The recent New Yorker article “The End of the English Major” first came to my attention on Twitter. The responses rapidly rallied to deny the thesis, but The New Yorker presents compelling numbers to back up the clickbait:
From 2012 to 2020:
- Tufts lost ~50% of humanities majors
- Boston University lost 42% of humanities majors
- Notre Dame lost 50% of humanities majors
- The study of English and history at the college-level dropped by 33%
- More than 60% of Harvard’s class of 2020 planned to enter tech, finance, and consulting jobs
It’s an anonymous interview subject, a “late-stage career English professor,” who drives a stake in the heart of the humanities when he tells author Nathan Heller:
The age of Anglophilia is over… I don’t think reading novels is now the only way to have a broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that people face.
It is this assumption – that the study of novels must necessarily offer a solution to a problem and not just a process with its own rewards – that has effectively ended the English Major. Blame Gen Z. Just like previous generations of college students, they want to make a difference. This time around, though, paying tens of thousands of dollars to be taught how to interpret books is seen as a hobby with no attributable outcome, not a career. College, an investment, must produce capital and careers are where one finds that capital. Capital is power and power propels purpose.
In this new understanding of humanities, passion is privilege and numbers are the truth. As Heller notes, one of the most popular classes at Harvard is now introductory statistics: enrollment rose from 90 students in 2005 to 700+ today. If my math is correct, that marks a 677.78% increase. Wow, what a graph.