Major distribution at elite colleges ( including Duke), where engineering is 20-30% of undergraduate enrollment, and computer science is sometimes the most popular major, differs from the national data.
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I believe the main drivers of this trend are things already mentioned upstream - jobs, salaries, high cost of college (ROI), etc. But another smaller factor may be the way that high school humanities departments have radically changed their curriculums in the past several years.
Instead of teaching students to read great literature (Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dickens, Hemingway, Chinau Achebe, etc, etc), the English curriculum (at least at our school) has effectively become simply a social justice exercise. English classes focus almost entirely (outside of AP classes) on victim narratives. In fact, the 8th grade English curriculum for one of my kids includes only one “classic” (The Diary of Anne Frank) and every single one of the remaining 7 books is written in the first person, parents-are-a-drag, nobody-understands-me trope. All of them are honestly terribly written from a literary perspective. There is one about the gay girl, one about the Black kid, one about the trans kid, one about the migrant kid, etc. To be very clear, I think all of these books can have a place in an English curriculum, and I 100% support the social justice themes. But to completely drop all great literature in favor of these poorly written books for adolescents really does a disservice to those kids who could be challenged by and fall in love with great literature. I’m not surprised kids that have been entirely unexposed to great literature wouldn’t want to study it in college.
Similarly with the history curriculum at our h.s. It has radically changed in the past several years to focus almost entirely on social justice. Again, I applaud the inclusion of social justice themes and units in a history class. But when 80% of every history curriculum focuses on seeing the world through only that lens, it’s no wonder some students aren’t excited about studying the field of history in college. Participating in protests and volunteering for worthy causes is a more salient and relevant option for those interested in social justice than reading about others “doing” social justice, which is what many kids now believe constitutes the field of history.
A little balance in h.s. humanities curricula that exposes kids to great literature and multiple ways of approaching history might encourage a few more kids to find it an enriching and challenging area to study in college.
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I believe we’ve gone from teaching literature to teaching “pop culture” literature.
The pendulum switching to “social justice” in history teaching is because history was so devoid of social justice 30 years ago. I loved history in high school and took oodles of courses in Canadian history. Not once were “residential” schools even mentioned. So I understand why.
However, the focus on STEM at really early ages is in the long term negative overall. Many students simply have no interest in STEM and have “abilities” not captured by STEM methods. We’ve kind of lost the “breadth” of knowledge concept. Kids have plenty of time to narrow their focus later on.
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I completely agree that we greatly needed a course correction to include issues of social justice in the high school curriculum that I, too, never learned as a kid. But I believe the pendulum has swung too far. I’m sad that my kids will never read the great authors of history in high school.
I do think there’s a mismatch between how universities are organized and what most students/parents want to learn now.
Universities’ departments—the places where students do their majors—represent the major branches of human knowledge. They don’t very directly represent career paths or areas of preprofessional training—or if they do, they do so somewhat inadvertently. (I’m talking about universities, not vocational schools or certificate programs.)
So nobody (except maybe Henry Ford) could seriously argue that History is not a major branch of human knowledge.
Same goes for Philosophy, and other humanities majors. (We may have our doubts about ones like English or Art History, though I’ve heard professors in those fields be very persuasive about the fundamental intellectual value of their disciplines.)
Going to college has always been in part about getting a job, of course, just not exclusively so. It was formerly also, unabashedly, a way to gain an understanding of the world. (Again, I’d be surprised if anybody would attempt to argue with a straight face that History or Literature did not offer a fundamental way to understand the world.)
But for more parents/students than ever, the career path—one seen to be as direct as possible—has crowded out other considerations.
Sure, cost is a factor—though not really at the elite schools. Our twins will be attending an Ivy+ university with no loans this Fall. They are free to be Art History majors or Philosophy majors, or Econ majors, as they see fit, without fear of debt.
And yeah, I suppose the “social-justice” aspect of the humanities lately maybe puts some people off. But that’s what the newspapers and websites report, because conflict and outrage sells. The reality is that there is still scholarly work being done in humanities disciplines that doesn’t make it into the headlines.
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My D who just graduated from college last year read a number of classics in HS and I just did a quick survey of required reading and am seeing Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Sophocles, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, etc… AP history courses were also very very rigorous and not social justice focused at all. (Looks to be the same today based on curriculum).
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Yes, and my kids, who are graduating from high school in a couple of days, read Shakespeare, Kafka, Emerson, Austen, and many other prominent writers of the past in their AP Lit class. For a sample of contemporary fiction, they read a (very) recent novel by Jennifer Egan—whom I and everybody else consider to be a serious literary writer.
The poets they studied included Keats, Robert Browning. Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, the list goes on.
And their high school is a quite un-fancy public one with lots of working-class and middle-class students.
I don’t deny that rather boilerplate identity narratives often crowd out a lot of important literature of the present and past on many syllabi. But we’re lucky it wasn’t that case at our kids’ high school.
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Of course, much actual history included conflicts about what was then ideas about social justice versus those who opposed those ideas. A prominent example in the US was the struggle to limit or abolish slavery versus the opposition to such limitation or abolition, where such struggle was an important part of US political history from the beginning of the US until it resulted in a civil war.
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Students at highly selective private colleges tend to gravitate towards fields associated with higher incomes, more so that the general college population. Most popular majors are typically CS, economics → finance/consulting, and bio->MD. Engineering total is not that different from the general population (many engineers attend non-“elite” publics). For example 3.5% of males were mechanical engineering majors at both highly selective colleges and not highly selective colleges. However, CS major percentage is typically several times higher than the general population, often being the most popular major among males. There are also fewer pre-professional majors, such as nursing, accounting, and marketing. However, one thing highly selective colleges have in common with less selective colleges is few humanities majors.
Specific stats are below for the ~30 most selective colleges in the United States, using IPEDS. For simplicity, I grouped majors in to larger categories than in the previous summary. For example, all types of non-statistics math majors are math instead of separating mathematics from applied mathematics.
Major Distribution at 30 of the Most Selective US Colleges: Women
- Biology – 8.6%
- Computer Science – 6.8%
- Psychology – 6.4%
- Economics – 6.3%
- Political Science – 4.6%
- Neuroscience – 3.7%
- Mathematics – 3.2%
- English – 2.6%
- Business – 2.6%
- Communication/Media – 2.3%
Major Distribution at 30 of the Most Selective US Colleges: Men
- Computer Science – 13.8%
- Economics – 11.2%
- Biology – 5.8%
- Political Science – 4.8%
- Mathematics – 4.7%
- Business - 3.8%
- Mechanical Eng – 3.5%
- Electrical Eng – 2.9%
- Finance – 2.8%
- History – 2.2%
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That looks like good news to me, that women at elite colleges are choosing mostly the same majors as their male peers. Seems like progress.
I was a STEM/humanities double major at Duke as well (biology and English), and I feel that the humanities are getting what they deserve. I loved my humanities classes, but they were simply not as hard as my science classes. More importantly, they have often devolved into a “lens” approach; I.e., let’s look at this topic/writing from a Marxist/feminist/LGBTQ perspective. It’s completely subjective and unfalsifiable.
I was there for the Sokal hoax, which deeply undermined the credibility of post-modernism (though that didn’t stop it from thriving to this day!). If you think of college as weight lifting for the mind, the STEM majors are lifting heavier weights. When I hire people, I find this is often apparent. I’d take a chemistry major over an art history major if that’s all I had to go on.
Do I wish current graduates had better writing skills? Definitely. Do I think everyone would benefit from reading more literature? Yes. But the humanities in academia have mostly abandoned those goals, and I’m not sad to see them fade into irrelevance while clutching their Lacan and Foucault.
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I won’t deny your personal experience—I’m sure it’s accurate.
But my experience in the humanities world differs from yours. I see a lot of rigorous scholarship and serious, research-based, intellectual endeavor in History, Philosophy, and yes, in literary study in various language departments, including English.
And sadly, I see a lot of STEM students struggle in humanities courses. Often their writing is not very good. And often their reading skills are quite poor.
The difference in a literature course between a strong English major and a CS student dropping by to fulfill a distribution requirement is often astounding. A very wide gulf lies between two such students, not just in sophistication, insight, and the ability to notice textual details, but more simply in reading comprehension. (This does not apply to double majors like yourself!)
It is a regular occurrence for many STEM students now to misunderstand the sentences they quote, even at the level of basic syntax. I’m not talking about Joyce or Proust. I’m talking about Austen.
I think this has changed over the last decade. High school students are now encouraged to specialize. The college counsellor we consulted (pro bono volunteer) vehemently urged my son not to take AP Lit and Advanced Acting because he planned to major in Bio. We are glad he ignored her.
I don’t know when you went to Duke. But for a long time, it was a hotbed of “theory” high-flyers (the “Fish tank”). The “high theory” approach in literary study is receding—it’s now just one of many—and it’s coming to seem pretty stale. (Foucault and Lacan died a long time ago.)
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Universities really need to adapt to the needs of society. Otherwise, they risk significant waste of resources on anachronisms of bygone eras…
I can’t say I know what you mean by “needs of society.”
But I know when some people say that, they mean “needs of the market.” In this context, the job market—so the university’s function is to optimize its production of employees.
I still believe society needs people who understand the world.
And if you want to understand the world, the first thing you need to understand about it is that it’s been around a lot longer than you have. (I think I’m paraphrasing Hannah Arendt.)
And a corollary: it will be around for a very long time after you are dead (—one hopes, we nowadays must add).
Anyway, the humanities remain excellent at conveying these kinds of understanding.
Maybe employees don’t really need them. Many are probably more useful and compliant without them.
But I don’t want to live in a society where the only measure of value is more money, more jobs. Besides, new understandings of the past are where all good new ideas come from (bad ones too).
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Here is my personal experience(and I was born in the 60s for context). I took advanced science courses in high school and then chose to go the “liberal” arts path in CEGEP (Quebec) and went to business school in university. Beyond a doubt, what shaped me as a person was the “liberal arts” courses I took. They helped me appreciate music, the arts, etc… and made me "happier’ when I wasn’t working. More importantly, it helped me communicate better with my kids etc…and be a better parent.
This is my perspective but with three kids going to or having completed university, I see the same positive influences from “liberal arts” courses.
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I could write a book about this. When I was a grad student teaching Reading and Composition, I used to teach these students and the majority couldn’t write their way out of a simple paragraph. But the worst part is that they didn’t even care. Until they got their course grades and then they were shocked and I’d get all these emails begging for me to change their grades.
But this attitude - that STEM is rigorous and important and that humanities are fluff - begins in schools, as many districts - including the students themselves who take their cues from the adults around them - view math level as a proxy for intelligence. Which is absurd.
Personally, I told my D early on: If you learn ONE thing in high school, let is be writing competence.
Now that she is in college and many of her grades are largely dependent on her ability to develop and clearly express a written argument, she is very glad for my insistence on this issue.
And the humanities matter, every ounce as much as STEM, for the good of society, for the good of the world, and for the good of our collective future. I will die on that hill.
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Double (or triple) majoring may also be part of the perceived decrease in majors. In order to avoid double counting any particular student, I suspect most universities require the students to identify which major is “primary.”
I know that is the case for my son’s school (which is not Duke). Because his degree from the Business School is more useful in job hunting than the degree from the School of Liberal Arts, he chose the former as the primary. Consequently, his very real degree in History will not be reported in his university’s CDS.
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If your university is admitting students with inadequate reading or writing skills, regardless of major, that would be best addressed through the admissions office policies. Weaker writing skills would be addressed by the college-wide imposition of distribution requirements or required writing courses in the first year of study.
I too believe society needs people who understand the world, now more than ever. That includes quantitative skills necessary to understand the complexity of modern technology. One needs both.
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I’m not sure sure why many believe that humanities majors have a lock on understanding the world. Many stem majors take several “humanities” classes in addition to their tech classes, they are strong writers, and have a wide view of the world.
Many of the tech driven “new ideas” come with their debates. Bring up AI with a group of CS majors and the discussions will always include the ethics of AI, and just what is “life”.
No one is more compliant than one who struggles to find gainful employment.
We live in a society where demand sets the wage for any and all. You buys your ticket you takes your chances.
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Based on what is valued by those who hold the purse strings, not necessarily based on social value (I say as a member of the generally very underpaid but often critically vital to those in need nonprofit sector…)
Editing to give a nod to the grossly underpaid cadre of adjunct faculty, many of whom are currently teaching your children…
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