These are the numbers of graduating majors in classics, Ancient Greek, or Latin at a few universities for a recent year based on IPEDS information:
Brown University: 12
Harvard University: 11
Princeton University: 10
University of Pennsylvania: 9
Yale University: 7
Columbia/Barnard: 6
Cornell University: 6
Tufts University: 4
Brandeis University: 2
Can speak to Brown specifically- there are students who major in Religious Studies (for example) who have essentially covered off a Classics major (Ancient Greek for early Christianity, Latin for later and Medieval texts) AND have studied Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, have likely delved into other organized and cultic societies of that time. So it’s a “Classics plus” major but housed in Religious Studies (Brown is very receptive to “figure out your own discipline” as long as you have a faculty member or Dean to oversea the content and your research). You would need to add back the Religious Studies majors and likely a subset of philosophy and art history departments to capture the number of students who have covered the traditional Classics curriculum.
Can’t speak to the other U’s …
regarding the personalization aspect of curriculum design/majors, when 3 of my Classics major colleagues all agreed we wanted to do a reading of Greek in the New Testament which was not formally offered as a Classics course at Amherst, a Religion professor who reads Greek offered to teach a course of Classical Greek text in NT Scriptures for the 3 of us. this counted as credit towards our major and allowed us to learn what we wanted to learn even when the course catalog did not ordinarily offer it. Amherst’s commitment to help students learn exactly what they want came through for us - i would like to think they would still do the same today.
Absolutely the kind of experience that does not show up in “stats”, self-reported or otherwise! What a fantastic way to approach studying antiquity!
From a data analytics perspective, IPEDS information may be best used directionality. Colleges with hgher reported numbers of first majors in classics may have larger classics communities overall in comparison to schools with lower reported numbers of first majors. To the extent that this represents the case, and to the extent that this student would like to study at a college at which students interested in classics are not exceedingly rare, potential choices such as Holy Cross, Hamilton and Haverford, along with universities with similarly good representations of classics majors, would seem to merit inclusion as schools to research further.
One wonders why Hamilton is not offering introductory Greek this fall if its Classics program is allegedly so robust. It is hardly ideal to require prospective Classics majors to wait to begin one of their ancient languages.
This is not an issue at colleges with strong Classics programs. All of the Ivies are offering both introductory Greek and introductory Latin this fall, for instance, as are numerous LACs like Amherst, Williams, Wellesley, Oberlin, etc.
Spot on,@Blossom. You are not the one missing the point. First, we already know the many problems with self-reported outcome data so we don’t need to repeat that again here at this time. I just returned from a landmark college reunion. Many of my classmates majored in things like history, Russian, biology, philosophy, sociology, math, religion, art history, and several created their own interdisciplinary majors. All of them had fascinating lives, careers and journeys. Employers understand the level of reasoning, insight and intellectual prowess that a classics major would likely have. It is an excellent major, even if some are not familiar with it.
As a follow up, I just looked up the undergrad degree of a classmate who gave an interesting presentation at our reunion. He has a very successful company in market research and consulting. His undergrad degree was in communications. That skill probably helped him develop the consulting business, but as in so many cases what one majored in in undergrad has little to do with their career path.
Who hasn’t? Seriously though, she has 4.6 GPA and 1550 SAT, so will apply to Yale, Brown and Dartmouth, but the odds are so small she’s thinking of them like a lottery.
Agree with Shelby-Balik–very odd. The Midd newspaper published its 5th annual “zeitgeist” report (Zeitgeist 5.0 - The Middlebury Campus) about all stats Middlebury, and although only 44% of students participated in the survey, 9 of that small percentage said they were classics majors.
Based on this survey, it appears that 9 of 1,112 respondents from four class-years of Middlebury students identified as classics majors, which suggests a greater number of students interested in classics than might be inferred from IPEDS information alone.