The End of the English Major

&quot;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.&quot; - John Adams[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.masshist.org&#x2F;digitaladams&#x2F;archive&#x2F;doc?id=L17800512jasecond" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.masshist.org&#x2F;digitaladams&#x2F;archive&#x2F;doc?id=L178005...</a>

I&#x27;ve wrestled with this since I graduated in &#x27;08 with an English degree from a shit school and far, far too much debt. Still, you can&#x27;t put a price on what I learned. My thinking changed fundamentally. The world opened up. It&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;ve given a lot of thought about what I&#x27;ll advise my son to do, assuming he listens to me. It&#x27;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&#x27;ve touched every part of my life. I don&#x27;t have an answer yet.

&gt; Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?<p>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.

&gt;“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.”<p>Are the standards to get into university that low?

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

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.<p>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.<p>So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?

&quot;Women&#x27;s studies lost eighty per cent.&quot;<p>I welcome this change. The less grievance studies majors there are, the better off society will be.

Stands to reason. Most of the working population is borderline illiterate in English anyway, why would anyone want to major in it?<p>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 <i>lot</i>, 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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t lining up to make less money and be around people that the general populous abhors.

&gt; It was late autumn, and the sunsets came in like flame on thin paper on the way to dusk.<p>This is the most annoying sentence I&#x27;ve ever read.

I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>When I enrolled in 2000, I thought &quot;well, I already know how to program, I can always get a job in software. Let&#x27;s see what a liberal arts education can teach me,&quot; 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&#x27;m sure that breed is nearly extinct, and I can&#x27;t even imagine what&#x27;s left. It could have just been my university, but nothing I&#x27;ve seen (including this article) makes me think that was an isolated case.<p>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&#x27;t teach these very well anymore, and you&#x27;d be better off just learning them yourself as well.

The sad truth is that if you want to make big bucks with a humanities degree alone, you should go to a prestigious &#x2F; top school, get your degree, and then join the workforce doing something completely different.

This was written 7 years ago and I think works pretty well as a response to this new one from The New Yorker.<p>The End of the English Major? Not So Fast (April 13, 2015)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;just-visiting&#x2F;end-english-major-not-so-fast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insidehighered.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;just-visiting&#x2F;end-engli...</a>

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&#x27;d almost have to try to not reach a comfortable living as a programmer.<p>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.<p>We crank out something like 25,000 history majors every year in the US. At the same time there are (don&#x27;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.

As a former graduate student in the humanities, this part really struck me:<p>&gt; 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.<p>&gt; of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track<p>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&#x27;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.

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

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.<p>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.

I&#x27;ve encountered people who gleefully celebrate this (&quot;why would you study something so &#x27;useless&#x27;?&quot;) -- but surely a genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests, instead of funneling them into the same roles? Isn&#x27;t this a failure of political economics?

If the future of AI is LLMs like ChatGPT, which are trained on literature and other things that people create, you&#x27;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.

The issue is that humanities majors should be priced differently than other classes. The fact that &quot;pre-professional&quot; path classes cost the same as &quot;frivolous&quot; classes didn&#x27;t matter much when college didn&#x27;t cost THAT much.<p>Now? It&#x27;s a stark decision of cost-benefit analysis.<p>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&#x27;t have to shoulder as much cost. Or, they are separately endowed.<p>Humanities don&#x27;t need the management that college administration uses to justify its explosive expansion. It doesn&#x27;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 &quot;academic experience&quot;.<p>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.<p>So there&#x27;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.<p>I guess this is like what graduate students go through, which is what &quot;real college&quot; 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.<p>Let&#x27;s get rid of the massive undergrad debt for those that actually demonstrate academic interest. And let&#x27;s be real, even in places like Harvard, that is probably a small minority of people going there.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;m3y8B" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;m3y8B</a> to break out of the paywall

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;m3y8B" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;m3y8B</a>

Good.

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

The English major, as with most humanities, is a Veblen good. It is socially valuable <i>precisely because it is useless</i>, by getting one you are demonstrating your family is so rich you need not trifle with the petty concerns of the <i>hoi polloi</i> like getting a job.<p>It doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s long past universities were required to give objective numbers on career opportunities and salaries for the various majors.

Good. 18 year olds shouldn&#x27;t be given the option to put themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for no career prospects.<p>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&#x27;t come to the detriment of the basic quality of life of people that are barely old enough to take those decisions.<p>The title of the article is perfect. It&#x27;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&#x27;s what you want. But don&#x27;t shoot yourself in both feet when you&#x27;re 18.<p>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&#x27;s where my interests laid when I finished highschool.