The declining number of English majors

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Even in my DC’s AP English class the summer reading is Ta-Nehisi Coates, and this is a Catholic school. Not trashing the book, but it isn’t as if they are reading Whitman or Twain either.

Not sure why it matters what you read as long as it is more than a graphic novel or harlequin romance.

I don’t know many people that read Twain or Whitman for pleasure…and certainly not teens.

My kids hate fiction (I don’t much like fiction)…but on their own read Moneyball and the Musk biography. I just don’t see why there cant be some flexibility in all this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

This is a big factor. Many places do not teach great literature because it was written by Dead White Men, or they teach it in “reinterpreted” ways. The silly stuff sucks all the oxygen out of the room…

Of course they teach it in a new way. Every generation of PhDs needs to produce something original, only anything even remotely touching reality has already been written.

[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.

Post-modernism has destroyed everything. One used to study English literature to interpret the message of the author and appreciate the art he or she created. Now, one does it to dismantle subterranean white/male supremacist power structures.

[Anonymous]

As Bloom said, you wouldn't want to purchase a desk where the legs fell off soon after you bought it, and the fact that the desk was made by a person of a certain identity group is irrelevant. Yet that's how literary study is approached. So they'll have catalogues full of courses on fourth-rate Chicano poets or something. It's contempt for serious literature.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Even in my DC’s AP English class the summer reading is Ta-Nehisi Coates, and this is a Catholic school. Not trashing the book, but it isn’t as if they are reading Whitman or Twain either.

But that’s AP English, an unregulated English course beyond a few key content points. When I was in Ap English, I had to read Jhumpa Lahiri- there’s no standard text for the course.

Go into an actual English department page and you will see how much it a non issue this is at the collegiate level

[Anonymous]

DC is an English major and looked at me like I was an idiot for suggesting they don’t read the cannon.

She says so far she’s had to read Whitman, Ginsberg, Poe, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Melville, Camus, Eliot, Donne, Herbert, Rushdie, Rys, and Beckett, and that’s as a rising Sophomore! She goes to an ultra liberal, liberal arts college and there’s “only two faculty dedicated to gender studies, you have to fight for anything that isn’t old dead white men.”

I think the departments are doing fine.

[Anonymous]

Summer reading for DD’s AP Lit is 100 Years of Solitude and Oedipus Rex. Tri-state area public school.

Biggest takeaway for me is that there are only 2 boys but about 15 girls in the class. I wonder if it’s an odd year or if the gender imbalance is standard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Summer reading for DD’s AP Lit is 100 Years of Solitude and Oedipus Rex. Tri-state area public school.

Biggest takeaway for me is that there are only 2 boys but about 15 girls in the class. I wonder if it’s an odd year or if the gender imbalance is standard.

English majors are mostly women.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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

STEM wave is misguiding parents and they are misguiding their kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Summer reading for DD’s AP Lit is 100 Years of Solitude and Oedipus Rex. Tri-state area public school.

Biggest takeaway for me is that there are only 2 boys but about 15 girls in the class. I wonder if it’s an odd year or if the gender imbalance is standard.

English majors are mostly women.

But in high school? Boys have to take English. On the flip side, I bet her school’s Physics C has 15 boys and 2 girls. Thinking aloud.

[Anonymous]

The postmodernist haters are so ill informed in this thread. You do know there are women and people of color included in the cannon right? That when the “woke mob” is teaching you Baldwin, Lord, Woolf, Austen, Dickinson, et Al. They’re teaching canonical literature that matters. An English degree is not a classics degree, it spans literature from various ages and voices. At the end of the day, no one’s letting you graduate without old white men.

[Anonymous]

My kid just graduated as an English major and would do it all over again. Going back n to grad school. Always liked to read and write as a child. Sad that kids these days often don’t enjoy reading. Much easier to get instantaneous gratification from news feeds and social media so they don’t have the patience to read a long book. Students focus on STEM nowadays and its easy to understand why but they should at least try to take a class or two as it gives a different understanding of people and life in general.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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

The idea that college is trade school seems to be one of the most immutable of the lower-middle class misconceptions.

Most of the kids are not trust fund kids, so they need jobs.

If they really needed jobs, they'd go into a trade, get an ASN/Rad Tech/Construction Management associates, or do the many other options you have before getting a degree. They are lazy and want to delay working for four years by partying and BSing through school.

Average salary is higher with college degree for long term and also more opportunities.
College + job is the best.
By the way, yes most kids really need jobs.
What are you trying to say??

The kids of this generation are much dumber than previous ones and shouldn't be getting degrees. Colleges are lowering their standards to get them to pass (B is the new C!) and many of these students should be working before ever even thinking of going into a collegiate institution. Many have no respect for education, but somehow also want 4.0s and some even want to go to grad schools with a terrible consumerist mindset about University. If your objective is money, there's so many jobs out there that do not require a degree that you can use as a launchpad to a successful career.

What are these jobs?

Most of the associates you can get in non-liberal arts fields are directly practical and qualify you for a job. I didn’t take this path but of the people I know in them include construction/construction project managers, Policy planners, forestry and conservation, nursing, radiation tech, dentist assistant, etc. I’m sure there’s others, but these are the type of careers my friends growing up went into with community college.

This is outdated - nursing and forestry both typically require an advanced degree for anything other than the most basic entry level labor (and no you don't work your way up anymore). My mom who is 75 could be a nurse with kust an AA in the 70s but that's not the case anymore, and even then she couldn't be a manager of any kind without more school. Lots of PMs and policy people have at least a 4 year degree, often more.
(I'm ignoring the fact you shifted from "no degree" to an associates degree, but i noticed.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kid just graduated as an English major and would do it all over again. Going back n to grad school. Always liked to read and write as a child. Sad that kids these days often don’t enjoy reading. Much easier to get instantaneous gratification from news feeds and social media so they don’t have the patience to read a long book. Students focus on STEM nowadays and its easy to understand why but they should at least try to take a class or two as it gives a different understanding of people and life in general.

Your kid is going to grad school. Most people don't want another 2 years of school, especially if they cannot afford it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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

The idea that college is trade school seems to be one of the most immutable of the lower-middle class misconceptions.

Most of the kids are not trust fund kids, so they need jobs.

If they really needed jobs, they'd go into a trade, get an ASN/Rad Tech/Construction Management associates, or do the many other options you have before getting a degree. They are lazy and want to delay working for four years by partying and BSing through school.

Average salary is higher with college degree for long term and also more opportunities.
College + job is the best.
By the way, yes most kids really need jobs.
What are you trying to say??

The kids of this generation are much dumber than previous ones and shouldn't be getting degrees. Colleges are lowering their standards to get them to pass (B is the new C!) and many of these students should be working before ever even thinking of going into a collegiate institution. Many have no respect for education, but somehow also want 4.0s and some even want to go to grad schools with a terrible consumerist mindset about University. If your objective is money, there's so many jobs out there that do not require a degree that you can use as a launchpad to a successful career.

What are these jobs?

Most of the associates you can get in non-liberal arts fields are directly practical and qualify you for a job. I didn’t take this path but of the people I know in them include construction/construction project managers, Policy planners, forestry and conservation, nursing, radiation tech, dentist assistant, etc. I’m sure there’s others, but these are the type of careers my friends growing up went into with community college.

This is outdated - nursing and forestry both typically require an advanced degree for anything other than the most basic entry level labor (and no you don't work your way up anymore). My mom who is 75 could be a nurse with kust an AA in the 70s but that's not the case anymore, and even then she couldn't be a manager of any kind without more school. Lots of PMs and policy people have at least a 4 year degree, often more.
(I'm ignoring the fact you shifted from "no degree" to an associates degree, but i noticed.)

In many states you can graduate high school with an AA, it's not that difficult to get. You clearly know they mean four year degree, no reason to try a gotcha.