A great migration is happening on U.S. college campuses. Ever since the fall of 2008, a lot of students have walked out of English and humanities lectures and into STEM classes, especially computer science and engineering, The Washington Post reports.
English majors are down more than 25% since the Great Recession, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics. It’s the biggest drop for any major tracked by the center in its annual data and is interesting, given that college enrollment has jumped in the past decade.
At LSU, enrollment in the university’s college of humanities and social sciences, which includes English programs, dropped from about 4,500 to 3,400 between 2010 and 2015, before rising slightly to 3,700 this fall. Meanwhile, the college of engineering has grown from 28,000 enrolled students to 31,760 in that same time period.
Any college student or professor will probably say the shift is about jobs. However, as humanities majors slump to the lowest level in decades, some prominent economists are making a case for why it still makes sense to major—or at least take classes—in humanities, which teach critical thinking.
One reason students (and their parents) might want to think twice about abandoning humanities is the data. Though the typical computer science major makes more money shortly after graduation than the typical English major, English majors ages 25 to 29 had a lower unemployment rate in 2017 than math and computer science majors, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
