The flight of the humanities: not-so-news from the Twin Cities. From the article:

Over the past decade at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, the number of history majors has dropped 30 percent; English majors 52 percent; and art history majors 63 percent. (The total student enrollment over that period has remained roughly flat.)  

“This is a flight of students,” says Ascan Koerner, associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Liberal Arts at the U of M–Twin Cities.

Where are they going? At the U of M’s College of Liberal Arts, they’re flooding economics, which has 2.4 times as many students as it did in 2009, and statistics, which has 6.6 times as many students. At all of Minnesota’s four-year institutions, they’re headed to health sciences with an increase of 31 percent; information technology with an increase of 60 percent; and America’s teacher’s pet, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), which has notched an increase of 30 percent….

The handwringing and haranguing of liberal arts deans (and novelists) won’t repopulate those survey courses in Caribbean literature. But U of M Morris students Sarah Severson and Bailey Kemp may have cracked the code. The junior and senior double-majored in English and a  science (chemistry or biology). And they say that academic sequence helped prepare them for an original research project on hypoplastic left-heart syndrome. 

“We started synthesizing, looking for patterns appearing across the literature,” Severson says. “This is where our humanities background came in.” Last spring, the pair presented their research at the Mayo Clinic and won a prestigious prize.

h/t Rob Townsend