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MISLED BY  THE MAJORS

7/25/2013

5 Comments

 


D R A F  T

Comments and criticisms welcome; please post at the end of the blog entry

My last blog posting (“The New Story about the Humanities”) expressed great admiration for new quantitative studies of  what is happening in this area.  From them we can see that it’s not a story of steady decline or imminent collapse, as many have suggested,  but of fluctuations tied, at least in part, to  shifts in social, economic and cultural attitudes.

Good!  No more narratives of decline. There is, however, a problem in the statistics.  It seems a small one, but it has some big implications.  Decline–and-Fall folks live off the percentage of student majoring in various fields.  For example, Mark Bauerlein recently cited a summary of one set of such figures: “For English majors, Silver counts a proportion of 7.6 percent 40 years ago, 4.7 percent 20 years ago, 4.1 percent 10 years ago, and 3.1 percent in 2011.[1]“.    At that rate there will be no English majors at all in a few decades!   

But it’s not just the Decline-and-Fall folks who rely on the percentage of majors in various fields as their single indicator of the overall health of the humanities.  Ben Schmidt and other skeptics about narratives of decline also rely on these figures, sometimes representing them as “enrollments.[2]”   They are not course enrollments totals; they are the number of graduates who end up in one major or another.  In some fields, such as mine, enrollment figures and the number of majors may be radically different.   , Classics departments often show strong enrollment numbers from courses taught in English translation,  such as Mythology, Great Books, Western Civilization, Etymology, etc.   At the same time the number of majors (who need to have some mastery of the ancient languages) can be pitifully small.  Something similar, I suspect, may be the case in other humanistic fields such as modern languages, philosophy, music, maybe even English.

So “majors” don’t necessarily correlate with “enrollments.”  Tracking changes in the percentage of majors in various fields, moreover, is meaningless unless one knows how many majors are being offered at various points in time.   If, for example, an institution offered majors in 25 fields forty years ago, and  50 such majors today,  you’d expect the average department’s share of majors to drop from 4% to 2%, simply because there were more majors around for students  to choose from.

How likely is that scenario?  The last half century has been a time of vast increase in human knowledge, some of it in the humanities but more spectacularly in science, medicine and technology.  New knowledge has led to new majors, plenty of them. In addition the creative arts  have increasingly found a congenial setting in colleges and universities – with majors  now commonly offered in  Dance,  Studio Arts, Creative Writing, Theater and Performing Arts, among others.

I found my alma mater provided a good case study of these shifts.  The Hamilton  College web site (http://www.hamilton.edu/catalogue) lists 52 fields in which one can now major, of which more than half, if memory serves, were not offered when I was a student over fifty years ago.   Most of the added fields are in the creative arts, ethnic or identity studies, and the natural sciences.  Some are in the social sciences, but only a few in the humanities.  So, in a purely statistical sense,  one has to expect that the percentage of degrees in the humanities would decline.

At the national level we have seen in addition  the proliferation of majors in in fields that should lead to careers immediately after the bachelor’s degree,  not just old stand-bys such as business, K-12 education, health related professions, but newer fields such as Homeland security, law enforcement and firefighting, Parks and recreation and Transportation  and materials moving. [3] Eve Mortuary Science is now a bachelor’s level major at 19 American colleges and universities.[4]  Whatever the intellectual quality of these majors, statistically speaking, their introduction means that older fields would almost inevitably experience a percentage decline in majors.   

Relying on the percentage of majors in a field is, then, a flawed metric for determining the health of the humanities.  What would be a better metric?  How about total course enrollments- are they going up or down? Or, better, total course enrollments as  as a percentage of all students in college? It turns out that extracting such enrollment figures is not easy. The only humanistic fields for which I have found such data are the foreign languages, where the Modern Language Association has for some years tracked enrollment trends, language by language and overall.  The MLA’s most recent figures show a 6.6% increase in foreign language enrollments from 2006 to 2009, though with dramatic differences among the individual languages.  (The biggest gains were in Chinese and Korean; the biggest decline was in Modern Hebrew.)  The percentage of students studying  foreign languages,  moreover, does not match the “decline and fall” scenarios.  True, that percentage dropped precipitously after the boom in the 1960s, reaching a low of 7.3 per 100 college students around 1980. But since then enrollments per hundred students have slowly but steadily increased to 8.6 in 2009.[5]

Comparable figures for enrollments in other fields are badly needed but the foreign language figures are enough to make one cautious about relying on the number of majors as the sole indicator of the health of the humanities.  In such situations the metric often determines the narrative and the response.  Rely solely on majors and you may well end up with a demoralizing narrative of decline.  Even worse, departments and others  will be tempted  to misdirect  their efforts at improvement, focusing exclusively on attracting more majors rather than reaching out to students in other fields.   

Here’s a thought experiment that will clarify what I mean. Imagine a student who decides to major in Economics, but supplements courses in that field with ones in the  Chinese language, Comparative Literature, Asian history, and Eastern religions.   She will not show up in the count of majors in humanistic field.[6]  But do we wish to dismiss her as a loss to the humanities?  Or consider a student I taught some years ago, who decided (despite my advising) to major in Public Policy, but still kept talking courses in Classics and ancient history.  I suspect that J.P.  Sarbanes is a better Congressman today because of the breadth of his course selections back then.[7]

A reliable statistical picture of the  health of the humanities has to find a way to pay attention to such students. In the meantime, we’d be well advised not to rely solely on the percentage of majors.



[1] “Nate Silver Crunches the Humanities”  http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/07/15/nate-silver-crunches-the-humanities/


[2] For example, Schmidt is loose in his phrasing when he refers in his very valuable “Crisis in the Humanities, or Just Women in the Workplace?” to  “ … the long-term collapse in humanities enrollment [Italics mine]  has to do with the increasing choice of women …’. (http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2013/06/crisis-in-humanities-or-just-women-in.html#more )The context makes clear that he means the decline in the percentage of students majoring in humanistic fields, not enrollments.


[3]  “ Of the 1,650,000 bachelor's degrees conferred in 2009–10, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (358,000); social sciences and history (173,000); health professions and related programs (130,000); and education (101,000)” (See table 286)  National Center for Educational Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/ch_3.asp. These fields are followed by Biological and biomedical sciences, Computer science, Engineering and the visual and performing arts.     See also (esp. fig.  16) http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/figures/fig_16.asp?referrer=figures


[4]  http://collegeprowler.com/search/d-bachelor/sm1-funeral-service-and-mortuary-science/


[5] See especially figurer 5 in  Nelly Furman, et al., Enrollments in Languages other than English” Fall 2009:  http://www.mla.org/pdf/2009_enrollment_survey.pdf


[6]  If, however, she is formally enrolled in a language program as a “second major,” that fact may be reflected  in some  figures, as the MLA has noted “Data on Second Majors in Language and

Literature, 2001–08  “http://www.mla.org/pdf/data_second_majors.pdf


[7] Anthony Grafton makes a similar point in
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-in-Dubious/140047/ I am indebted to him for many insights into the situation of the humanities.


5 Comments
mike mcpherson
7/26/2013 04:23:35 am

It's important to get the numbers right, and this piece makes a big contribution. Ultimately though we need to come to grips with the question of how many people studying, teaching, and researching in the humanities do we need, and what do we need them for? I don't think it is likely that plausible answers to those questions could be expressed in percentage terms. If for example the aggregate number of people doing research across all fields rose by 50%, it's not at all obvious that the aggregate number of people doing research in the humanities needs to rise by that same percentage. The only way to answer such a question is by articulating what it is that humanities scholars are studying and what contributions their studies make.

Reply
Bob Connor
7/28/2013 01:00:00 am

Thanks to Mike McPherson for this comment, especially since he has been sch an astute observer of higher education both as president of a small liberal arts college and as president of the Spencer Foundation. His comments puts it on the line-- what do we need the humanities for, and then what do these disciplines need to do the job well?

Reply
Bob Connor for Harriet Zuckerman
7/29/2013 01:56:19 am

Harriet Zuckerman has allowed me to post this comment:

you’re exactly right. It’s a big relief to get rid of the “decline and fall” story and have it replaced with a story of ups and downs. More so, you’re right that the concentration on majors draws attention from the far more telling indicator of students’ interests and exposure than majors. And beyond that, demand for faculty members is more closely tied to enrollments than it is to the number of students majoring in one field or another. Physics (like your own field) is a relevant case to cite because it has had precious few majors for a long time but more substantial enrollments in spite of that (at least I think so – I have not done the work of looking recently; I do know it used to be the case) .

Beyond this, though, you’ve made a really important contribution to the discussion by bringing up changes in the number of majors students could select. I don’t know what the data would show in detail, but my guess is that there has been an increase as you say (mortuary science included!) and that this must be taken into account when longitudinal data are being examined. I do know that colleges and university boast of the number of majors prospective students might select – which may well drive up the number of majors offered and thus drive down the share of majors each might attract. In any event, if the proliferation of majors is a significant development, it should be that a number of other fields have been undergoing reductions in the number of majors they attract due to the larger and larger menu of majors available.

I note you do not mention that increasing number of students are selecting double majors or even triple majors, partly because students have multiple interests and don’t like to be fenced in by the bureaucratic rules and partly because some are intent on making themselves attractive in the job market by multiplying their credentials. I don’t think such numbers are large enough to make much or indeed any dent in the national data but they also present problems of comparability – how are they counted in the first place and do such students enroll in more courses overall than others? Another argument for enrollments data rather than majors data.

Carolyn Fuqua
7/29/2013 04:58:19 am

Thank you for this valuable reframing. It is essential to look beyond majors if we are to make a full accounting of student engagement with the humanities at the postsecondary level.

Debra Nails’ (Michigan State) remarks at an American Philosophical Association meeting last year come to mind: “Most of what we [philosophy faculty] do is for others.” The desire to more accurately gauge the “value added” by the academic humanities has certainly shaped the survey that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is currently conducting. As part of the second round of the Humanities Departmental Survey (see http://humanitiesindicators.org/resources/survey.aspx for the findings of Round I) departments are being asked not only about enrollments in their own courses but also courses their faculty may have been recruited to teach in professional schools (business or medical ethics, “Conversational Chinese for Business”, etc.).

It is important to consider enrollments, but there is another type of evidence of available: the painstaking college transcript studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that allow us to examine students’ complete coursework portfolios and determine what share of their credits have been taken in humanities and other areas. And when such transcript collections are done as part of longitudinal studies—such as the 1993 round of NCES’s Baccalaureate & Beyond, which followed students for 10 years after graduation--more sophisticated sociometric methods can be used to estimate the effect of humanities coursework on students’ later employment and civic engagement. The Academy is working to incorporate the wealth of insight yielded by these studies into its Humanities Indicators (humanitiesindicators.org).

Developing a nuanced understanding of the condition and contribution of the academic humanities requires that humanities stakeholders convey to Federal statistical agencies, other public entities, and private organizations the value of enrollment and transcript studies. Neither type of study, if it is really to tell us something about the humanities, is cheap or easy. Close collaboration is imperative. Data collectors need to pool methodological insights and other resources. Issues of data comparability must also be addressed. Standardization of methods and definitions will allow for revealing trend analyses and interdisciplinary comparisons.

Reply
Bob Connor
7/31/2013 10:38:14 pm

Jim Tatum adds sage advice:

Don't wring hands over Narratives of Decline,
Put them on the clothesline to dry ...
In the Sun of Reason and Facts

Reply



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