BW #6: End of the humanities?
This week, we look into the subjects that US college students are studying — and how that compares with data from the last 50 years. What are they studying more, and what are they studying less?
This week’s topic: End of the humanities?
I got my undergraduate degree at MIT, where virtually all of my classmates were studying science or engineering. For most of us, a university education was very practical, giving us knowledge and skills that would directly give us jobs. And yes, MIT required that we take at least eight classes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. But people who majored in those sorts of subjects were seen as, well, taking the easy way out. And not getting obvious practical skills.
The worst were those students at Columbia University, where every single undergraduate was required to study art history. Wow, did we get a good laugh from that!
Fast forward to today, and … well, I’m married to a curator, who got a degree in art history. I now appreciate art — and more importantly, I appreciate the perspective and knowledge that you get from learning such subjects. I’m very happy having studied computer science, but believe the world would be less interesting without the arts and humanities.
The thing is, a humanities degree is no more obviously practical than it was back when I was in school, oh-so-long ago. You learn lots of art and literature, which is fun and interesting, but doesn’t clearly tee you up for a great job. You learn to write and to think critically, which are definitely important and useful skills, but that’s not necessarily enough to get your first job.
And so, not surprisingly, the number of Americans getting humanities degrees has dropped like a stone. This was the subject of an article in the New Yorker several weeks ago, called “The end of the English major.” Felix Salmon wrote about it in his Axios column, as well.
This week, I thus decided to dive into the data: How much of a drop have we really seen for college students getting degrees in the arts and social sciences? What subjects are people now studying instead?
Data and questions
Our data for this week comes from the US Department of Education, which tracks a huge number of data points regarding universities — both the institutions and their students — in a program they call IPEDS, short for Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. From the IPEDS site (https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds), you can select and retrieve a wide variety of information.
I chose to retrieve, from the Digest of Education Statistics, a table showing the total number of students majoring in each of 30 different areas of study. You can view the table at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_322.10.asp. Better yet, you can download the file from:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/xls/tabn322.10.xlsOur questions for this week are:
- Retrieve the Excel file with selected years, and turn it into a data frame.
- Remove the line numbering the surveys. Remove the total. And remove the lines at the bottom, after "Other and not classified".
