other prestige-seeking institutions will do the same, and so on and so on as universities compete in a zero-sum prestige game.
In short, academia is largely a prestige economy and it seems very unlikely that a loss in prestige at the top end won’t have an effect on the humanities throughout the system as a whole. I’m certainly not saying that’s how it should be, but it may be how it is.
Chaz 11.02.13 at 12:50 am
The Other category is the big grower and it’s all vocational degrees. Given that I don’t think it makes sense to talk about share of humanities degrees among total degrees. It would be better to look at the share of the college-age population earning humanities degrees. If lots of cops and hospital workers now have vocational bachelor’s degrees instead of a high school diploma, that does not represent a decline in humanities enrollment. Same goes for business to some extent.
From the NACE data the one that’s really plummeted is education. Has there been a movement among prospective teachers to specific subject degrees rather than generic education degrees?
Herbal Infusion Bagger 11.04.13 at 4:40 pm
Almost got hired once by the IP licensing department at Stanford where they had a $1 billion dollar fake check representing the income they had brought to the University.
That was more than ten years ago.
To quote Steve Bell, “We’re not talking wardrobes full of zlotys here. We’re not talking trainloads full of shekels. We’re talking Grand Canyons full of moolah.”
Two weeks later I had an interview at a Very Large Research Institution where they boasted of getting $20 million in licensing fees.
“A year?” I asked,
“No, total” they said. My barely contained mirth trashed that interview.
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