17 ms·

The End of the English Major

77 points by gbjw 4y ago

webmaven 4y ago
https://archive.ph/m3y8B https://archive.ph/m3y8B
Ambolia 4y ago
>“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.” Are the standards to get into university that low?
- SergioAlonso09 4y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  If standards are this low we need English requirements in university more than ever.
- xenon7 4y ago
  Yes. I'm guessing it's because nearly every American needs to go to college nowadays (sure, there are other options, but college is the most practical) and as a result they had to lower standards. I mean, I've heard that some universities don't even require SAT/ACT scores anymore. That doesn't mean that "prestigious" universities don't exist, but generally speaking they've really dumbed-down things a lot.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    The college diploma is yet another victim of Goodhart's law.
  - justinator 4y ago
    Even 20 years ago, I had a class that was struggling to get through the introduction of a book. We spent a few weeks on it. I became frustrated and just checked the book out of the library and read it entirely one afternoon. It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      …if they had dyscalculia, they'd be studying elementary ed.
  - watwut 4y ago
    42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
    - xenon7 4y ago
      It's really that low? Ah, my bad. That's surprising to me.
      - red-iron-pine 4y ago
        And 41% is just enrollment -- many will never finish. Maybe 30% of the US actually holds any sort of degree.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Important context - that quote is attributed thus: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor". Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...
  - modernpink 4y ago
    Not to mention __________ ______.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Rorschach tests?
    - CrazyStat 4y ago
      Student athletes?
      - econonut 4y ago
        Affirmative action.
        CrazyStat 4y ago
        Major donors?
        econonut 4y ago
        My extensive hangman experience leads me to believe that's not what the commenter is suggesting.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Legacy admissions?
- alistairSH 4y ago
  And that's at Harvard! Wow. "The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  When I graduated university, it was very clear to me that my peers couldn't communicate adequately at that time. A lot of essays are effectively cheated on and the students are taught mostly to pad as opposed to have serious consideration and thought on the literature. None of this contributes to mastering structure or craft in any way. There's a lot of pressure to graduate students by parents/the board/local government, especially in highschool, especially when English is continually marginalized as a field of study. Where do you, an English teacher at highschool, get off failing a rising star athlete, young mathematician, engineering passionate, or any number of categories that is "worth more" than the capacity to read and write intelligently?
- jakeinspace 4y ago
  To be fair, I found that an extremely tedious book, probably my least favorite required high school reading.
- siva7 4y ago
  Standards can also act as a gatekeeper, discriminating against the underprivileged. So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor.
  - Ambolia 4y ago
    I suppose this is trolling, but if it's not everybody doesn't really "get a change", you are just turning an english major into a different thing while keeping the name and trying to keep the prestige, though that won't last for long.
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    > So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor. They don't, though? > The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult. From a NYTimes analysis [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
- browningstreet 4y ago
  Based on my son's freshman year at a big university, all the 101 and 102 classes assume no prior knowledge, of almost anything. Grammar, the desktop/filesystem metaphor (which, I'm told, a whole lot of students still didn't understand even after spend a couple of classes on these basics), what a cell is, and in physics classes... what a proton is. Just to name a few examples.
  - 98codes 4y ago
    We can thank iOS and Android for the death of desktop/filesystem knowledge for people at large. Universities will need to start requiring a General Computing course to close that gap, if they aren't already.
- codeulike 4y ago
  For context, the Scarlet Letter is pretty annoying. Halfway through each of these sentences I feel myself losing patience A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
  - kemayo 4y ago
    Definitely a pain if you're trying to teach it in a sentence-diagramming kind of way. That said, I kind of wonder why you'd be bothering to do that unless the kids are literally not able to understand what's being said and you need to work through it from first principles. (Which I guess is possible? That all reads as a bit of a ramble but perfectly understandable, particularly if you read it out loud.) For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.
- pdntspa 4y ago
  A lot of pre-20th century writing is absolutely awful. Long, pretentious, rambling run-on sentences and authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice. My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Leo Tolstoy would like a word with you.
    - randcraw 4y ago
      Or several.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Funnily enough, it kind of applies to this article too.
  - rawgabbit 4y ago
    I agree. Scarlet Letter is an example on how not to write. It is steam of consciousness without a modicum of merit. I don't think I learned anything from it. I read half of the book and was completely lost on what the author was trying to say. Maybe that was the author's point. But the writing is god awful. Below is a passage where the dude who got Hester pregnant confessed? Or is it her husband who felt cheated? Uggh. Who cares. “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Yes they are. Kids in lower schools are generally not taught how to read or write well at all. When they do read books, the books are either distilled into key ideas in class (so you don't really have to read them aside from the occasional quiz) or very easy reading material. When they write, it's usually a "5-paragraph" essay that is more about regurgitating the distilled points than any form of original thought. That is, if they don't cheat on the essay. I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter." By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing. A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.
- SL61 4y ago
  Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes. Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up. Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load. Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade. Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!
  - kjellsbells 4y ago
    I'm sure I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I heard that undergrads were using ChatGPT to write essays my first instinct was to wonder how university standards had gotten so low that a generated essay would not simply be dismissed as a feeble attempt. 500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?
    - notafraudster 4y ago
      It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy). One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion. The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be. I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD. So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.
- dkarl 4y ago
  My father taught at a local state university, nowhere near state flagship level but still a "university" in name, and he occasionally had kids in class who were close to functionally illiterate. His reading for the semester was very light (something you would get through in a competitive university in a week) but from helping kids who came to his office he could tell it would have been a hundred hours of reading for some of them, even if they skipped all the words they didn't know. I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free. Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.
  - notafraudster 4y ago
    A lot of colleges now have what amount to transition classes for high school kids who can't hack it in college. The upside of these is that they seem to actually help students who went to shitty high schools or who needed a change of environment. The downside is that typically they don't count for credit but they still cost money.
    - bitwize 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cafard 4y ago
  The impression that I get from my brother, who teaches as an adjunct at a couple of state schools in the Midwest, is that yes the standards are that low.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  >"having trouble identifying the subject and the verb" In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  My Philosphy 101 was me having a conversation with the grad student lecturer over Plato's dialogues. After class one day, this STEM student, likely taking the course for the easy credit as I don't believe anyone failed the course, asked me "How do you read this stuff?" in what I interpreted as a mixed tone of condescension ("why would you read this stuff") and surprise ("how do you read this stuff"). Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints. Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.
- disambiguation 4y ago
  >Are the standards to get into university that low? Universities aren't what they used to be. In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1] In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2] [1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifications-for-daycare-workers https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica... [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-reformation-1221776 https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...
garbagecoder 4y ago
[dead]
lordleft 4y ago
I've encountered people who gleefully celebrate this ("why would you study something so 'useless'?") -- but surely a genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests, instead of funneling them into the same roles? Isn't this a failure of political economics?
- f1yght 4y ago
  It's also unfortunate that majors that teach people how to write and think critically are panned. Those are very useful skills and give people a better ability in normal life. I understand college is so expensive that people feel a need for it to prepare you for a job, but I still hold onto the ideal that college should be a place that allows people to grow as a person and learn to communicate and think.
  - hcayless 4y ago
    This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.
    - eldaisfish 4y ago
      a key point is that these skills - soft skills if you will - can be learned on the job, even with minimal background knowledge. It is much harder to learn programming or electrical engineering on the job if you lack the educational base. Communication is a critical skill today as are information skills. Truly sad that they are often derided as being worth less than technical skills.
      - brewdad 4y ago
        [flagged]
        eldaisfish 4y ago
thucydides 4y ago
https://archive.is/m3y8B https://archive.is/m3y8B to break out of the paywall
apodolny 4y ago
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams[1] [1] https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
- dmos62 4y ago
  I'd add that if any of those generations fails, the next will have to study politics and war again.
  - awb 4y ago
    Even if it succeeds they have to study it. There are very few examples of countries that have survived without a military.
- awb 4y ago
  Reading between the lines I’m sure he meant that they could study those arts in addition to those fundamental studies listed prior. A nation devoted to poetry and porcelain isn’t sustainable. And certainly he must have been aware of how cyclical history is versus a linear march towards artistic pursuits. The US since it’s inception has been involved in a significant war in nearly every decade. Post-Vietnam through the 1st Iraq war was one of the rare periods where a US citizen could have been of military age without a major hot war. Although the Cold War certainly brought it’s own level of fear.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Switzerland has been war free in 171 of the last 176 years. It can be done, just not if you plan on being a major power.
    - awb 4y ago
jdkee 4y ago
Many humanities departments went fully woke over the past decade and that alienates students. See purity spirals.
- weakfish 4y ago
  Can you back this claim up?
  - jdkee 4y ago
    Yes I can.
    - acc_297 4y ago
      but will you?
      - kylereeve 4y ago
        They can never back up these claims, it's always just a feeling they have based on the right wing outrage bait they consume.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Humanities departments have been hyper-liberal since the 70s. The only thing that's changed is what hyper-liberal means (much the same as hyper conservative now implies the MAGA militia). Society has polarized, in large part because the two party system each party wants to differentiate itself, and first past the post voting with party primaries rewards extremists.
Scubabear68 4y ago
I know my wife majored in English in the 90’s, when she graduated the job prospects were very weak. She got a job in book publishing that was barely above minimum wage. She hated it so much that she went back to school to become a physical therapist, and she had been happily doing that for decades. So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?
- newsclues 4y ago
  "So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?" Yes, publishing and communications professions can be perfect for English majors. But how many jobs vs how many applicants is the problem.
  - Scubabear68 4y ago
    This is more or less what I was getting at. They’re some very nice jobs at the Editor level, but damn few of them. Many people seem to have to settle for peripheral jobs (my wife was in the physical book manufacturing and shipping end) that pays about as well as Burger King.
- vitaflo 4y ago
  My college roommate was an English major. Now he is a professor of English at a university and is quite happy with it. Of course the joke always was that he was majoring in English to teach future majors in English.
  - cpr 4y ago
    That's the dirty secret of the whole education-leading-to-PhD system -- it's only real and useful purpose is to create more educators.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  A lot of popular youtube content creators have english or literature degrees actually. It's almost like being really good at writing for a given audience, and being able to write stuff that will be interpreted as genuine and good is a useful tool that we really should be using more. Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.
TrackerFF 4y ago
The sad truth is that if you want to make big bucks with a humanities degree alone, you should go to a prestigious / top school, get your degree, and then join the workforce doing something completely different.
modernpink 4y ago
Are we possibly becoming a post-English society in the same sense that we became post-Latin? Latin was once the language you needed to know to access knowledge and learning. Now it is of little use to most outside of the Classics. In the future it will be possible to conduct science without full literacy. With the rise of large language models, apps, APIs, handheld computation, video content, and finger gestures, it seems that our daily interface with the world is moving from logocentrism. Furthermore, with the coming abundance of generated junk text from generative models, the relative value of language (English) looks to continue to diminish.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Or perhaps we are simply seeing the emergence of the Eloi and the Merlocks.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Good. 18 year olds shouldn't be given the option to put themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for no career prospects. I absolutely understand the point of view of the top comments saying that it people should be allowed to pursue their interests, and I agree, but it shouldn't come to the detriment of the basic quality of life of people that are barely old enough to take those decisions. The title of the article is perfect. It's the end of the English MAJOR. Study it as a Minor. Go back to school at 40 once you have your career built if that's what you want. But don't shoot yourself in both feet when you're 18. Otherwise I should have been allowed to do - and be respected for doing - a Major in video game playing and TV series watching, because that's where my interests laid when I finished highschool.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
The issue is that humanities majors should be priced differently than other classes. The fact that "pre-professional" path classes cost the same as "frivolous" classes didn't matter much when college didn't cost THAT much. Now? It's a stark decision of cost-benefit analysis. I almost think that humanities need to be like hermit satellite institutions attached to the universities. You know, like universities were back in the day. Reduced expectations of funding and costs for attending those. The university gets the prestige, but doesn't have to shoulder as much cost. Or, they are separately endowed. Humanities don't need the management that college administration uses to justify its explosive expansion. It doesn't have grants and all that. It just needs classrooms, some offices, and libraries. The dorms can be old-school if you want, part of the "academic experience". The rest of the university, with its sport facilities, lavish living quarters, frats, grant-seeking labs, etc, whatever. Go exist. Over there. Grade inflation, cheatable classes, over there. So there's two university experiences: the one where people go to get the job rubberstamp, and much cheaper but traditional (as in millenia old) experience of actual academic interest. Those can have separate admissions criteria. I guess this is like what graduate students go through, which is what "real college" is kind of like, but why not provide a track that bypasses the crappy undergrad phase for those students (and they do exist) that demonstrate the academic interest? The key difference is that grad students have a massive undergrad debt, but then in grad school pay nothing or get paid subsistence wages. Let's get rid of the massive undergrad debt for those that actually demonstrate academic interest. And let's be real, even in places like Harvard, that is probably a small minority of people going there.
- VLM 4y ago
  The problem is we already have that. The market has spoken and if you get that English degree from Yale you'll be permitted to get one of the few jobs in the field with decent pay, but if you get the same degree from the same curriculum from reading the same texts and the same research journals at the state satellite campus down the road from my house, that more or less fully implements your suggestion, there are no jobs after graduation beyond Starbucks or maybe selling real estate. The price of the state satellite campus is lower than sticker for ivy leagues, but its still too high. The real mystery is why non-credit Japanese taught by the same instructor in the same room using the same text and same syllabus on a different night of the week has a tuition of $45 but the for-credit class version of the same class is around $2K. I would guess the ivy league tuition equivalent of the same class would be $15K? The irony is the grads of all three expense levels are roughly equally skilled.
koops 4y ago
People who went to Harvard always manage to slyly communicate they went to Harvard. Including the author of this article. Good for you, dear!
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  An English degree from Harvard is nearly adjacent to the trajectory of Conan O'Brien. One should be so proud. This person could have written for the Lampoon.
stephenboyd 4y ago
If the future of AI is LLMs like ChatGPT, which are trained on literature and other things that people create, you're going to need humanities scholars like you need computer scientists to understand the AI. Microsoft gave their chatbot, which has probably almost every published work of science fiction in its training set, a human name and then were surprised that it imitated the fictional poorly-behaved named AIs that it was exposed to in its training.
cm2012 4y ago
English majors (and other liberal arts majors) do not build "critical thinking" any better than science majors. That skillset comes down to your natural intelligence and curiosity.
- never_inline 4y ago
  It's funny because at least where I live, critical thinking is (rightly) associated with STEM. STEM is also harder for affluent people to get in without putting in work.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    You can't bullshit your way through a math test.
  - ismokedoinks 4y ago
    I think you're expressing an unhealthy resentment here. I work as a SWE and I appreciate the critical thinking involved in the types of problems I get to solve. I'm also in graduate school for something that often borders on humanities and I am amazed at the complexity of thought that goes into the field due to how limitless the scope is and the way in which the humanity of the field allows anybody to participate. The STEM students I teach often struggle with exactly that, as well as with having well-developed communication skills. Turns out that choosing either STEM or humanities and forsaking the other leaves students deficient.
    - never_inline 4y ago
      > I think you're expressing an unhealthy resentment here. Just an observation. In a developing country anyone with better academic performance is compelled to pursue fields that pay well. So that statistically skews the other fields to people of lower academic performance up to high school. Academic performance correlates to cognitive abilities. STEM grads I see around me have no problem with communication or anything a humanities degree claims to "teach". I think it all boils down to people and their cognitive abilities. Second factor is subjectiveness of humanities fields; in STEM fields there are often objective measurements. It's much easier to bullshit your way to and through a non-STEM degree, especially when you have money and background. Edit: I have heard "humanities" as solution to engineers not writing proper docs or bug reports. That is missing the real reason, which is pretty boring. We don't have conceptual foundations of many things we use. Fresh grads even more so, due to abysmal education system.
blakesterz 4y ago
This was written 7 years ago and I think works pretty well as a response to this new one from The New Yorker. The End of the English Major? Not So Fast (April 13, 2015) https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/end-english-major-not-so-fast https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/end-engli...
trollerator23 4y ago
Good.
65 4y ago
> It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. This is the most annoying sentence I've ever read.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  It sounds like the journalist set out to be a novelist, but had to settle for something else.
- wankle 4y ago
  I agree, it reads like an ill-fated attempt at parody.
darth_avocado 4y ago
> Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? It costs too much and the jobs you get out of college (if you get one) are paying way too low. English has been one of the most popular majors in the last decade, but unfortunately the economy cannot meaningfully employ as many English majors. So people end up in careers that are completely unrelated. On the better side, sales and marketing jobs hire them, on the worse, a receptionist or barista. You can actually go to a trade school and come out better off on the other side.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  There was a time where almost everyone majoring in liberal Arts could make a decent living. They were viewed as educated and had an open door to almost any career. I knew many liberal Art majors who ended up programming and as tech writers in the early days, never mind sales/marketing. And I am sure quite a few ended up in Business due to their learned communication skills. Also, I had Uncles (non college) who worked selling carpets, worked in grocery stores who were able to afford a very nice life. They were able to put their children through college. But since the early 80s, those jobs are now a race to the bottom. Now it seems you are hired only if you are pigeon holed into a specific career, and if that career path becomes obsolete, you are SOL.
  - klooney 4y ago
    That only worked because college was a finishing school for the well brought up (plus the occasional striver), and businesses felt comfortable just trying to hire that demographic. It doesn't work if businesses are trying to hire based on qualifications, and if half of all young workers have a college degree.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    > I knew many liberal Art majors who ended up programming and as tech writers in the early days In the early days no one could hire people who had degrees in these fields, because the university courses didn't exist. So they had to go further afield. Also in these early days fewer people had college degrees. You were hiring the social (and sometimes intellectual) elite whenever you hired anyone with any degree.
throwawayacc5 4y ago
"Women's studies lost eighty per cent." I welcome this change. The less grievance studies majors there are, the better off society will be.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  Truly; there is only the experiences of one half of humanity worth studying.
  - Veen 4y ago
    Women's Studies isn't an academic discipline at all. It's an activist community masquerading as an academic discipline.
  - slothtrop 4y ago
    Is that how you'd describe every other major, studying males?
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      Actually, I think male bias is a problem in other academic fields. For example, we spent a long time thinking girls rarely have ADHD or Autism, and didn't even test drugs on women in case they might be pregnant. It's important to take a critical and objective look on why a women's studies would exist historically, in a setting where academics may not consider women worth studying. [To be clear: I'm not saying that women's studies is some kind of objectively valid hard-proof field of study or whatever. I do think however it is true that historically women have been excluded in academic study populations, which might explain why there may have been a legitimate desire to have a field of study for that underserved population.]
      - Veen 4y ago
        > historically women have been excluded in academic study populations That may have once been true, but it is no longer the case. Since the 90s, women have earned more post-graduate qualifications than men. Women have parity in obtaining medical doctorates. They dominate the medical and life sciences, the humanities, psychology and social sciences, human resources, education, veterinary medicine, and many other fields. Computer science and some other math and engineering disciplines are rare exceptions. https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure-12-percentage-us-medical-school-graduates-sex-academic-years-1980-1981-through-2018-2019 https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data... https://www.statista.com/statistics/185160/number-of-masters-degrees-by-gender-since-1950/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/185160/number-of-masters... https://www.zippia.com/biological-scientist-jobs/demographics/ https://www.zippia.com/biological-scientist-jobs/demographic... https://www.vetxinternational.com/male-vs-female-veterinarians-how-the-sexes-compare-in-veterinary-care/ https://www.vetxinternational.com/male-vs-female-veterinaria... https://www.statista.com/statistics/240141/us-doctorate-recipients-by-gender-and-field-of-study/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/240141/us-doctorate-reci...
overthemoon 4y ago
I've wrestled with this since I graduated in '08 with an English degree from a shit school and far, far too much debt. Still, you can't put a price on what I learned. My thinking changed fundamentally. The world opened up. It's a rich field, connected to history, politics, philosophy, and more. I had wonderful professors and the epiphanies I had in their classes I will cherish forever. Life without art is not really life. After I graduated, I was in so much debt I became suicidally depressed. I thought my future was over. (I ended up learning to program and got a job doing that, instead.) The outlook that reduces education in the abstract to its ROI is bleak; the refusal to descend into the real world and consider the economics of education is naive and useless. I've given a lot of thought about what I'll advise my son to do, assuming he listens to me. It's true that he could always read any books in his free time, but that would leave out the discussion, writing, and instruction, which are indispensable. I do NOT want him going into a horrible amount of debt for it, or miss out on a career that will actually support him. But I want so much for him to have something like the mental and cultural enrichment I got to have, whose effects are hard to even explain because they've touched every part of my life. I don't have an answer yet.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  The answer is to do a double major in Computer Science and English.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    You've never seen such beautiful word choice and phrasing in a git commit
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    I did a Poli-Sci degree with a minor in IT. Work in IT full-time now, but worked in a few different (wildly different, in some cases) fields before then. Worked out alright, definitely see the differences when working on the architect / manager / principle engineer -- the highly technical types only see tech.
buescher 4y ago
Stands to reason. Most of the working population is borderline illiterate in English anyway, why would anyone want to major in it? One thing some of the STEM-is-the-only-way-to-keep-the-wolves-from-the-door advocates might not realize is that generally at top schools humanities majors have to write a lot, which is good preparation for, well, anything that involves writing, ranging from writing for the hell of it to law and business consulting. Not a bad life if you can wrangle it.
boredumb 4y ago
Considering the PR for most humanities majors being paraded around is that you can become a full time activist and work for a government institution or non profit it's no surprise as people in general are becoming increasingly annoyed with the non-stop pearl-clutching activist caricature being portrayed in all aspects of society, that people aren't lining up to make less money and be around people that the general populous abhors.
lapcat 4y ago
As a former graduate student in the humanities, this part really struck me: > Today, the academic profession of the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then, years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the discipline. > of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track Of course, not everyone who majors in the humanities as an undergrad needs to go on to a career in academia, but it was a hope, a dream for many. Now there's seemingly no hope, and thus no reason for academically-inclined people to pursue it, when only the very lucky few survive. The students who would be most enthusiastic about the humanities are scared away by the hopelessness and lack of investment. Humanities are becoming a dead end not only in terms of getting a job in industry but also in terms of getting a job in academia. Indeed, ironically, a humanities degree may end up being more useful now for industry than for academia.
fmajid 4y ago
The English major, as with most humanities, is a Veblen good. It is socially valuable precisely because it is useless, by getting one you are demonstrating your family is so rich you need not trifle with the petty concerns of the hoi polloi like getting a job. It doesn't help that in the turf battles between university departments, clout comes with enrollment and so they have incentives to exaggerate the career opportunities available to gullible post-grads. We have mandatory nutrition labels on food, it's long past universities were required to give objective numbers on career opportunities and salaries for the various majors.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
When college, medical and housing are as expensive as they are in the US, is it a surprise that people want to do everything in their power to avoid becoming destitute? There is no obvious path to middle class prosperity with a degree in English, but you'd almost have to try to not reach a comfortable living as a programmer. At some point your aspirations of being a well-rounded well-read cosmopolite have to take a back seat to not being one mistake away from medical bankruptcy, to not spending half of your life paying off your school loans, and to being able to afford a home and a family without 14 hour Uber shifts. We crank out something like 25,000 history majors every year in the US. At the same time there are (don't quote me on this) only 1000 jobs in the whole country that require a history degree. Everybody else will have to end up doing something entirely unrelated to history.
karaterobot 4y ago
I wouldn't blame STEM. English departments did this to themselves when they bought into post-structuralism and postmodernism and so on, and in so doing tacitly assented to the proposition that they themselves could have nothing valuable to teach, because there wasn't any concrete truth to be had. After that, English just became a centrifuge where the core ideas lost cohesion, and everything flew outward to more and more distant, disconnected edges. There is no discipline of English to study at this point. When I enrolled in 2000, I thought "well, I already know how to program, I can always get a job in software. Let's see what a liberal arts education can teach me," but even back then it was all about problematizing, casuistry, and twisted little factions of hateful goblins ruling over their tiny kingdoms. Nobody was teaching how to really read and comprehend a text, other than a couple of ancient Associate Professors who would never, ever make tenure. Nowadays, I'm sure that breed is nearly extinct, and I can't even imagine what's left. It could have just been my university, but nothing I've seen (including this article) makes me think that was an isolated case. For the record, English has a ton of value in the software industry. Programming is easy enough, you can just learn that on your own. On the other hand, reading comprehension and critical thinking are incredibly rare in our industry, and they are differentiators. The problem for English departments is that they don't teach these very well anymore, and you'd be better off just learning them yourself as well.
- lapcat 4y ago
  This is a stretch. The article title says English, but there's a lot more to the humanities than just English. The article talks about how history for example has also dropped considerably.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I only studied English, and cannot speak to other branches of the humanities. My comment was pretty clearly about my own experience.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      You only studied some English, at one department, at one point in time in past, and then go on to claim, waving broadly, "There is no discipline of English to study at this point."

77 points by gbjw 4y ago

https://archive.ph/m3y8B https://archive.ph/m3y8B

>“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.” Are the standards to get into university that low?

SergioAlonso09 4y ago
[dead]
throwaway1777 4y ago
If standards are this low we need English requirements in university more than ever.
xenon7 4y ago
Yes. I'm guessing it's because nearly every American needs to go to college nowadays (sure, there are other options, but college is the most practical) and as a result they had to lower standards. I mean, I've heard that some universities don't even require SAT/ACT scores anymore. That doesn't mean that "prestigious" universities don't exist, but generally speaking they've really dumbed-down things a lot.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  The college diploma is yet another victim of Goodhart's law.
- justinator 4y ago
  Even 20 years ago, I had a class that was struggling to get through the introduction of a book. We spent a few weeks on it. I became frustrated and just checked the book out of the library and read it entirely one afternoon. It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    …if they had dyscalculia, they'd be studying elementary ed.
- watwut 4y ago
  42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
  - xenon7 4y ago
    It's really that low? Ah, my bad. That's surprising to me.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      And 41% is just enrollment -- many will never finish. Maybe 30% of the US actually holds any sort of degree.
bell-cot 4y ago
Important context - that quote is attributed thus: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor". Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...
- modernpink 4y ago
  Not to mention __________ ______.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Rorschach tests?
  - CrazyStat 4y ago
    Student athletes?
    - econonut 4y ago
      Affirmative action.
      - CrazyStat 4y ago
        Major donors?
        econonut 4y ago
        My extensive hangman experience leads me to believe that's not what the commenter is suggesting.
        Apocryphon 4y ago
        Legacy admissions?
alistairSH 4y ago
And that's at Harvard! Wow. "The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
When I graduated university, it was very clear to me that my peers couldn't communicate adequately at that time. A lot of essays are effectively cheated on and the students are taught mostly to pad as opposed to have serious consideration and thought on the literature. None of this contributes to mastering structure or craft in any way. There's a lot of pressure to graduate students by parents/the board/local government, especially in highschool, especially when English is continually marginalized as a field of study. Where do you, an English teacher at highschool, get off failing a rising star athlete, young mathematician, engineering passionate, or any number of categories that is "worth more" than the capacity to read and write intelligently?
jakeinspace 4y ago
To be fair, I found that an extremely tedious book, probably my least favorite required high school reading.
siva7 4y ago
Standards can also act as a gatekeeper, discriminating against the underprivileged. So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor.
- Ambolia 4y ago
  I suppose this is trolling, but if it's not everybody doesn't really "get a change", you are just turning an english major into a different thing while keeping the name and trying to keep the prestige, though that won't last for long.
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  > So i'm glad that everyone gets the same chance, if rich or poor. They don't, though? > The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult. From a NYTimes analysis [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
browningstreet 4y ago
Based on my son's freshman year at a big university, all the 101 and 102 classes assume no prior knowledge, of almost anything. Grammar, the desktop/filesystem metaphor (which, I'm told, a whole lot of students still didn't understand even after spend a couple of classes on these basics), what a cell is, and in physics classes... what a proton is. Just to name a few examples.
- 98codes 4y ago
  We can thank iOS and Android for the death of desktop/filesystem knowledge for people at large. Universities will need to start requiring a General Computing course to close that gap, if they aren't already.
codeulike 4y ago
For context, the Scarlet Letter is pretty annoying. Halfway through each of these sentences I feel myself losing patience A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
- kemayo 4y ago
  Definitely a pain if you're trying to teach it in a sentence-diagramming kind of way. That said, I kind of wonder why you'd be bothering to do that unless the kids are literally not able to understand what's being said and you need to work through it from first principles. (Which I guess is possible? That all reads as a bit of a ramble but perfectly understandable, particularly if you read it out loud.) For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.
pdntspa 4y ago
A lot of pre-20th century writing is absolutely awful. Long, pretentious, rambling run-on sentences and authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice. My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Leo Tolstoy would like a word with you.
  - randcraw 4y ago
    Or several.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Funnily enough, it kind of applies to this article too.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  I agree. Scarlet Letter is an example on how not to write. It is steam of consciousness without a modicum of merit. I don't think I learned anything from it. I read half of the book and was completely lost on what the author was trying to say. Maybe that was the author's point. But the writing is god awful. Below is a passage where the dude who got Hester pregnant confessed? Or is it her husband who felt cheated? Uggh. Who cares. “Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Yes they are. Kids in lower schools are generally not taught how to read or write well at all. When they do read books, the books are either distilled into key ideas in class (so you don't really have to read them aside from the occasional quiz) or very easy reading material. When they write, it's usually a "5-paragraph" essay that is more about regurgitating the distilled points than any form of original thought. That is, if they don't cheat on the essay. I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter." By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing. A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.
SL61 4y ago
Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes. Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up. Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load. Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade. Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  I'm sure I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I heard that undergrads were using ChatGPT to write essays my first instinct was to wonder how university standards had gotten so low that a generated essay would not simply be dismissed as a feeble attempt. 500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?
  - notafraudster 4y ago
    It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy). One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion. The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be. I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD. So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.
dkarl 4y ago
My father taught at a local state university, nowhere near state flagship level but still a "university" in name, and he occasionally had kids in class who were close to functionally illiterate. His reading for the semester was very light (something you would get through in a competitive university in a week) but from helping kids who came to his office he could tell it would have been a hundred hours of reading for some of them, even if they skipped all the words they didn't know. I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free. Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.
- notafraudster 4y ago
  A lot of colleges now have what amount to transition classes for high school kids who can't hack it in college. The upside of these is that they seem to actually help students who went to shitty high schools or who needed a change of environment. The downside is that typically they don't count for credit but they still cost money.
  - bitwize 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cafard 4y ago
The impression that I get from my brother, who teaches as an adjunct at a couple of state schools in the Midwest, is that yes the standards are that low.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"having trouble identifying the subject and the verb" In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.
imbnwa 4y ago
My Philosphy 101 was me having a conversation with the grad student lecturer over Plato's dialogues. After class one day, this STEM student, likely taking the course for the easy credit as I don't believe anyone failed the course, asked me "How do you read this stuff?" in what I interpreted as a mixed tone of condescension ("why would you read this stuff") and surprise ("how do you read this stuff"). Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints. Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.
disambiguation 4y ago
>Are the standards to get into university that low? Universities aren't what they used to be. In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1] In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2] [1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifications-for-daycare-workers https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica... [2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-reformation-1221776 https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...

garbagecoder 4y ago

[dead]

lordleft 4y ago

I've encountered people who gleefully celebrate this ("why would you study something so 'useless'?") -- but surely a genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests, instead of funneling them into the same roles? Isn't this a failure of political economics?

f1yght 4y ago
It's also unfortunate that majors that teach people how to write and think critically are panned. Those are very useful skills and give people a better ability in normal life. I understand college is so expensive that people feel a need for it to prepare you for a job, but I still hold onto the ideal that college should be a place that allows people to grow as a person and learn to communicate and think.
- hcayless 4y ago
  This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.
  - eldaisfish 4y ago
    a key point is that these skills - soft skills if you will - can be learned on the job, even with minimal background knowledge. It is much harder to learn programming or electrical engineering on the job if you lack the educational base. Communication is a critical skill today as are information skills. Truly sad that they are often derided as being worth less than technical skills.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - eldaisfish 4y ago

thucydides 4y ago

https://archive.is/m3y8B https://archive.is/m3y8B to break out of the paywall

apodolny 4y ago

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams[1] [1] https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...

dmos62 4y ago
I'd add that if any of those generations fails, the next will have to study politics and war again.
- awb 4y ago
  Even if it succeeds they have to study it. There are very few examples of countries that have survived without a military.
awb 4y ago
Reading between the lines I’m sure he meant that they could study those arts in addition to those fundamental studies listed prior. A nation devoted to poetry and porcelain isn’t sustainable. And certainly he must have been aware of how cyclical history is versus a linear march towards artistic pursuits. The US since it’s inception has been involved in a significant war in nearly every decade. Post-Vietnam through the 1st Iraq war was one of the rare periods where a US citizen could have been of military age without a major hot war. Although the Cold War certainly brought it’s own level of fear.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Switzerland has been war free in 171 of the last 176 years. It can be done, just not if you plan on being a major power.
  - awb 4y ago

jdkee 4y ago

Many humanities departments went fully woke over the past decade and that alienates students. See purity spirals.

weakfish 4y ago
Can you back this claim up?
- jdkee 4y ago
  Yes I can.
  - acc_297 4y ago
    but will you?
    - kylereeve 4y ago
      They can never back up these claims, it's always just a feeling they have based on the right wing outrage bait they consume.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
Humanities departments have been hyper-liberal since the 70s. The only thing that's changed is what hyper-liberal means (much the same as hyper conservative now implies the MAGA militia). Society has polarized, in large part because the two party system each party wants to differentiate itself, and first past the post voting with party primaries rewards extremists.

Scubabear68 4y ago

I know my wife majored in English in the 90’s, when she graduated the job prospects were very weak. She got a job in book publishing that was barely above minimum wage. She hated it so much that she went back to school to become a physical therapist, and she had been happily doing that for decades. So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?

newsclues 4y ago
"So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?" Yes, publishing and communications professions can be perfect for English majors. But how many jobs vs how many applicants is the problem.
- Scubabear68 4y ago
  This is more or less what I was getting at. They’re some very nice jobs at the Editor level, but damn few of them. Many people seem to have to settle for peripheral jobs (my wife was in the physical book manufacturing and shipping end) that pays about as well as Burger King.
vitaflo 4y ago
My college roommate was an English major. Now he is a professor of English at a university and is quite happy with it. Of course the joke always was that he was majoring in English to teach future majors in English.
- cpr 4y ago
  That's the dirty secret of the whole education-leading-to-PhD system -- it's only real and useful purpose is to create more educators.
mrguyorama 4y ago
A lot of popular youtube content creators have english or literature degrees actually. It's almost like being really good at writing for a given audience, and being able to write stuff that will be interpreted as genuine and good is a useful tool that we really should be using more. Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.

TrackerFF 4y ago

The sad truth is that if you want to make big bucks with a humanities degree alone, you should go to a prestigious / top school, get your degree, and then join the workforce doing something completely different.

modernpink 4y ago

Are we possibly becoming a post-English society in the same sense that we became post-Latin? Latin was once the language you needed to know to access knowledge and learning. Now it is of little use to most outside of the Classics. In the future it will be possible to conduct science without full literacy. With the rise of large language models, apps, APIs, handheld computation, video content, and finger gestures, it seems that our daily interface with the world is moving from logocentrism. Furthermore, with the coming abundance of generated junk text from generative models, the relative value of language (English) looks to continue to diminish.

somenameforme 4y ago
Or perhaps we are simply seeing the emergence of the Eloi and the Merlocks.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Good. 18 year olds shouldn't be given the option to put themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for no career prospects. I absolutely understand the point of view of the top comments saying that it people should be allowed to pursue their interests, and I agree, but it shouldn't come to the detriment of the basic quality of life of people that are barely old enough to take those decisions. The title of the article is perfect. It's the end of the English MAJOR. Study it as a Minor. Go back to school at 40 once you have your career built if that's what you want. But don't shoot yourself in both feet when you're 18. Otherwise I should have been allowed to do - and be respected for doing - a Major in video game playing and TV series watching, because that's where my interests laid when I finished highschool.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

The issue is that humanities majors should be priced differently than other classes. The fact that "pre-professional" path classes cost the same as "frivolous" classes didn't matter much when college didn't cost THAT much. Now? It's a stark decision of cost-benefit analysis. I almost think that humanities need to be like hermit satellite institutions attached to the universities. You know, like universities were back in the day. Reduced expectations of funding and costs for attending those. The university gets the prestige, but doesn't have to shoulder as much cost. Or, they are separately endowed. Humanities don't need the management that college administration uses to justify its explosive expansion. It doesn't have grants and all that. It just needs classrooms, some offices, and libraries. The dorms can be old-school if you want, part of the "academic experience". The rest of the university, with its sport facilities, lavish living quarters, frats, grant-seeking labs, etc, whatever. Go exist. Over there. Grade inflation, cheatable classes, over there. So there's two university experiences: the one where people go to get the job rubberstamp, and much cheaper but traditional (as in millenia old) experience of actual academic interest. Those can have separate admissions criteria. I guess this is like what graduate students go through, which is what "real college" is kind of like, but why not provide a track that bypasses the crappy undergrad phase for those students (and they do exist) that demonstrate the academic interest? The key difference is that grad students have a massive undergrad debt, but then in grad school pay nothing or get paid subsistence wages. Let's get rid of the massive undergrad debt for those that actually demonstrate academic interest. And let's be real, even in places like Harvard, that is probably a small minority of people going there.

VLM 4y ago
The problem is we already have that. The market has spoken and if you get that English degree from Yale you'll be permitted to get one of the few jobs in the field with decent pay, but if you get the same degree from the same curriculum from reading the same texts and the same research journals at the state satellite campus down the road from my house, that more or less fully implements your suggestion, there are no jobs after graduation beyond Starbucks or maybe selling real estate. The price of the state satellite campus is lower than sticker for ivy leagues, but its still too high. The real mystery is why non-credit Japanese taught by the same instructor in the same room using the same text and same syllabus on a different night of the week has a tuition of $45 but the for-credit class version of the same class is around $2K. I would guess the ivy league tuition equivalent of the same class would be $15K? The irony is the grads of all three expense levels are roughly equally skilled.

koops 4y ago

People who went to Harvard always manage to slyly communicate they went to Harvard. Including the author of this article. Good for you, dear!

Apocryphon 4y ago
An English degree from Harvard is nearly adjacent to the trajectory of Conan O'Brien. One should be so proud. This person could have written for the Lampoon.

stephenboyd 4y ago

If the future of AI is LLMs like ChatGPT, which are trained on literature and other things that people create, you're going to need humanities scholars like you need computer scientists to understand the AI. Microsoft gave their chatbot, which has probably almost every published work of science fiction in its training set, a human name and then were surprised that it imitated the fictional poorly-behaved named AIs that it was exposed to in its training.

cm2012 4y ago

English majors (and other liberal arts majors) do not build "critical thinking" any better than science majors. That skillset comes down to your natural intelligence and curiosity.

never_inline 4y ago
It's funny because at least where I live, critical thinking is (rightly) associated with STEM. STEM is also harder for affluent people to get in without putting in work.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  You can't bullshit your way through a math test.
- ismokedoinks 4y ago
  I think you're expressing an unhealthy resentment here. I work as a SWE and I appreciate the critical thinking involved in the types of problems I get to solve. I'm also in graduate school for something that often borders on humanities and I am amazed at the complexity of thought that goes into the field due to how limitless the scope is and the way in which the humanity of the field allows anybody to participate. The STEM students I teach often struggle with exactly that, as well as with having well-developed communication skills. Turns out that choosing either STEM or humanities and forsaking the other leaves students deficient.
  - never_inline 4y ago
    > I think you're expressing an unhealthy resentment here. Just an observation. In a developing country anyone with better academic performance is compelled to pursue fields that pay well. So that statistically skews the other fields to people of lower academic performance up to high school. Academic performance correlates to cognitive abilities. STEM grads I see around me have no problem with communication or anything a humanities degree claims to "teach". I think it all boils down to people and their cognitive abilities. Second factor is subjectiveness of humanities fields; in STEM fields there are often objective measurements. It's much easier to bullshit your way to and through a non-STEM degree, especially when you have money and background. Edit: I have heard "humanities" as solution to engineers not writing proper docs or bug reports. That is missing the real reason, which is pretty boring. We don't have conceptual foundations of many things we use. Fresh grads even more so, due to abysmal education system.

blakesterz 4y ago

This was written 7 years ago and I think works pretty well as a response to this new one from The New Yorker. The End of the English Major? Not So Fast (April 13, 2015) https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/end-english-major-not-so-fast https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/end-engli...

trollerator23 4y ago

Good.

65 4y ago

> It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk. This is the most annoying sentence I've ever read.

theandrewbailey 4y ago
It sounds like the journalist set out to be a novelist, but had to settle for something else.
wankle 4y ago
I agree, it reads like an ill-fated attempt at parody.

darth_avocado 4y ago

> Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened? It costs too much and the jobs you get out of college (if you get one) are paying way too low. English has been one of the most popular majors in the last decade, but unfortunately the economy cannot meaningfully employ as many English majors. So people end up in careers that are completely unrelated. On the better side, sales and marketing jobs hire them, on the worse, a receptionist or barista. You can actually go to a trade school and come out better off on the other side.

jmclnx 4y ago
There was a time where almost everyone majoring in liberal Arts could make a decent living. They were viewed as educated and had an open door to almost any career. I knew many liberal Art majors who ended up programming and as tech writers in the early days, never mind sales/marketing. And I am sure quite a few ended up in Business due to their learned communication skills. Also, I had Uncles (non college) who worked selling carpets, worked in grocery stores who were able to afford a very nice life. They were able to put their children through college. But since the early 80s, those jobs are now a race to the bottom. Now it seems you are hired only if you are pigeon holed into a specific career, and if that career path becomes obsolete, you are SOL.
- klooney 4y ago
  That only worked because college was a finishing school for the well brought up (plus the occasional striver), and businesses felt comfortable just trying to hire that demographic. It doesn't work if businesses are trying to hire based on qualifications, and if half of all young workers have a college degree.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > I knew many liberal Art majors who ended up programming and as tech writers in the early days In the early days no one could hire people who had degrees in these fields, because the university courses didn't exist. So they had to go further afield. Also in these early days fewer people had college degrees. You were hiring the social (and sometimes intellectual) elite whenever you hired anyone with any degree.

throwawayacc5 4y ago

"Women's studies lost eighty per cent." I welcome this change. The less grievance studies majors there are, the better off society will be.

fknorangesite 4y ago
Truly; there is only the experiences of one half of humanity worth studying.
- Veen 4y ago
  Women's Studies isn't an academic discipline at all. It's an activist community masquerading as an academic discipline.
- slothtrop 4y ago
  Is that how you'd describe every other major, studying males?
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Actually, I think male bias is a problem in other academic fields. For example, we spent a long time thinking girls rarely have ADHD or Autism, and didn't even test drugs on women in case they might be pregnant. It's important to take a critical and objective look on why a women's studies would exist historically, in a setting where academics may not consider women worth studying. [To be clear: I'm not saying that women's studies is some kind of objectively valid hard-proof field of study or whatever. I do think however it is true that historically women have been excluded in academic study populations, which might explain why there may have been a legitimate desire to have a field of study for that underserved population.]
    - Veen 4y ago
      > historically women have been excluded in academic study populations That may have once been true, but it is no longer the case. Since the 90s, women have earned more post-graduate qualifications than men. Women have parity in obtaining medical doctorates. They dominate the medical and life sciences, the humanities, psychology and social sciences, human resources, education, veterinary medicine, and many other fields. Computer science and some other math and engineering disciplines are rare exceptions. https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure-12-percentage-us-medical-school-graduates-sex-academic-years-1980-1981-through-2018-2019 https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data... https://www.statista.com/statistics/185160/number-of-masters-degrees-by-gender-since-1950/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/185160/number-of-masters... https://www.zippia.com/biological-scientist-jobs/demographics/ https://www.zippia.com/biological-scientist-jobs/demographic... https://www.vetxinternational.com/male-vs-female-veterinarians-how-the-sexes-compare-in-veterinary-care/ https://www.vetxinternational.com/male-vs-female-veterinaria... https://www.statista.com/statistics/240141/us-doctorate-recipients-by-gender-and-field-of-study/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/240141/us-doctorate-reci...

overthemoon 4y ago

I've wrestled with this since I graduated in '08 with an English degree from a shit school and far, far too much debt. Still, you can't put a price on what I learned. My thinking changed fundamentally. The world opened up. It's a rich field, connected to history, politics, philosophy, and more. I had wonderful professors and the epiphanies I had in their classes I will cherish forever. Life without art is not really life. After I graduated, I was in so much debt I became suicidally depressed. I thought my future was over. (I ended up learning to program and got a job doing that, instead.) The outlook that reduces education in the abstract to its ROI is bleak; the refusal to descend into the real world and consider the economics of education is naive and useless. I've given a lot of thought about what I'll advise my son to do, assuming he listens to me. It's true that he could always read any books in his free time, but that would leave out the discussion, writing, and instruction, which are indispensable. I do NOT want him going into a horrible amount of debt for it, or miss out on a career that will actually support him. But I want so much for him to have something like the mental and cultural enrichment I got to have, whose effects are hard to even explain because they've touched every part of my life. I don't have an answer yet.

roncesvalles 4y ago
The answer is to do a double major in Computer Science and English.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  You've never seen such beautiful word choice and phrasing in a git commit
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  I did a Poli-Sci degree with a minor in IT. Work in IT full-time now, but worked in a few different (wildly different, in some cases) fields before then. Worked out alright, definitely see the differences when working on the architect / manager / principle engineer -- the highly technical types only see tech.

buescher 4y ago

Stands to reason. Most of the working population is borderline illiterate in English anyway, why would anyone want to major in it? One thing some of the STEM-is-the-only-way-to-keep-the-wolves-from-the-door advocates might not realize is that generally at top schools humanities majors have to write a lot, which is good preparation for, well, anything that involves writing, ranging from writing for the hell of it to law and business consulting. Not a bad life if you can wrangle it.

boredumb 4y ago

Considering the PR for most humanities majors being paraded around is that you can become a full time activist and work for a government institution or non profit it's no surprise as people in general are becoming increasingly annoyed with the non-stop pearl-clutching activist caricature being portrayed in all aspects of society, that people aren't lining up to make less money and be around people that the general populous abhors.

lapcat 4y ago

As a former graduate student in the humanities, this part really struck me: > Today, the academic profession of the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then, years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the discipline. > of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track Of course, not everyone who majors in the humanities as an undergrad needs to go on to a career in academia, but it was a hope, a dream for many. Now there's seemingly no hope, and thus no reason for academically-inclined people to pursue it, when only the very lucky few survive. The students who would be most enthusiastic about the humanities are scared away by the hopelessness and lack of investment. Humanities are becoming a dead end not only in terms of getting a job in industry but also in terms of getting a job in academia. Indeed, ironically, a humanities degree may end up being more useful now for industry than for academia.

fmajid 4y ago

The English major, as with most humanities, is a Veblen good. It is socially valuable precisely because it is useless, by getting one you are demonstrating your family is so rich you need not trifle with the petty concerns of the hoi polloi like getting a job. It doesn't help that in the turf battles between university departments, clout comes with enrollment and so they have incentives to exaggerate the career opportunities available to gullible post-grads. We have mandatory nutrition labels on food, it's long past universities were required to give objective numbers on career opportunities and salaries for the various majors.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

When college, medical and housing are as expensive as they are in the US, is it a surprise that people want to do everything in their power to avoid becoming destitute? There is no obvious path to middle class prosperity with a degree in English, but you'd almost have to try to not reach a comfortable living as a programmer. At some point your aspirations of being a well-rounded well-read cosmopolite have to take a back seat to not being one mistake away from medical bankruptcy, to not spending half of your life paying off your school loans, and to being able to afford a home and a family without 14 hour Uber shifts. We crank out something like 25,000 history majors every year in the US. At the same time there are (don't quote me on this) only 1000 jobs in the whole country that require a history degree. Everybody else will have to end up doing something entirely unrelated to history.

karaterobot 4y ago

I wouldn't blame STEM. English departments did this to themselves when they bought into post-structuralism and postmodernism and so on, and in so doing tacitly assented to the proposition that they themselves could have nothing valuable to teach, because there wasn't any concrete truth to be had. After that, English just became a centrifuge where the core ideas lost cohesion, and everything flew outward to more and more distant, disconnected edges. There is no discipline of English to study at this point. When I enrolled in 2000, I thought "well, I already know how to program, I can always get a job in software. Let's see what a liberal arts education can teach me," but even back then it was all about problematizing, casuistry, and twisted little factions of hateful goblins ruling over their tiny kingdoms. Nobody was teaching how to really read and comprehend a text, other than a couple of ancient Associate Professors who would never, ever make tenure. Nowadays, I'm sure that breed is nearly extinct, and I can't even imagine what's left. It could have just been my university, but nothing I've seen (including this article) makes me think that was an isolated case. For the record, English has a ton of value in the software industry. Programming is easy enough, you can just learn that on your own. On the other hand, reading comprehension and critical thinking are incredibly rare in our industry, and they are differentiators. The problem for English departments is that they don't teach these very well anymore, and you'd be better off just learning them yourself as well.

lapcat 4y ago
This is a stretch. The article title says English, but there's a lot more to the humanities than just English. The article talks about how history for example has also dropped considerably.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I only studied English, and cannot speak to other branches of the humanities. My comment was pretty clearly about my own experience.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    You only studied some English, at one department, at one point in time in past, and then go on to claim, waving broadly, "There is no discipline of English to study at this point."