Essays In Bloom

Rethinking college rankings…

How to Think About College Rankings When Deciding on Schools The 2022-2023 college admissions decisions come out at a time when the U.S. News rankings have come under significant scrutiny.

With "English Major" in the title and a 10,225 word count, this conspectus on studying truth and beauty (the humanities) in the American "multiversity" model is aggressively statistically unappealing, but it’s also essential reading for all invested (financially, philosophically, culturally, traditionally...) in the American university model. If the word count scares you away—there’s an audio version at the top of the article. ; )

A few reader’s digest quotes to introduce some content. These quotes don't cover the full scope of the article.

He [James Shapiro, English professor at Columbia] labelled. . . a graph "1958". . . when the National Defense Education Act appropriated more than a billion dollars for education. "We’re not talking about élite universities—we’re talking about money flowing into fifty states, all the way down. That was the beginning of the glory days of the humanities…” He scribbled "2007," the beginning of the economic crisis. “That funding goes down. The financial support for the humanities is gone on a national level, on a state level, at the university level... This is also the decline-of-democracy chart . . . You can overlay it on the money chart like a kind of palimpsest—it’s the same."

In 1980, on average, state funding accounted for seventy-nine per cent of public universities’ revenue. By 2019, that figure was fifty-five per cent, and governors such as Ron DeSantis, in Florida, are applying new pressure for funding cuts. … many of the greatest American public universities increasingly run as private businesses.

The money at Harvard—and a lot of other universities, too—is disproportionately going into stem. “Google, Facebook, Deloitte, B.C.G. . . .” “They just have access to our campus in a really pervasive way!”

Sazi Bongwe, a Harvard freshman from Johannesburg ... had to consider that the F1 visa, for international students, allows for a stay of a year in the U.S. after graduation—except for majors in a stem field, in which case one year of grace becomes three. Bongwe had come to Harvard with thoughts of a humanities major. But, like several international students...he worried that the choice would be naïve.

One idea about the national [humanities] enrollment problem is that it’s actually a counting problem: students haven’t so much left the building as come in through another door [online or “the drifting of humanities skills into other fields” or other departments]. Adjacent fields aren’t included in humanities tallies, and some of them are booming.

Faggen, a literature professor at Claremont McKenna: “I think there is a hunger among students for the thrill that comes from truth and beauty.” That’s challenging, many scholars worry, without the national mandate that the humanities had fifty years ago.

The End of the English Major Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?