Illustration by Dan Page
Humanities in Minnesota Colleges and Universities
As the students in Minnesota’s college class of 2019 toss their mortarboards into that big blue sky of opportunity, fewer will come down with humanities degrees attached. A lot fewer. I’ve observed the phenomenon anecdotally (and not impartially) as a novelist working for a liberal arts college, who is married to a novelist/English professor. But I also parent four college-aged children, and I can read the numbers.
Bachelor’s degrees earned in Minnesota increased by 10 percent from 2009 to 2017. Yet the number of graduates with majors in the career cluster labeled “liberal arts, languages, and history” decreased by 33 percent, according to data from the Minnesota Office of Higher Education.
Separated out, the decline is 24 percent at Minnesota’s private liberal arts colleges, where humanities majors are the bedrock of the model. Minnesota’s state colleges and universities have notched a more dramatic 58 percent decline, from 928 graduates in those majors to 388, and in just eight years.
A crash course on academic terminology: “Humanities” study what it means to be human—history; philosophy; languages and literature; cultural studies; gender, women, and sexuality studies; the arts; and sometimes political science (or other social sciences). “Liberal arts” (after the Latin liberalis) refers to the essential knowledge necessary to participate as a fully informed citizen.
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.
Colleges are crunching the numbers, too. No majors means no programs. In 2017, St. Catherine University dropped its music and theater programs, then closed its Minneapolis campus to consolidate with its flagship in St. Paul. In 2016, Concordia College, in Moorhead, dropped nine majors and one concentration, mostly related to languages and classics. (A sign of the times: In October, it added a post-baccalaureate program specifically to prepare pre-med majors for the MCAT.)
Why the exodus from the humanities? It’s the economy, stupid. Or at least the 2008 recession, which the parents of today’s college students survived by gripping their stagnant wages with their whitened knuckles held just above their underwater mortgages. “It was a traumatic experience for a lot of families,” Koerner says. “The recession put a certain fear into their hearts.”
The cost of college turned the knife. It did not go down with the value of our homes. It rose more than 25 percent. I hesitate to mention the gory details, which are easily Google-able, because “price” and “cost” differ for each family, few pay sticker price, and private colleges often provide substantial aid. But I will say this: If you’re expecting a traditional on-campus experience, the room and board alone will start at $40,000 for four years.
And so here we are. For 20 years before the recession, first-year students gave the same answer in an annual survey that asked why they were attending college: “to learn about things that interest me.” Today, the top answer is this: “to get a better job.”
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For all you traumatized parents curious about where to find those “better jobs” in Minnesota, you can slice those numbers a variety of ways. I did, looking both at current in-demand jobs, and at career areas with high projected growth and future openings. According to Minnesota’s Department of Economic Development, your safest bachelor’s-degree bets lie in the following jobs: actuaries, accountants, and auditors; market research analysts and marketing specialists; software developers; and secondary school teachers. Right behind are the oft-cited, much-needed jobs in health care.
As for the rest of Minnesota’s upcoming “better jobs,” the majority contain the word “management” or “analyst,” such as the job with the fifth most projected openings in the year 2027: management analyst. Whatever that is.
The skills necessary to analyze and manage stuff? Those develop through the humanities and liberal arts. As Shakespeare wrote, there’s the rub. (Shakespeare, if you skipped that course, wrote management case studies on executive leadership challenges in Scotland, Denmark, and Rome.) It appears that the moral aim of studying the humanities—that it makes you a better person—also makes you a better, more attractive employee.
Since 2005, the Association of American Colleges and Universities has asked employers what they most want from their college graduates. Their answers, taken from surveys conducted over the past 14 years: intellectual and practical skills (particularly oral and written communication, critical thinking and analytic reasoning, and the ability to solve problems with diverse groups), and personal and social responsibility.
“To some extent it is our own fault. We have resisted the idea that our skills are marketable, that we should talk to liberal arts professors on how we are preparing students for careers.”
Ascan Koerner
Closer to home, folks at Concordia College, in Moorhead, analyzed more than 390,000 full-time job postings in Minnesota and our border states. The most sought-after skill? Oral and written communication—followed by a list almost identical to the AAC&U survey.
Employers know this, so why don’t students and their parents?
“To some extent it is our own fault,” says Koerner. “We have resisted the idea that our skills are marketable, that we should talk to liberal arts professors on how we are preparing students for careers.”
In this way of thinking, he continues, liberal arts confer “a good life, citizenship, aesthetics”—not something utilitarian that “can be measured in salary.”
Peter Bognanni, professor of English at Macalester College (and a 2001 grad), always gives a lofty speech on the first day of his “Intro to Creative Writing” class, which includes plenty of STEM majors slotting in a fine arts credit. “I’m trying to sell that this is a class where you’re going to figure out what you really believe, do extreme exercises in empathy, learn about viewpoints that are different. A lot of those students need that why-is-this-class-worth-my-time justification.”
We get it. And yet, we worry. Bognanni recalls telling his arts-friendly parents about his own interest in an acting career. Their response: Had he ever considered entertainment law?
As for his STEM-seeking students, eventually, Bognanni says, “some of them realize that they have no interest in STEM and they gravitate over to the thing that they love. They have to break the news to their parents, but then they’re much happier.”
They don’t all end up working as baristas or Uber drivers. Bognanni runs down an occupation list for his recent grads: branding agencies, nonprofits, the entertainment industry, technical writing, publishing. Some have gone to law school or (if they double-majored) med school.
And contrary to the myth, they are doing well financially. A 2014 study from the AAC&U showed that during the peak earning age bracket (56–60 years), workers who majored in the humanities or social sciences earn about $2,000 more, annually, than those who majored in professional or pre-professional fields. (Granted, the short-term numbers, for recent grads, look comparatively better for pre-professional majors.)
At the University of Minnesota Morris, also a liberal arts institution, humanities majors have fallen only 5 to 10 percent, and English remains a top choice.
Interim dean Janet Schrunk Ericksen likes to get in front of a big group of parents and ask, “How many of you have a job title that a 17-year-old has ever heard of?” You can imagine, she says, a few teachers and nurses raising a hand. The rest—you know, the management analysts among us—look around at each other and chuckle. Her conclusion: “The majority of adults cannot neatly be tied back to a particular field of study.”
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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. Things look good.
With tuition being what it is, the case for the humanities probably depends on promoting a clearer sense of the payoff.
“In the back of my mind there is that fear,” about the English major, Severson says. “But what I see is that you do gain valuable skills,” she added, and learn “how to apply those skills.” She plans to pursue a PhD in chemistry and perhaps become a professor.
Kemp completed capstone projects in each major: on the history of vaccinations, one on HIV, and on the ecology and colonialism in Irish folklore. Next stop: medical school.
With tuition being what it is, the case for the humanities probably depends on promoting a clearer sense of the payoff. Looking at the economy his students will soon inherit, Koerner predicts something bolder. “There’s the public discourse about how STEM is going to save us, and I don’t think that’s true at all. STEM is a dead end. It is really the things where humans are better than computers—that’s where the future is.”
Your STEM-star son, now a nurse, may excel at shuffling you through the process of your colonoscopy. But can he empathize with the humanity (or, rather, inhumanity) of the procedure, the heartache, as Shakespeare wrote, the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? I’d sure like him to, but alas, I fear he may not.
