Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times writer, mourns the demise of the English major.
In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science. At Pomona this year, they were economics and mathematics.
He says that you learn tons of things from being an English major. With a humanities education, one learns “clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.”
All that is true. I took a lot of English classes when I was an undergraduate. In fact, I nearly chose it as a major.
In my junior year, I waited on a long line at the Bursor’s Office, after getting my third threatening letter from school administrators telling me that I had to choose major. I counted up my classes in English and in Political Science. Equal numbers. I checked my GPA. Equal GPA. I got closer to the front of the line, and the panic increased. I chose Political Science, because the guys were cuter. One of a series of life changing decisions made based on my weakness for the opposite sex.
Still, I very much loved my English classes. I also enjoyed the other classes that I randomly signed up for in college – Introduction to Piano Keyboard, 17th and 18th Century Art History, and History of the Roman Empire.
Would I have signed up for classes as randomly as I did, if the price of college was in today’s prices? Probably not.
It’s all fine and good for a person with a regular gig at the New York Times to swoon at practical minded students. But you can’t separate the demise of the humanities from student debt and gigantic tuition prices. So, every time you finance some administrator’s million dollar vacation home, you kill a humanities student.
Apt. 11d 
My eldest currently plans to be an English major. I think this plan fits her strengths–she loves to read, she reads widely, and she writes well and frequently. I could see her becoming a teacher, author, playwright, business leader, or, oh yeah, running the world.
When we visited colleges together during her search, we did notice how much emphasis all the colleges place upon engineering and the sciences in their presentations. It was so marked, at one college she opted to skip the tour, remarking, “Why bother? They (the tour guides) will all be engineers, anyway.”
Mark Bauerlein blamed the universities themselves in part for the decline: http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/05/31/englishs-self-inflicted-wounds/.
I think a great deal of the blame really lies with choices children and families make far before they apply to college. Who reads these days? What do they read? How long do they read? By the time they arrive at college, do they have the mental stamina to read hundreds of pages with good attention to detail?
Even if they are adept at decoding prose, does their schedule give them the time to tackle long novels, repeatedly? For fun? Even (or especially) many kids whose parents hope to send them to elite colleges do not have time in their schedules to sit down and spend hours reading a book. They don’t necessarily have favorite authors, unless they’re adept at reading in cars on the way to and from sports practices (which everyone knows is the best way to get into colleges /sarc).
The choice of how to spend one’s time is really important, particularly when you’re developing (or should be developing) the ability not to automatically trust the narrator. Look at the Kaiser Family Foundation’s study of media use in children: http://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/8010.pdf. Pages 30-32 and 37. Before college, children spend between 33 and 46 minutes (on average) per day on print media (rates fall by age and year.) On the other hand, they spend between 5:30 and 7:58 on overall media.
The SAT critical reading portion shows a decline in verbal skills: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-09-24/local/35495510_1_scores-board-president-gaston-caperton-test-takers. Fewer students may be choosing to major in English because they just…can’t…do…it.
LikeLike
“Fewer students may be choosing to major in English because they just…can’t…do…it.”
Very true.
LikeLike
And don’t let the media off the hook. My eyes cross daily as I read the MSM and find typos galore – often in the form of inappropriate word choice that makes it through spell check.
Take for example last week’s Chicago Tribune article about thrillseekers who broke into a skyscraper and parachuted off the top. Were you aware that they adorned parachutes? I wonder if they brought their own hot glue guns?
LikeLike
Another possibility: English departments are perceived (not without reason) as consumed by identity politics and political correctness. If you tell the non-white, non-male students that Shakespeare has no relevance to them, and you tell the while male students that you disdain to teach dead white males, then whom will you teach? And what will you teach them?
LikeLike
“Another possibility: English departments are perceived (not without reason) as consumed by identity politics and political correctness.”
Bzzzt. Try again.
LikeLike
Law school was the fall-back for English majors. Maybe kids are pulling back because that hasn’t been a reliable way to get a job for long enough that people noticed.
LikeLike
I do not think USA needs more English mayors but definitely all the technical/scientific mayors need more English and Literature in their studies.
LikeLike
Do you mean they are not so perceived? Or do you mean they are so perceived, but without reason? Or do you mean that is not one of the causes of diminished student interest?
LikeLike
Try again without using the phrases “dead white males,” “identity politics,” or “political correctness.” Bonus points for understanding what English majors actually read and what English faculty actually teach.
LikeLike
Try again, only answering the question. Do you think I am one of your students that you can bully into repeating the political cant you shove down their throats?
LikeLike
Your question was of the “when did you stop beating your wife” variety that no one should ever reply to on it’s own terms.
LikeLike
Ah, I get it. You were one of those students who raise their hand and ask, in an annoyed voice, “Did you ever think that maybe Robert Frost was just taking a walk and there’s nothing more to it than that?”
LikeLike
I was fairly strategic about taking classes, so most of the English classes doubled for something else. I took a writing fiction class that kept me out of art history and Native American literature class that filled my non-western civ requirement.
LikeLike
I work in the financial industry and I hear complaints from managers about our finance interns and the way their ability to analyze and write has deteriorated in the last decade. For large deals an eight to ten page write-up is standard and lately the interns struggle mightily.
In my realm which is the IT side of the organization, we struggle to communicate as clearly as possible since the readers of our software requirements are in India and every misunderstanding costs money.
LikeLike
First, I’d want to know if the variation is consistent and whether it crosses universities. That’s a pretty big drop yet Yale, but in an individual institution, such changes can be explained by changing admissions, changing style trends, changing faculty, changing requirements as well as macro trends that span the generation. My own undergraduate institution used to have something like 12 bio undergraduates every year; ten years after I graduated bio majors boomed to increased 5-fold. Some of the trend was an increasing popularity of the bio major, but a big part of it at that institution was an increase in the number of pre-med students choosing the university.
It could be that Yale had some faculty retirements and changes in who they wanted to admit, and being an English major at Yale stopped being hot.
LikeLike
Eldest got fabulous marks in English, writes fluently and reads voraciously. I advised her against pursuing an English major by pointing out what constitutes major objectives for most such programs: theory and literary analysis. These were the aspects of her high school classes that she enjoyed little. Being an English major would mean she’d have to grapple with those continuously.
I also know that with the implosion of journalistic careers and the beat down of schoolteachers, it doesn’t look as if there are as many options for English majors after graduation as there once were so whether you’re thinking about the program or afterwards, English has become a hard sell.
So has history (to a lesser extent) but that’s a story for another day, I’m sure, given how the NYT runs through these types of stories.
LikeLike
Would I have signed up for classes as randomly as I did, if the price of college was in today’s prices? Probably not.
You went to SUNY Binghamton, didn’t you? Tuition and fees there are about $7K/year- not nothing, but not wild and low enough to allow more than a bit of experimentation with classes, I’d guess. A pretty good price for a very good school, if you abstract from the location.
LikeLike
Yes, Binghamton. The price was a large factor in choosing the school. Even as an out of state student, it was reasonable. English was one of the most popular majors when I was there. Apparently, it still is. Second most popular major after business. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/binghamton-university-suny-2836
LikeLike
The USA economy probably does not need more English mayors, but any other mayor (Engineer/IT/Sciences ) needs much more English and Literature between their subjects.
LikeLike
I wonder if it’s because admissions seems to be so extremely biased towards extroverts these days — it’s all about leadership and passion and starting organizations and being, well, so incredibly confident and suave and mature. I’m not sure that the people who are rewarded by our present admissions game are the same pool of people (even at Yale) as those who become English majors.
If someone applied to college and the admissions officer said “Tell me about yourself.” and the individual replied, “Well, I like to read a lot. I spent most of last summer curled up in the porch swing on my back porch and I read Sylvia Plath, and I read Jane Austen and then I read some Dostoevsky,” my sense is that the perky twenty-something admissions officer would scrawl something like “boring” or “nerd” on his chart before grilling him on where his portfolio of leadership activities was.
I think those of us who love literature are often introspective, a bit tortured, often the odd ducks who are on the outskirts of activities watching rather than participating. Sometimes we’re even a bit morose and depressed. All this does not present well for admissions purposes.
Did anybody read Jeffrey Eugenides last book, the one about the English majors at Brown University? (The name, of course, escapes me.) In this book, he writes about how the people who made a production out of “being a deconstructivist” were really more into it for show than they were actual people who actually enjoyed reading literature.
LikeLike
“I wonder if it’s because admissions seems to be so extremely biased towards extroverts these days — it’s all about leadership and passion and starting organizations and being, well, so incredibly confident and suave and mature. I’m not sure that the people who are rewarded by our present admissions game are the same pool of people (even at Yale) as those who become English majors.”
Very good point.
Also, as a broader and broader cross-section of young people go to college, it’s natural that the average major would be less and less traditionally academic and more and more vocational.
I think there’s a lot to be said for the English major, You immediately know that an English BA can read A LOT (hello, Middlemarch!), has a good attention span, a good vocabulary, and isn’t afraid of writing. These days, you can’t say that of every college grad.
“Did anybody read Jeffrey Eugenides last book, the one about the English majors at Brown University? (The name, of course, escapes me.) In this book, he writes about how the people who made a production out of “being a deconstructivist” were really more into it for show than they were actual people who actually enjoyed reading literature.”
That sounds interesting.
As to what Wendy and y81 were discussing upthread, at least back in the 90s, that was a real concern. I would never have gone into a grad program in English, knowing full well that it was very political (and not in any congenial sort of way). I started a doctoral program in Russian lit and was very disappointed to discover that it was very much the same thing there, with the continental feminist theory prof in a death struggle with the cultural studies people (and that’s who people were writing dissertations with–the other faculty were boring and/or old). That wasn’t why I read Dostoevsky. In unskillful hands, those methods (as well as pretty much any other method), can be used to torture the text until it yields the insights that we want it to yield. Or, to use a different metaphor, literary theory can be like bad cops planting evidence on a perp.
I don’t know how things are today, but this was a real thing. (Big Arm Woman had a very good post on this some years back that I can’t find now. She talked about what a depressing business it was in grad school cranking out the papers where you take a text from column A and a literary theory from column B and then turn the crank until you have a paper. It’s particularly depressing and alienating when the literary theory is something that you have little sympathy for in real life.)
LikeLike
” In unskillful hands…” Here we have the problem summarized in three words.
LikeLike
The Ivies generally use alumni interviewers. Alumni interviewers are taught to look for intellectual curiosity, so reading Plath and Austen and Dostoyevsky would be a fine idea.
However, few students seem to do it. I do alumni interviews for my college, and I’ve discovered that “Read any good books recently?” is a very difficult question these days. It’s not a softball question. Very few students seem to read widely outside of class, or they’re ashamed to admit they like certain books. It would be wonderful to encounter a teenager who was willing to admit he liked John Green’s works, and could compare them to other books he’d read.
LikeLike
“Alumni interviewers are taught…”
Alas, never got any lessons in interviewing.
“It would be wonderful to encounter a teenager who was willing to admit he liked John Green’s works, and could compare them to other books he’d read.”
Ooh, ooh, ooh! Mr. Kotter! I have one of those. 🙂 She’s a she, though. But she loves John Green.
LikeLike
For a shoe-on-the-other-foot comparison, consider how dreadful it would be for a liberal if you knew that your paper on Sister Carrie or The Grapes of Wrath needed to be written with a theoretical basis in Reaganomics in order to be taken seriously.
LikeLike
“For a shoe-on-the-other-foot comparison, consider how dreadful it would be for a liberal if you knew that your paper on Sister Carrie or The Grapes of Wrath needed to be written with a theoretical basis in Reaganomics in order to be taken seriously.”
*sigh* You do realize I *was* an English major in the late 80s/early 90s, right? I was at Cornell (home of Jonathan Culler) and Duke (home of Stanley Fish). I know exactly what was happening there. I *did* have to write a paper on The Grapes of Wrath with a theoretical basis in Reagonomics. I lived. My grad advisor told me that maybe I should stop taking so many courses in African American literature (I had taken ONE). The fantasies that Allen Bloom and David Brooks conjured up over the radicalization of the university English department made for great copy and I’m sure plenty of fundraising opportunities, but it wasn’t real.
I really don’t know what any of you English department skeptics really expect out of English classes, either on the undergrad or grad level. I mean, how many fucking times can you write a paper on how “Road Not Taken” symbolizes the choices an individual must make (and I say this having taken a whole semester of modernist poetry with Frank Lentricchia, half of the time spent on Frost, half on Wallace Stevens). The whole point is to find new perspectives of analysis, to see new things in great literary works. Jane Tompkins (yes, I know I’m name-dropping) once compared literature to a prism that she holds up to the light. Every time you shift it, you see something different and beautiful. Isn’t it more coercive to say “this is the One True Meaning” of Road Not Taken, or Hamlet, or Scarlet Letter, or anything else, and to expect students to regurgitate it over and over again? How exactly does that kind of work foster critical thinking?
I did one of my prelim areas on the formation of the literary canon and to sum it all up: people have been bitching about the literary canon and university teaching for YEARS. I suggest American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, by Vincent B. Leitch, as a good starting point, though the years before the 30s are also kind of interesting.
LikeLike
If undergraduate students don’t find the courses relevant, they won’t choose to take more of the same. They won’t choose to major in the subject. Skeptics may bother purists, however, fewer students mean less work for professors. Less work for professors means fewer professors, which should mean smaller graduate schools.
Students do not arrive at colleges these days better prepared for serious literary study than in the past. In part, if the English Major wants to survive, it may need to first remediate the students’ lack of knowledge. By the way, this lack of knowledge will only get worse as the Common Core kicks in, as it seems the time devoted to reading fiction in class will be halved at least. I say “at least,” because the Common Core also requires schools to add media competency, which may translate to watching movies and videos.
I also doubt most new undergraduates have read widely enough to make much sense of literary criticism. A professor may think she is making a subtle argument, but a student who’s read perhaps fifteen adult books in his life may not be able to parse the argument, nor prepare a cogent reply.
And, to add insult to injury, remember many students arrive at college with the firm idea that there is “One True Meaning” for every question, an idea reinforced by the standardized tests they grew up taking.
LikeLike
I think that what frustrates me the most is the lack of specificity about what precisely people expect from the English classroom. No one can ever say specifically what they want English professors to do, but they sure are pretty certain what they *don’t* want English professors to do, which is to express any opinion on literature that falls outside traditional interpretation. Because if they ever do, OMG, they’re oppressing the poor student who just wants to regurgitate what he learned in high school about The Scarlet Letter and re-read the same novels or poems that he already read because obviously, that was the “good” literature. And he should know because he got a 5 on the AP English exam!
But I keep hearing that the problem with college is that college students are never taught to *think*!
*throws up hands*
LikeLike
“…because the Common Core also requires schools to add media competency, which may translate to watching movies and videos.”
!!!!
“I also doubt most new undergraduates have read widely enough to make much sense of literary criticism. A professor may think she is making a subtle argument, but a student who’s read perhaps fifteen adult books in his life may not be able to parse the argument, nor prepare a cogent reply.
“And, to add insult to injury, remember many students arrive at college with the firm idea that there is “One True Meaning” for every question, an idea reinforced by the standardized tests they grew up taking.”
There’s a dreadful possibility that the instructor believes that they are “teaching students to think” while in actuality, the kids are just learning “the right answer” that will go down with that particular teacher.
LikeLike
This is just to say
I have written
the papers
like the ones
you describe
and which
you were probably
dreading reading
again
Forgive me
I was hungover
so tired
and so bummed
LikeLike
I upvote all rewritings of Williams. 🙂 They never get tired.
LikeLike
Another thought, and then I must go do something else. I’ve heard from several people that good science students can get grants to cover graduate study. The same does not seem to hold true for the humanities, particularly English. I find the reported compensation for graduate students in the humanities to be insufficient to support someone who wanted such luxuries as food and heat in winter.
Over time, families of kids who have the smarts for graduate study will be more enthusiastic about Molecular Biology than English Literature. The graduate students in the sciences may be better TAs, because they don’t have to worry about starvation. Students are influenced by teachers; if the Bioinformatics TAs are more interesting to talk to than the English TAs, students may be more likely to choose to major in the sciences, rather than the humanities. Your family approves; society approves; you can be financially independent. What’s not to like?
LikeLike
Another thought, and then I must go do something else. I’ve heard from several people that good science students can get grants to cover graduate study. The same does not seem to hold true for the humanities, particularly English. I find the reported compensation for graduate students in the humanities to be insufficient to support someone who wanted such luxuries as food and heat in winter.
I am confused about this. A top private university and some public universities will more than adequately fund a humanities student. After heat and food, they may even have enough left over in their paycheck to spend on beer and whiskey Friday nights. Science students may get a few grand more, but they are basically slaves for 12-16 hours a day in someone else’s lab, and/or they’re TAing chem 101 with 200 students. Depending on the area of research you do (maybe less the case for English lit specifically), there are government and other grants that pay for extended research outside the hard sciences. It’s an elite group of grad students, but it’s not none.
LikeLike
How many grad students? How many top universities do this? What percentage of the graduate student population is funded? If a few top students don’t need to worry, does that matter when most graduate students do need to worry?
In other words, how large is this elite group of grad students? Because some 830,000 grad students had an average debt of $43,000 upon graduation in 2012. Someone’s taking out loans for graduate study: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB70001424052702304192704577406652556893064.html.
LikeLike
Cranberry,
Bear in mind that master’s degree programs are often cash cows for universities. Grad students are a diverse group and not all of them are doctoral students. While one of my favorite horror stories is the one about the woman who writes at Get Rich Slowly who borrowed $100k to do a doctorate in creative writing, doctoral students don’t generally take out student loans.
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2012/08/14/student-loan-debt-how-i-got-in-deep/
I socialize with our local grad students and their families. While the medical insurance situation is less than ideal (the families often go on Texas Medicaid) in our low cost-of-living environment, they do surprisingly well. (I don’t have the exact numbers on grad stipends right this minute.) Quite a few of the families have two kids and a fair number even have three and you would be surprised how many grad wife SAHMs there are (or very part-time working moms). The rent on the university grad housing is $500 a month for a small 2BR/2BA very close to campus. If they can squeeze themselves into that space, it’s quite a steal. The grad programs are not super high ranked and so there are issues with placement, but the level of financial support and quality of life is good. One of my hobby horses is giving grad couples the “don’t buy a house in graduate school” talk. I’m sure it’s harder to live on a graduate stipend in the NE, but of course the job placement situation may also be better.
LikeLike
I lost a reply. Short version: a lot of non-elite colleges offer tolerable grad support, especially in low cost-of-living areas. Our local grad families often have two (and even three) kids and may have a SAHM (or a lightly employed mother). The college has small 2BR/2BA grad apartments for $500 a month. I don’t have the stipend amounts at my fingertips, but it’s OK, particularly bearing in mind that housing option. The problem is not the stipend amount but the health insurance–the family plan offered is expensive, so grad families often go on Texas Medicaid.
That’s for doctoral students. MA programs are often cash cows for colleges.
LikeLike
PhD’s in the sciences are always paid a stipend ( as in you shouldn’t be doing it if you are not). That work in the lab should be your thesis work ( though it will also be someone else’s work). Many biomed PhD’s do nominal TA’ing. The wage is livable, usually. And, yes, I’d expect that to contribute to choices about major.
It would be interesting to hear how many folks in English/history/etc receive stipends (not a percent, but how many).
I think there’s some bias towards extroverts in college admissions, but I think the real bias is towards creation rather than consumption. Reading isn’t good enough if the reading Ian’t also producing something (writing, criticis, analysis, teaching, . . . ).
In many fields I have found that students enjoy learning, but not creating, which makes them bad candidates for fields where creation of new knowledge is the point.
LikeLike
Same with humanities/social sciences PhDs. If you’re not getting a full tuition waiver as well as a stipend that allows you to live without taking out loans, and preferably to save something as well, then you shouldn’t go. The principle is no different for non-hard sciences PhD students.
LikeLike
No one should do a PhD in any field without a stipend any more. I advise humanities students (mostly English) and they certainly don’t go for PhDs without funding. And they can and do get funding.
The Eugenides book is The Marriage Plot, by the way.
And here is a contrarian take on the employability of English majors: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-strauss/hiring-english-majors_b_3484409.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
Again, I teach English majors, and they really all do end up employed. It may take them a little longer than accounting majors, who lock up their jobs by the end of the summer before their senior years, but they also have a lot more flexibility in what they can do. It’s not such a bad trade-off, really.
LikeLike
I started reading that contrarian take, and then I got to the phrase “the great David Brooks,” which was apparently not used ironically. So I just stopped right there, no matter how much I wanted to agree with the author.
LikeLike
I have to support Wendy’s point above– I was an English major then a grad student in the nineties at an Ivy. There was NO pressure to do theory ( it was an optional class) and if you wanted to focus on Shakespeare or Chaucer that was fine. This consternation over classroom radicals is just a bunch of Horowitz-inspired hoo-hah. All English departments still teach Shakespeare. I just finished a section this spring. The problem is that 50% of my class could not get through the language. It was just too much of a barrier for them. Also, they really struggled with the amount of reading ( we did 8 plays in 15 weeks). Some students in the class could not memorize one sonnet. Trust me, English teachers are still teaching the classics; we should be worried that more and more students literally can’t read them.
LikeLike
Thanks. 🙂 One of my best friends at grad school was a Shakespeare scholar, and another was a Milton scholar. Fish himself was a Milton scholar. “Theory” was a new approach to literature the same way that New Criticism was once a new approach to literature. Again Leitch’s book is fascinating, and there’s another I can’t seem to remember (this was 20 years ago) that was also good.
Usually this is what I find happens when I argue with anyone about the intellectual depravity of the contemporary English department:
Whiner: Waaah! English departments are mean!
Me: Give me some examples.
Whiner: [gives example]
Me: [tears apart example]
Whiner: Waaah!
Me: Give me more examples.
Whiner: No! If I do, you’ll just tear them apart too! You are a manipulator of words!
Me: Yes, I am. That’s what being an English major taught me to do, mofo! Suck it!
LikeLike
Milton sucks for completely non-political, atheoretical reasons.
LikeLike
I love this.
My own department no longer requires a theory course for graduation (this is undergrad). We tried it briefly in the 90s and then no one really wanted to teach it, and frankly Philosophy did a better job of it anyway, so whatever. It’s folded in to most courses, of course, one way or another, but we still teach plenty of canonical literature (in fact “theory” allowed a lot of people to keep teaching the canon, just in new ways) alongside all kinds of less canonical stuff. Students can mostly choose, and very few don’t choose a Shakespeare course at some point.
LikeLike
I find Miranda’s comment heartening. In the late 80s, I was an English major, but not a very good one. When I graduated, or even today, for that matter, I really could not tell you what attributes a good paper had. But the reading load was heavy–our Shakespeare class covered 14 or 15 plays in 16 weeks. The major served me well when I became a journalist and, later, a lawyer. Most people from my department are doing fine. None are in academia, and only a very few even tried to get into English graduate programs. Some became teachers, many went to law school, someone became a forest ranger.Going outside of my own school, I know an English major who became a sports agent and another who became a screenwriter. I’d recommend the major for my children. The world is changing fast. But Shakespeare stays the same.
LikeLike
But Shakespeare stays the same.
My high school used a version of MacBeth with the sex jokes removed. However, our teacher also played an audio recording of the play with the jokes left in. I was either the only one paying attention or the only one who noticed.
LikeLike
I’ll assume students at Yale could get through Shakespeare’s language. The 62% decline in the number of English majors over 11 years must have other sources.
Yes, admissions criteria could play a part. Do thoughtful kids who are reading in their rooms fail to amass the sort of resume needed to win acceptance? Or do kids who might be interested in the humanities find the go-getters enrolled at Yale (etc.) too frenetic? If everyone’s out founding internet companies and running international charities, there’s not much time left for 2 a.m. dorm discussions. Harvard’s magazine had an article about modern students: http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/03/nonstop. I found the article rather horrifying in its implications, myself.
Another option, though, is that the sort of people who would have been English and History majors in prior years are choosing other career paths. Perhaps they’re opting to become computer programmers rather than poets.
I found this online: http://oir.yale.edu/yale-factsheet. Comparing 2010 to 1990, far more Yale College grads opt to start working after graduation (75% vs. 67%). The drop in law and medical school enrollment has been precipitous. (1985, 41% of grads headed for either law school, medical school, or Arts & Sciences grad schools; 2010? 15%).
LikeLike
“1985, 41% of grads headed for either law school, medical school, or Arts & Sciences grad schools; 2010? 15%).”
That is a dramatic statistic (and, the percent of MD is 1/2 what it was in 1985, and not because there are more law students). I wonder how those stats look at other universities or if the changes reflect a shift in Yale (definitely possible, ’cause the characteristics of student bodies can change for all kinds of reasons).
LikeLike
Is Yale a good place to go to be pre-med?
LikeLike
What a great thread. On stipends for humanities: elite private schools and the top state flagships have gone over to full funding for all PhD students in humanities. This has entailed severe cuts in the numbers of those admitted, which has to be a good thing though like competitive college admissions it’s hard on a lot of great kids. The amount of teaching they have to do varies widely (and what I know is about historians: YMMV): fairly heavy at Harvard in most fields, I gather from my former students who have gone there, middling at Stanford, light at Princeton (where none is required). But all of my students who have gone to grad school in the last 15 years have received multi-year fellowships that cover living expenses and tuition–and that’s at Yale, UCLA, Berkeley, Harvard, Hopkins, Penn, Columbia and no doubt other places I’m now forgetting. Incidentally, I never agree to write a letter for grad school without delivering my most convincing version of THE SPEECH about the situation of the Humanities. But I do my best to help those who do want to go despite everything, and my colleagues and I make clear to them that they should absolutely not do it if they’re not fully supported by the graduate department. There are thousands of grad students with terrible debt loads, but if you get in to a strong program in humanities, you can get through without joining their number.
LikeLike
Yes, this is my experience and the experience of my friends in grad programs. The only people I know who have gone to unfunded programs are those with trust funds & wealthy parents, so they don’t have to worry about debt or living expenses.
I think several things are never mentioned about getting PhDs in humanities/most socials sciences. The first is that there are plenty of fields in crisis, so natural alternatives like publishing or law or K-12 teaching or [insert middle class profession here] are not necessarily better bets, and either require much more debt, or have entry level salaries that pay about the same or only a bit more than a grad stipend. If the choice is entering a paid apprenticeship with a chance of your dream career or making 5K more a year doing data entry, the second choice isn’t obviously a better one.
Secondly, I think the bigger issue is that our society in general is that we’re losing our middle class and losing social mobility. People sinking towards the bottom don’t necessarily recognize this and no longer understand what ‘the rules’ of social mobility or for success are, and people at the top have a vested interest in not being explicit about this. Although many schools call themselves universities or colleges and offer degrees, the difference between a degree at any level from Harvard and a degree at any level from Podunk U is so great that to speak of them as in any way equivalent is disingenuous. In general, getting a degree from a non elite institution is a very bad use of money unless it is no financial hardship and has a clear and direct benefit, such as a raise at an already existing job. Conversely, one could major in nose picking at Harvard and still benefit greatly from the degree. When people profile sob stories in these ‘don’t go to law school’ or ‘don’t get a doctorate’ stories, they’re picking people, often from working class backgrounds who don’t understand how the system works, and who went 100,000s of dollars in debt to get a worthless degree because they thought, and had been told by society, admissions deans, banks, etc. that a generic law degree or a generic English lit PhD would pay off. Instead of using these cases as a chance to show how ways of social mobility are shrinking and class lines are hardening, these sorts of articles simply portray an entire field as a bad option for everyone, or the individual as being foolish. In reality, the reason why many PhDs can’t get jobs is because jobs only go to people from certain schools. If you’re one of the few grad student at one of those schools, the odds are much better than they are on paper, and you knew that before applying. If you’re a grad student anywhere else, the odds are much worse, and very likely no one really told you this. To make it more unequal, generally only the good schools provide solid stipends and health insurance and so on.
LikeLike
Uh. “the good schools??” You mean the well-endowed schools? Lots of grad programs are providing solid, excellent educations to their grad students, but aren’t well funded. Grad programs that don’t fund their students shouldn’t be allowed to exist, but that doesn’t mean that the classes and requirements aren’t “good.” Sorry, but the elitism of grad system drives me bananas.
Heard another story this weekend from an English PhD from a “good school” who had a post doc at an “excellent school” who couldn’t land a tenure track position this year. She also couldn’t land a private high school teaching position. (She was willing to relocate to anywhere in the country.) Luckily, her old grad school advisor found a foundation position for her. Charity.
BTW, this comment thread switched from talking about undergraduate majors to PhD programs. I’m not really sure how we got here.
LikeLike
I mean good as in prestigious, or what is socially considered “good.” I believe you can get a quality education in many places, including community college. When it comes to social signaling, however, an associates degree in English from a CC doesn’t have the same cache as a BA from Princeton, even if the person actually was better educated at the CC. Since we’re talking about the practical benefits of a degree, some schools are “better” than others in ways that have nothing to do with academics.
Grad school is complicated because not all top departments are well endowed, although there’s a pretty decent overlap, with wealthy private schools generally having strong programs across the board. Many public schools with less money will offer great funding to students they really want, and then work their way down to no funding. Most private institutions no longer do this, and admit smaller numbers of students with similar generous amounts of funding. There’s also outside funding available, like Mellon and NSF or FLAS. But yeah, academia is anti-egalitarian in that success is cumulative, and the more successful you’ve been in the past, the easier it is to be successful in the future.
LikeLike
When you referred to “good” schools, you were talking about grad programs, not undergraduate schools. So, let’s keep talking about grad programs. There is absolutely no difference in the PhDs coming out of the well endowed grad programs versus the more poorly funded programs. None. Same IQ, same training, same teaching ability, same stupidity for sticking in the program. The only difference is that the more poorly funded schools have bad track records for placing students, and they have saddled their students with a lot of debt.
Academia is elitist, because it makes assumptions based on crap rating charts in US World Report and name brands.
LikeLike
For some reason, I can only reply to my own comment, but this is a reply to below. In terms of undergrad/grad school,I was actually talking about both. In fact, I very clearly state this:
Although many schools call themselves universities or colleges and offer degrees, the difference between a degree at any level from Harvard and a degree at any level from Podunk U is so great that to speak of them as in any way equivalent is disingenuous. In general, getting a degree from a non elite institution is a very bad use of money unless it is no financial hardship and has a clear and direct benefit, such as a raise at an already existing job. Conversely, one could major in nose picking at Harvard and still benefit greatly from the degree.
“At all levels” means undergrad through PhD, inc. master’s and professional programs. I then go on to refer to “major,” which is a comment on undergrad, since most people don’t refer to anything beyond that as having a “major.”
I also don’t get why you’re attacking me for pointing out that academia is elitist, and this is something one needs to consider from a practical standpoint when looking into where to attend school, when that’s exactly the same point you’re trying to make. Nowhere have I said that this is an accurate representation of the quality of education you can get, or a judgment on the intelligence of people. In fact, I have repeatedly said the opposite.
LikeLike
Ah, never mind, the comment seems to have sorted itself out.
Anyways, maybe it’s not clear I’m using Harvard metaphorically, to stand in for an elite school. By ‘elite’ I mean, give or take, most competitive admissions schools (less than 30% of the colleges out there, but probably all the schools we’re thinking about). I was focusing on Harvard and the most elite though, since this conversation was oriented around if it was a good idea to major in English at Yale, and then debating the merits of an English major, when really, anything is a fine major at Yale. If you’re already at Yale, you’re going to be fine pretty much no matter what, and this seemed to be missing from the conversation. But yes, there are many other places you can go besides an Ivy and also be fine. A degree from the flagship campus of the state university system is almost always a good use of money. It might very well be the case that if you want to remain local, a degree from the local U might be more helpful than from an East Coast SLAC for name recognition. A degree from a non-competitive admissions school is only a good bet if you can do it without much or any debt and you have a very clearly laid out job track. So, a degree in X-ray technology from a place that has a good relationship with the local hospital, or a degree in education with an understanding that once completed the local school district will hire you. By contrast, taking out $80,000 in loans for an English degree from Directional State university is a very bad idea, not because you will end up homeless or unemployable, but because there’s no clear career path that would allow you to earn enough money to comfortably pay off the debt.
With grad school, at least at the doctoral level, I’m not sure UNWR plays much if any of a role as to where people go. The extent to which there is a correlation is probably because wealthy private schools have deep pockets and can hire away top faculty from other less well funded departments, in a vicious cycle of poaching. I’m in a field where only one of the Ivies is considered a top school in the field, and most of the top schools are public, so “good schools” in my discipline don’t map on all that well to UNWR rankings. That said, in my field if you can’t get into one of the best programs with decent-enough funding, going to an Ivy with 5 years of a $30,000/year stipend + health insurance isn’t necessarily a bad idea, even if the outcome is likely not an academic job.
LikeLike
“we’re losing our middle class and losing social mobility. People sinking towards the bottom don’t necessarily recognize this and no longer understand what ‘the rules’ of social mobility or for success are, and people at the top have a vested interest in not being explicit about this. ” I very much agree with this idea, even if I nitpicked you about your terminology for grad programs.
Yes, not everyone understands the rules about how to properly spend money on colleges. I totally agree on that and have written a lot about how kids, esp kids from certain backgrounds, need more guidance in that department.
But the rules are changing rapidly. People need time to catch up.
At my poorly endowed grad program, not a single one of my friends had a trust fund or wealthy parents. In fact, most came from working-class backgrounds. All have staggering debt right now, even the few that managed to get tenure track jobs later on. None of us realized how badly we were being screwed over. My dad is a college professor, so you think I would have known better. But he hadn’t figured out that the rules had changed.
I think that we all have an obligation to tell the truth as much as possible. In public places like this one.
LikeLike
Yes, when I went to law school (at Berkeley), the tuition was $8000 a year. I could have borrowed the entire amount and paid it back with six month’s earnings after graduation. Even private universities were MUCH cheaper than they are now, relative to everything else in the world. I suspect that Laura’s father (and others) may not have realized how much tuitions had increased relative to salaries. I remember previous Ph.D. or J.D. gluts, but only in the past decade has lack of employment been combined with crushing debt burdens.
LikeLike
Do students at schools in which PhD students aren’t supported during their graduate training actually complete their PhDs at the same rate? Why do students chose unsupported programs over supported ones? I will admit that I would presume that most would chose them because they weren’t admitted to the programs in which they would have received support.
In science, the difference was whether one would have to TA for support or would be offered RA support. These days, all of the elite programs offer full support and promise it for the duration of one’s PhD. That’s created pressure for programs in the next tier, who have to find money to make similar guarantees, even if they are funding students off research grants with little endowment/foundation/other support. A classic email before recruitment season is to ask the faculty what their grant support is — before making offers of admission. Some programs have actually withdrawn admissions offers after they were extended because they couldn’t guarantee support for the duration of the degree.
LikeLike
Sorry, I guess that would be choose and not chose. BTW, it’s an interesting difference in standards that I don’t consider that a big deal (in judging myself, but also others).
I think the bottom line is that it’s a bad choice to go substantially into debt to get a degree that isn’t a direct track to a job. Substantially in debt depends on what your resources are. I see the debt as being the biggest part of the problem and fear that schools that rely on their students debt are an important part of the problem.
(the topic has drifted a lot).
LikeLike
“Why do students chose unsupported programs over supported ones?”
You would be surprised at the variety of reasons. For most people, including myself, the reason was location. I was only willing to live in NYC. I only applied to one other school.
Other reasons… Lots of students are incredibly ignorant that other students are getting funding. They are egged on by advisors and administrators who don’t tell them about the risks and the truth in the job market. Then they get that awful brainwashing that tells them that being an academic is the only worthy path in life. The cult. And most grad students start school in their early 20’s and haven’t developed a long term planning skill.
My debt load wasn’t too bad, in part because I landed a plum research job in my first semester of grad school and had a tuition fellowship. But I worked my ass off at the research job and various adjunct jobs. It definitely slowed me down.
LikeLike
“I was only willing to live in NYC.”
Nooooooooo!
“And most grad students start school in their early 20′s and haven’t developed a long term planning skill.”
I worry a bit more about our grad students who are finishing degrees around age 35. If there’s no job, what then, even if there aren’t loans involved? A 20-something has more time to screw up. But, then again, they’re probably more likely to screw up.
I applied to two or three grad schools in the later 90s knowing pretty much nothing about the process (also, I was overseas at the time, and didn’t have a phone at home and of course no internet, it being 1996 or 1997). I got one offer with a $10k a year stipend (and a FLAS, so no teaching that first year) and was thrilled with it. It was enough to live on where I was going (I think my rent my first year was something like $300 a month). I would never have dreamed of borrowing money for a humanities graduate program, but it’s also true that I did not have a back-up plan for if I didn’t get into graduate school, so I have no idea what I would have done instead–I was coming out of the Peace Corps after college. My parents had done MAs in the 1970s and it wasn’t the fast-track to professional jobs and fame and fortune for them, either. I don’t think I was really thinking very hard about the professional future aspect of it. I just mainly felt that 1) I wanted to study more Russian and Russian literature than I had as an undergraduate and 2) I felt like I was supposed to go to graduate school.
These days, with the internet there to help, it should be a very different experience.
LikeLike
“Other reasons… Lots of students are incredibly ignorant that other students are getting funding. ”
This is a big issue that needs to be remedied, by making the information about stipends and who gets them available to everyone. I think our reticence about salary information ends up penalizing labor in the marketplace (take the example of CEO salaries going up when the info about them was required to be published).
But i do think that means that I don’t need to tell people not to go to grad school — just that they shouldn’t go unless they are going to be paid a salary they can live on for the duration of the degree. And live on means live on in a way that won’t feel desperate to them (as DINKs, my family’s needs were few. Now, I like being able to pay for luxuries for my children).
I think people shouldn’t take on significant student loan debt unless they know exactly how they are going to pay for it. I graduated with about $6000 dollars of debt back in the old days. That was a small enough amount that in a terrible pinch my parents could have taken a home equity loan to pay it (if, for example, it would prevent me from moving forward in my life).
LikeLike
“I graduated with about $6000 dollars of debt back in the old days.”
That’s almost exactly what I wound up with for undergraduate.
LikeLike
One point is clear: as the CHE has been arguing recently, departments need to be transparent (and they aren’t). Every applicant should be able to find clear information about financial support, placement and attrition rates on the web page of any department. Very few departments known to me provide all of these facts–and yet there’s no way for a student to make an informed decision without knowing them. I have been pushing on this at my own institution, and getting very, very modest results.
One other point isn’t so clear yet, but it’s clear enough to make me panic when I wake up at 3:00 AM. The ice seems to be cracking under colleges and universities. Whether you’re a grad student at a top program or a middling one, you’re going to face ferocious competition, and the chances that you’ll replicate the sort of career your teachers have had, though not non-existent, are steadily becoming smaller. Prediction is a mug’s game, and if the economy should turn up again, conditions might ease up, as they have after other recessions. But pie in the sky is no good thing to promise wonderful young people. All the more reason to make what we’re offering as transparent as possible, and to update the data every year.
LikeLike
Thanks, tony, for pushing for greater transparency. I think grad students are much better informed than I was when I started my program 20 years ago, but there’s still room for improvement.
Yeah, higher ed is changing and I think that the change is happening not in the incremental way that I expected. In four years, when my son applies to college, who knows what college will look like.
Even though the rules are changing, and changing rapidly, I don’t it’s all doom and gloom. Opportunities are opening up in other venues. Check out this post at Gawker about salaries of young 20 somethings…
http://gawker.com/this-what-is-your-salary-thread-is-terrifying-anxiet-513415531
LikeLike
In my continuing online search of different institutions’ humanities experience, I find Stanford’s approach to the problem to be the best I’ve found so far. http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=57728
They are tackling the problem on multiple fronts: strengthening the incoming flow of students interesting in the humanities, explaining to enrolled students why the humanities are important, (WTHAI) and arranging for visitors to campus to explain WTHAI, revamping courses, including making the progression of courses more obvious to undergrads, AND calling for a change in humanities PhDs, and improving the number of career options for newly minted PhDs:
ONE OF THE MOST OBVIOUS CHALLENGES for Stanford in the national humanities context is the anxiety felt by graduate students. As the humanities elsewhere face increasing pressure to justify their expense versus science and technology programs, the number of jobs opening for newly minted professors is scant. People spend their 20s immersed in unique or specialized research studies and it leads to—where? Russell Berman, professor of German studies and comparative literature, has become a national voice for an intrepid remedy: reformulating the route to a humanities PhD.
“Last I looked,” says Berman, “the time to degree for a PhD in literature—it’s slightly different for English and the foreign languages—nationally is nine years. . . . We should cut that in half nationally. I think five years is absolutely doable. Four years is not unthinkable.”
The stipends, tuition waivers, fellowships and grants for graduate programs are backed by Stanford’s overall financial strength. But Berman is passionate in warning about the possible downside of the University’s strong position.
“Not everybody,” he says, “can afford what Stanford or Princeton or Harvard can afford. And if we set a standard that is so expensive that others can’t meet it, we’re going to drive them out of the business. And then we’ll just be a small, elite group with no democratic access to advanced study in the humanities. . . . Stanford should alternatively lead toward a reform agenda that keeps the humanities accessible and affordable nationwide.”
Very impressive. I am more impressed by Stanford’s approach than by Harvard’s.
LikeLike
I’m always suspicious of PhD reformers who suggest shortening the path to a PhD as their main method of dealing with issues in PhD’s. I’m prone to thinking that they are selfishly trying to keep PhD’s in their programs (either to keep TAs and RAs or just ’cause they like having bright young minds to talk to ). Alternatively, their vision of a PhD is very different from mine and just contributes to the degree creep in society.
I see a PhD as being a degree you earn at the end of having produced original scholarship. True, that financial support and resources will play a significant role in time to degree, but then, the right goal isn’t to decrease the time, but to provide support that allows people to complete their degree without distraction. It makes sense to me that time to degree is going to creep up with time as more scholarship is done.
I also question the goal of attracting more humanities students by marketing the humanities programs (i.e. giving a potential boost to humanities focused students in admissions, explaining why humanities courses are important, . . . .).
Kids applying for colleges are prone to following flashy trends and an effort by everyone to educate children in judging flashy trends (Stanford itself is a flashy trend right now, not the least because of a few high profile attendees and its sports program). But there can be a a short distance into self-serving advertising.
LikeLike
How many PhD students are able to work in academia after they receive their degree? Are they able to support a family on their earnings? I don’t mean the happy few who manage to become tenured professors at well-endowed colleges. Does the student who completes a degree at a lower level university have a chance at a career as a scholar? Will she be able to repay her student debt before she retires?
Scholarship is all well and good, but parents are very influential when a 19 year old college freshman decides what course to take in life. A thirty year old with a literature PhD who does not secure a teaching job is not as well positioned in the job market as a 21 year old English major.
If you followed the Dartmouth link I posted on the other thread, students with 800s on the SAT verbal section have better chances of admission to Dartmouth than students with 800s on the SAT math. In other words, strong verbal and analytical skills are already an advantage when applying to elite colleges. The problem seems to be, what will they choose to major in?
It may be an odd idea, but I wonder if the rise in anthropology and sociology majors isn’t fed by the recent increase in study abroad opportunities for undergraduates. How do English and History majors work study abroad programs into their schedules? Could some potential History majors choose anthropology, because they can justify the expense of foreign travel to their parents for anthropology field work, but not for History?
LikeLike
“How many PhD students are able to work in academia after they receive their degree? Are they able to support a family on their earnings? I don’t mean the happy few who manage to become tenured professors at well-endowed colleges. Does the student who completes a degree at a lower level university have a chance at a career as a scholar? Will she be able to repay her student debt before she retires?”
I don’t know what constitutes a lower level graduate program, so I picked a middling undergrad institution with a PhD in English program and looked at its placement for PhDs:
http://english.cas2.lehigh.edu/placement
The guy at CCSU got his PhD in 92 in American and Irish lit, fwiw.
She got her degree in 2011 and is working at a university in WV.
Heh, I’m sure some of you will love this guy.
Do these people want to be scholars or scholar-teachers or just teachers? Unknown. Are they settling for less than they want? No idea. I just feel like there is more assuming and anecdata going on here than there is data.
LikeLike
I see a PhD as being a degree you earn at the end of having produced original scholarship. True, that financial support and resources will play a significant role in time to degree, but then, the right goal isn’t to decrease the time, but to provide support that allows people to complete their degree without distraction. It makes sense to me that time to degree is going to creep up with time as more scholarship is done.
Yeah, expectations creep is a big problem, and why time to degree is not simply a case of underfunding. If you’re expected to have multiple articles in good journals, or a book draft complete by the time you’ve defended, it’s really hard to do that in four years, even if you’re working on research full time. Also, depending on the discipline, there can be much less stigma to being an Nth year grad student than a newly minted PhD on the job market without success, which encourages people to stay grad students when they otherwise might be ready to defend.
LikeLike
You all know that this is completely insane, right? Ten year apprenticeships with no sure job waiting?
I had five roommates at the U of C. You know how many have tenure track jobs? None. The wealthiest is the guy who dropped out after his MA, got a law degree, and now works for the SEC. My ex, who lived around the corner, took 14 years to finish his PhD and just got tenure this year. That’s 25 years after starting grad school.
My advice to grad students, even those with good funding with well connected advisors, is to have a Plan B. I always had policy research and foundation work to fall back on. Other friends with high levels stats skills could work in the private sector. My humanities friends didn’t have that. My suggestion is talk to real people outside of the university to find out all the options.
Spending too much time in school, even with full funding, is a BAD thing. A stipend is not a proper salary. There’s no 401K plan or other benefits that come with normal employment. It means putting off the real world for way too long. Putting off having kids.
LikeLike
“Putting off having kids.”
Not in these parts. I do worry how they’re going to support all of those kids after graduate school, but nobody that I know is putting off life while they finish their degree. (I do wonder how the women are going to manage to finish.)
Graduate school is a good time to meet a spouse, I think.
LikeLike
Putting off life while you get a graduate degree is a bad idea. You need a Plan B (but, I think it’s world where everyone needs a Plan B).
LikeLike