Data10
April 26, 2015, 6:43pm
16
.The specific humanities quotes I found from the minutes are below. The make it sounds like Stanford has been making an intentional effort to increase the portion of the student body pursuing humanities and social sciences, but I don’t read much more than that into the statements.
With regard to humanities and social sciences, the number of students that have expressed an interest in those majors have gone up strongly, and that’s been intentional, that’s been an effort on the part of many to ensure that we can balance the number of students that are taking courses throughout the university.
More students in the class who are going to major in the Humanities. The applicant numbers have gone up to their highest level in many years. This is the result of a combined effort of our staff, the H&S faculty and the dean of the H&S. Not only did we get more applicants but also our yield is phenomenal! It’s 79%. We’re pretty excited about that because that will bring more kids to the campus who will have some focus in those areas. We know most of them don’t really know what they want to do with the rest of their life, but these are kids who are strong prospects in the area of the Humanities.
(Laughter)
He continued, “So that’s up to you to talk them into it. With incredible programs like the Humanities Institute these last couple of summers and direct mail campaigns to kids, we have observed the effect of being able to jack up the applicant pool.”
Professor Goldsmith commented, “I agree we need more women in engineering. But I want to thank you and your committee for gracing this university with the remarkable group of young people that I personally find it a privilege and pleasure to teach and to mentor. You love your job and we love our job, in part, because of the undergraduates that you bring to us. My question is—in your chart, you showed that 31% of the students entering the freshmen class are interested in engineering and yet we’re already seeing almost 40% of students majoring in computer science alone. So clearly something shifts when they come here and I think many of us have a concern that we don’t want to turn this into the Stanford Institute of Technology. In terms of admitting the pool coming in, why are students shifting after they come here; are there some broader things we should be doing as a university? I know some of the Joint Majors Programs are also going to have an impact.”
Dean Shaw responded, “I think these new and innovative programs are really extraordinary and they allow us to introduce them to the concept of liberal arts. That’s what we’re really trying to do; we’re trying to broadly educate our kids. But we are up against the behemoth for some number of years; that is we’re in the Silicon Valley. Almost every piece of news that comes out has to do with one of the four or five corporations whose founders [had some connection with Stanford]. That is all over the national news, so what we’ve had to do in order to change that balance is work one-on-one, head-to-head, kid-to-kid, and convince them that what we do here in the humanities is pretty extraordinary, and that we have some of the best humanities and social science programs in the nation. So we’ve been doing that, we’ve focused that way.