The Greatly Exaggerated Death of the English Major (and How To Save It)

It's a story I feel like I've read before.

The New Yorker's attention-grabbing headline summarizes their long feature which explores the decade-long decline of English majors (and students majoring in humanities overall) at college campuses across the country. The data paints a bleak picture.

"During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third."

The article presents every theory that has been offered to explain this decline, from the rise of smartphones and addictive technology that makes us stupider, to concerns about AI taking over writing jobs, to the very real desire and pressure on students to pursue a degree that will supposedly lead to better job prospects. Yet still on the surface, professors and administrators alike are finding the trend hard to understand:

"English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak."

Perhaps most worrisome is one professor's theory that "students [are] arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach." The flow of funding is also a factor, as schools increasingly funnel dollars toward STEM majors and more "in-demand" industries such as cybersecurity.

The problem, as one student noted, is that those classes are often filled with "just people trying to learn something to get a job." I'm a former English major myself, and have benefitted greatly from the way of thinking and skills I learned by doing that. So, yes, I would love to suggest a way to save the English major and other humanities majors too.

The solution won't come from higher education, though. It can only come from the rest of us who have the power and opportunity to celebrate those majors and hire the students who chose to do them.

Employers say they want team members who think for themselves, are creative and understand how to communicate. You could easily argue that these are all strengths of humanities majors. If technology will ultimately help make our lives better, we will also need a new generation of leaders and teammates who understand ethics and carefully consider the implications of the innovations they unleash upon the world.

The world, in short, needs English and humanities majors. It's up to all of us to do the things that will prove that to the young people who are choosing their majors right now. Otherwise the future will have much bigger problems than shrinking college English departments.