I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this. Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this: ""

I wonder what current (or perhaps past?) president of the MLA, Michael Bérubé, has to say about this. Or rather, I wonder if you wonder. I know. It's this: """ You know, I've been trying for many years now to get people to understand that the decline in humanities enrollments in the US happened almost entirely between 1970 and 1980. I usually work from this table from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_286.asp -- where you can see that English plummeted from an anomalous 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees in 1970-71 to 3.4 percent in 1980-81. (It was 4 percent in 1950; it rebounded to about 4.5 percent in the mid-90s and is back down to 3.2 percent today.) But today I came across this other table -- http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_289.asp -- and lo! In 1970-71, 17.1 percent of all bachelor's degrees were awarded in the humanities, and in 2009-10 the figure was .... 17.0 percent. For the purposes of the NCES, "humanities" includes "degrees in Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies; English language and literature/letters; Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics; Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities; Multi/interdisciplinary studies; Philosophy and religious studies; Theology and religious vocations; and Visual and performing arts." That last group, btw, has more than tripled in majors since 1970, while the total number of degrees has merely doubled. And "liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities" has increased sixfold. This makes up a lot of ground from the relative dropoff in English and foreign languages. """