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THE ONLY STATISTICS ABOUT THE HUMANITIES THAT REALLY MATTER

10/31/2013

3 Comments

 
 
The New York Times on Halloween reported more scary news about the Humanities – students at Stanford and elsewhere were scurrying away from these subjects, like kids scared by a haunted house.  It’s an informative article, but its  statistical base is flawed in part by the persistent error of measuring the health of the humanities by the percentage of students majoring in various humanistic fields, without calculating the increase over time of the total number of departments in which students can major. That skews a lot of the data. 

The article also fails to take into account  the hitherto untapped demand for skilled presentation of the humanities. MOOCs are one indicator of that,-  43,000 enrolled in the first iteration of Andy Szegedy-Maszak’s Greek History, 35,00 in Greg Nagy’s  “HeroesX,” 50,000 enrolled in Peter Struck’s  Classical Mythology   Even after high attrition, the numbers of those  finishing and passing a final test are impressive   – around 4,000 for example in the second iteration of Szegedy-Maszak's Greek History.

The interest is out there, whether or not it translates into majors at elite universities.

But there is one statistic about the humanities that really matters.  Andy Delbanco verbalized it in the Times article :

“Both inside the humanities and outside, people feel that the intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences, that the important issues that people of all sorts care about, like inequality and climate change, are being addressed not in the English departments.” 

There’s some partial  support for that view from a statistic in a report issued last spring by Harvard University called ”Mapping the Future“: Over the last 8 years, more than half of students who as pre-Freshmen indicate an intention to concentrate in a Humanities concentration end up in a different division” p. 8.  You can see the movement in figure 10 of the report.  The pre-freshmen who said they were likely to concentrate in the humanities migrate to other fields more than other groups do.  But they don’t head primarily for the natural sciences, but to Government and Economics.

That statistic has to be combined with another troubling one from Harvard, that  since 2,000 the percentage of admitted students indicating they were likely to concentrate in a humanistic field has declined from 27% to 18% (fig. 6 of the report). So are the “brightest and best” moving away from the humanities, even at a university with the strength and tradition of Harvard?

Is that the situation on other campuses?  If so, what’s going on?  There are three possible explanations, it seems to me:

  1. Pre-freshmen interested in the humanities are more intellectually adventurous than those heading into other fields. They are more inclined to explore and when they think they see the promised land, they migrate.
  2. Student today want, as John Medlin once put it, “either to save the world or own it.” If you want to save it, maybe a Government (or Politics as Woodrow Wilson would say) is the right major. If you want to own it, better head off to Economics Department.
  3. The kids are driven away by what is taught and how it is being taught in the humanities these days – it’s all too trendy, too theoretical, too based on identity-studies, etc.  One way to test that hypothesis is to look at what’s being offered in the Harvard English department this year.  Here’s the link to their offerings.
Which of these hypotheses seems most plausible to you–or is it something else entirely?

 

3 Comments
Ben Schmidt link
11/16/2013 07:10:37 am

In understanding what's going on at Harvard, I'm inclined towards your second explanation; I was a student there from '99 to '03 and on a fellowship from '11 to '13, and I was really struck by how much more talk there was about "entrepreneurship" and the belief that some of your most important career work might come <i>in college</i>, not after. So CS and engineering is a place to actually build out your portfolio--Zuckerberg and Gates, who left to become rich before graduating, are sort of heroes in this.

But at heart is a belief among undergrads that they can actually get started on real work right away. This is somewhere the humanities could learn from the sciences; they are very good at drawing undergraduates into actually doing research, while we tend to give them practice exercises.

That said, your point--which I noticed in the Harvard report--that almost all the loss is to the social sciences suggests a more optimistic explanation might be possible. Freshman, in general, have taken English and history courses; they haven't taken psychology or economics. So it might not be that surprising that more switch from humanities to social sciences than the reverse, because they come in knowing they're good at English but come to like social scientific ways of studying the human condition.

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Bill Berg
11/16/2013 11:50:20 pm

— or they come in, Ben, knowing they're *not* good at English, and therefore not likely to shine in the humanities curricula. I suspect high school graduates these days tend to shy away from courses that require them to read much elevated writing, or to express themselves using the traditional logic of grammar and syntax, because they have no confidence in those skills, and even less in their knowledge of the essential meaning of words that might do justice to the complexity of their thoughts. And it's not their fault. Their teachers, for a generation now, have been equally ignorant of the essentials of English. How to turn this situation around? The academy should recognize its role as "first responder," and provide, as it used to, required testing and remedial courses in English during the freshman year. Secondly, departments of education should get serious about including traditional communications skills in their teacher training curricula. Unless current cultural trends are reversed at a basic level, the future of the humanities is bleak indeed.

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Carla Antonaccio link
11/21/2013 06:02:59 am

This is a big discussion at Duke too, among the humanities faculty (nb history is in the social sciences here). We certainly are feeling the effects of the attrition noted by Bob after year one, and yes, the depts. we humanists tend to lose to are PoliSci (and Pub Pol, now its own school), Econ, and we now have a new undergrad major in global health that is taking off. We know that there are students who identify the humanities as an interest when they apply tend not to major - though in my dept., classical studies, we have double majors with a science or other 'unrelated' double. The reasons seem to be several but one is the force of peers: they see what the cool kids are doing and want to be cool. With Bob, I agree that it's about rule or own the world for many.

But FWIW, one of my current students is taking my course on Early Greek archaeology so that "I don't turn into a robot" (engineering major), for others it's humanizing and NOT about a career (students in Bio, Chem, etc.). Right now we are holding our own in enrollments, in part because of some popular 'civ' courses, and a growing digital aspect, but our colleagues also feel beleaguered and under appreciated here at Interdisciplinary U, where "inter" means different schools (law, med, environment, etc.) and arts and sciences.

Some of my colleagues in other departments feel that the sciences (hard social kind and the rest) are in the driver's seat and often do not understand the proper role of history, ethics, literature, etc. in understanding "the world" and its problems. I do not completely agree that humanities should just take a page from the sciences and have undergrads doing research from the get go: the humanistic disciplines often involve long apprenticeships (we have had students want to work on topics for which they don't have the required languages to do real research, e.g.). Why should we apologize for the hard work of learning deeply about something before you can push the envelope?

That said, there are lots of ways for students to do significant and original work, and some of it may be transdisciplinary, but we can develop our own paradigms.

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