… [H]umanities majors—which traditionally made up one-third of all degrees awarded at top liberal-arts colleges as recently as 2011—have fallen to well under a quarter. Meanwhile, at elite research universities the share of humanities degrees has dropped from 17 percent a decade ago to just 11 percent today.
“This wasn’t a gradual decline; it was more like a tidal wave,” says Brian C. Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College. The Minnesota campus, which is well known for its international-studies program, has “never been a science-first liberal-arts college,” Rosenberg said. But now 41 percent of its graduates complete a major in a stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field. That’s up from 27 percent only a decade ago….
To avoid further slippage in humanities majors, elite colleges and universities have resorted to an all-out campaign to convince students that such degrees aren’t just tickets to jobs as bartenders and Starbucks baristas. Colleges are starting early with that push. Stanford University writes letters and sends brochures to top-notch high-school students with an interest in the humanities to encourage them to apply, says Debra Satz, the dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. Prospective students can also take humanities classes at Stanford while still in high school.
What’s puzzling to the college officials I spoke to is that they say students’ interest in humanities majors remains high during the college-search process, according to what students indicate on their applications. Then something happens between when students apply and when they actually declare a major, usually in their sophomore year. Perhaps students’ intentions on their applications weren’t serious, but if they were, Satz says it’s critical that humanities courses in the freshman year capture their attention.
h/t David Hildreth
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