These are serious developments and they demand a serious response. But the apparent crisis is not what it seems. As someone who spends much of her time speaking to students about their choice of majors, I believe that many people have actually been talking past the issue.
The histrionics have masked a deeper story—a story of women’s choices in higher education.
Though the decline of the humanities is getting a lot of attention now, the major drop in enrollments happened between 1970 and 1985. Humanities enrollments dipped from 17.2 percent of all degrees in 1967 to around seven percent in the early 1980s. In 2011, humanities degrees still constituted 6.9 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. In other words, the decline stabilized ten years before current freshmen were even born.
Current debates were sparked by a much smaller decline. In 2011, there are seven percent fewer students studying the humanities than there were in 2009. The current downward drift is a gentle slope in comparison to the 1970s, when humanities enrollments fell off a cliff.
So the rhetoric of a deep crisis in the humanities does not bear out in the numbers. As overall enrollment has increased at institutions of higher education, very similar percentages of the college-age population have graduated with a degree in English over the past twenty years. In fact, there were proportionally more English majors amongst 21-year-olds in 2011 than in 1981.
Even if there is no substantial crisis now, what caused the decline in enrollments in the 1970s? And why does it still matter today?
As Ben Schmidt, assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, has shown in a series of great graphs, women’s choices of major really explain most of the drop. Starting in the late 1970s, women became the majority of the undergraduate student body at colleges and universities in the United States. By the 2000s, women made up around 57 percent of undergraduates. Women’s decisions became increasingly important, and those choices started to change radically.
The same percentage of men (7 percent) major in the humanities today as in the 1950s, but women’s interest in the humanities has dropped dramatically. More than 15 percent of all degrees that women earned in the 1950s were in the humanities. This peaked at more than 20 percent in the late 1960s, but plunged to below 10 percent by 1980. Currently, slightly more women than men study the humanities. The shift in women’s choices drove the fall in the share of humanities majors.
Why did women turn to other subjects, and what are the implications of those choices? Instead of pursuing degrees in the liberal arts and education, women often chose pre-professional degrees such as business or communications. From the mid-1990s onwards, women have earned more than 50 percent of bachelor’s degrees in pre-professional subjects. There’s still no concrete answer about why this happened, though theories abound. Perhaps it was a consequence of increasing equality that women turned away from degrees that seemed to funnel them into traditionally “feminine” occupations. Perhaps some women hoped that pre-professional degrees would seem more practical and applicable to potential employers and would prove their desirability over male candidates. Perhaps other women expected that pre-professional degrees would generate higher pay after graduation than the humanities.