The declining number of English majors

[Anonymous]

Just looked at some numbers and I didn't realize that it isn't just the proportion of English majors but the actual number has plummeted. The number of bachelor's degrees conferred has more than doubled since 1970 but there's only about half as many English grads. No other field has seen such a decline. What happened? Have a lot drifted to communications or cultural studies? Does it just reflect a declining interest in serious literature?

Figures here: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_322.10.asp

[Anonymous]

Academia has made literature an incredibly unappealing thing to study. Take a look at the specialities of your average English Department these days. It's not something you want to spend four years immersed in. No one has done more to destroy language and literature than contemporary academia. It is incredibly stifling, boring, pedantic, hyper-political, and all around not fun. I congratulate every bright liberal arts student who has chosen to not major in English. Well done.

[Anonymous]

You're talking about different student demographics. Cultural Studies/Sociology have stayed the same in grads but as departments have gotten much more popular because of student interests and they tend to cover "ignored histories" in ways that others fields do a terrible job at (looking at you anthropology). The liberal arts are in a weird limbo, especially English departments-they are both expected to teach a relative few amount of students who have any interest in knowing who Proust or Pound is, while also becoming the dumping ground for all writing content. There's less liberal arts majors more than ever but many colleges will have the liberal arts courses as the most subscribed, because they've become the bottom barrel "Core curriculum" and "Intro to [technical/creative/professional/rhetorical] writing"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Academia has made literature an incredibly unappealing thing to study. Take a look at the specialities of your average English Department these days. It's not something you want to spend four years immersed in. No one has done more to destroy language and literature than contemporary academia. It is incredibly stifling, boring, pedantic, hyper-political, and all around not fun. I congratulate every bright liberal arts student who has chosen to not major in English. Well done.

Yes. My MIL is an English professor at an Ivy and she would likely agree with everything you wrote. She hates how hyper-political it has become.

[Anonymous]

Maybe people have realized how hard it is to get a job with that degree.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Academia has made literature an incredibly unappealing thing to study. Take a look at the specialities of your average English Department these days. It's not something you want to spend four years immersed in. No one has done more to destroy language and literature than contemporary academia. It is incredibly stifling, boring, pedantic, hyper-political, and all around not fun. I congratulate every bright liberal arts student who has chosen to not major in English. Well done.

Yes. My MIL is an English professor at an Ivy and she would likely agree with everything you wrote. She hates how hyper-political it has become.

Can you elaborate? Most English departments are still stuck in discussion on Yeats, Joyce, and Shakespeare. I hardly see any curriculum that isn't just the typical cannon with a few classes to appease students (British Writers anyone!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maybe people have realized how hard it is to get a job with that degree.

College isn’t job training. That’s what vocational school is for.

[Anonymous]

Talk to middle school and high school teachers. The Covid gap kids are basically illiterate. So the number of English majors will further decline, at least for the next 8 years until we get through this bubble of kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe people have realized how hard it is to get a job with that degree.

College isn’t job training. That’s what vocational school is for.

That's old thinking. You're still stuck in the time period when Biff could just get any old college degree and find a job easily out of college because they have a degree.

Today is very different.

Colleges are also getting rid of the English majors. It's supply and demand.

Keep up with the times, or get left behind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Talk to middle school and high school teachers. The Covid gap kids are basically illiterate. So the number of English majors will further decline, at least for the next 8 years until we get through this bubble of kids.

Demand for English major has been declining, even before covid hit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Academia has made literature an incredibly unappealing thing to study. Take a look at the specialities of your average English Department these days. It's not something you want to spend four years immersed in. No one has done more to destroy language and literature than contemporary academia. It is incredibly stifling, boring, pedantic, hyper-political, and all around not fun. I congratulate every bright liberal arts student who has chosen to not major in English. Well done.

Yes. My MIL is an English professor at an Ivy and she would likely agree with everything you wrote. She hates how hyper-political it has become.

Is she in critical theory or something? Nothing that modern political about many parts of literary theory, rhetoric/comp studies, Modernism (filled with authors more interested in the Classics more than anything else, the drama side of English literature with Beckett and Co, Fiction Writing, and most of Historical lit. The average English academic is more into Virginia Woolf and Macbeth than Agnes Heller.

[Anonymous]

Woke ideologues have ruined the study of serious literature. They tell us that we need trigger warnings about Shakespeare, Dickens, Whitman and Twain and it's better to read second- and third-rate PC writers instead.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe people have realized how hard it is to get a job with that degree.

College isn’t job training. That’s what vocational school is for.

Eh, tell that to the people who major in accounting and teaching and graduate with job offers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Talk to middle school and high school teachers. The Covid gap kids are basically illiterate. So the number of English majors will further decline, at least for the next 8 years until we get through this bubble of kids.

Demand for English major has been declining, even before covid hit.

The decline started about 20 years ago. Social media has destroyed people's attention spans and the ability to read serious arguments.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Woke ideologues have ruined the study of serious literature. They tell us that we need trigger warnings about Shakespeare, Dickens, Whitman and Twain and it's better to read second- and third-rate PC writers instead.

Name "they."
Name "third-rate PC writers."
You will maybe read Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde in a "woke" English department, but the rest of your experience will be with the cannon for undergraduate English training.