English departments are closing, the number of undergraduate students majoring in English is in freefall, and the humanities are on the decline in American universities. Meanwhile, with more than one in five undergraduate students nationwide, Business has become the most popular undergraduate major. So writes William M. Chace in an opinion piece titled The Decline of the English Department, which appeared in the Autumn 2009 edition of The American Scholar. In Chace’s analysis, the causes of the impending demise of the humanities and college English departments are manifold. Chief among them is an act of self-sabotage by the English departments themselves, since they have failed to develop in students a love of great literature, and instead have alienated students by embracing esoterica such as identity studies, sexuality, and popular culture as subjects of research and study.
Another reason is that while the private universities have tended to uphold the traditional academic disciplines, the drift of students in recent years has been toward the public universities, which, Chace claims tend to focus more on business, technical, and applied disciplines. Added to these causes are the increasing cost of a college degree, making parents reluctant to direct their offspring into disciplines that don’t offer an obvious return on the investment; and the increasing ethnic diversity of the student body which calls into the question the centrality of the English canon and creates interest in other literatures.
While I wouldn’t disagree with Chace’s reasons, I would argue that his view is too America-focused, and fails to take into account trends at the global level that virtually assure the devaluation of subjects in the ‘love of learning’ category and push to the fore the more practical, work-oriented disciplines. After all, the humanities are not only threatened in the United States: commentators in the UK and Australia are also bewailing their demise. Chace’s analysis ignores two trends: first, globalization, or the increasingly free flow of trade, labor, and knowledge among the world’s nations; and second, the triumph of the human capital theory of education, first conceived by Adam Smith, and refined by Gary Becker in the 1960s, which puts education squarely in the service of economic advancement. In the human capital model, education’s role is to prepare students to be able to compete in the labor market, and its value is judged according to its contribution to economic growth. In a globalized world, this means a labor market in which more and more workers are competing with their counterparts in increasingly far-flung locales, since no matter where they are they can be educated and trained in the same knowledge and skills that they can trade in the global marketplace. Let us consider two examples of how human capital theory has been embraced outside of the U.S., before turning to the U.S. response and a more complete understanding of the decline of English that William Chace bewails.
Exhibit 1: In Western Europe, the human capital view took hold in the last decades of the twentieth century, and state-run or controlled universities, bastions of traditional academic disciplines, learning for the love of learning, and educators of free-thinking citizens, have come to be viewed as a drain on their countries’ economies rather than as a contributor. Simultaneously, Western Europe, already highly invested in political and economic integration, is integrating its post-secondary education systems by way of the Bologna process to create an enormous education zone that can compete on the world stage, and in the process firmly establishing a monolithic training ground for the knowledge workers of the future. The London Communiqué, issued by European ministers in 2007 following a conference to review the Bologna process in that city, urged institutions to communicate with employers and make their degrees relevant to the employment market.
Exhibit 2: For over sixty years, the World Bank has directed loans to the education systems of developing nations on the grounds that education is key to economic development. The World Bank’s educational agenda is functional, and designed to benefit the poor by helping them to participate in the economy: literacy, science, math, and foreign language learning are promoted as means to this end. It is hard to argue with an education that attempts to equip people with the means to lift themselves out of poverty, but we should note that, in developing nations that receive World Bank loans, a liberal arts vision of education, one which gives instruction in literature, philosophy, and history, may be passed over in the necessary rush to economic development. As workers emerging from these education systems begin to compete with Americans for jobs that can be outsourced or offshored to any part of the world – jobs in health care, insurance, and finance, for example - those American college graduates who majored in English and the humanities may find their knowledge is not very marketable.
Unable to compete with their foreign counterparts on price (since wages are much lower in the countries to which these jobs have migrated), American graduates need to add value to employers in other ways. Thus arises in the U.S. a discussion on what knowledge and skills Americans need in order to beat out the foreign competition. Indeed, human capital theory lies behind much of the mainstream discourse around American education of the past three decades, starting with the 1983 report A Nation at Risk (which addressed secondary education), and reaching into higher education by way of President George W. Bush’s American Competitive Initiative in 2006. The prime motivation for these initiatives was the perception that, with an increasing emphasis on work-relevant skills in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world, America was falling behind economically. The education system was to blame because it failed to prepare students to be competitive in the world economy, and education therefore had to be re-tooled to provide workers with the knowledge and skills to make America competitive again. No Child Left Behind, 21st Century Skills, and STEM education are all manifestations of this emphasis in the nation’s educational discourse and practice.
As American higher education takes a more vocational turn, it is not only American students who benefit. Always the top destinations for students traveling abroad seeking degrees, U.S. institutions hosted over 620 000 international students last year, with over 60% of them choosing degrees in business, engineering, math and the sciences, and other vocationally-oriented fields, and the humanities accounting for only 3%. Not surprisingly, considering that most of these students are likely to be paying full tuition, the majority are choosing fields of study with a greater promise of a return on their educational investment dollars. Universities that wish to attract greater numbers of international students – and creating multiple revenue streams is a sound survival strategy, especially during economic hard times - will have to ensure that they are offering, and have the capacity to enroll increasing numbers of students in, the practical, vocationally-oriented degrees that international students wish to study for. Here, U.S. institutions themselves are up against international competition. The UK and Australia have long been an alternative for international students seeking a degree in and English speaking country, and they attract significant numbers of students. New players such as China, Malaysia, and Singapore, are now also becoming significant recruiters of students from abroad. While absolute numbers of international students in the U.S. continues to grow, its percentage of the global international student market is shrinking. All of this puts enormous pressure on institutions to offer the practical degrees that will attract international students.
It is not only in the vocational orientation of degrees that American universities are serving as drivers of economic development. American institutions are held up as an example to the world of how massive investments in research, coupled with strategies to get this research to ‘spill over’ into business ventures, can fuel economic growth and employment through innovation. Universities and departments that can leverage research funding into new discoveries and commercialize them attract greater public and private funding. Although the Europeans are behind the U.S. in turning research into marketable product, they are studying American practices closely. If they can learn to emulate the entrepreneurial university model – through strategic investment in their institutions and planning - they will present the U.S. with a formidable economic challenge and drive higher education further towards an orientation toward economic advancement.
Human capital-based education certainly has its critics: they see education as having been co-opted as the training ground for multinational corporations. Higher education, in their view, has been commoditized, branded, and globally marketed. No longer a good and an end in itself, education has become a means to an end, and the end, though partly the benefit of the student who stands a better chance of being able to compete in the job market, is ultimately the economic advancement of the corporation and the nation state. However, this view is not heard much in the popular discourse, and it is not surprising: the first question asked of a student who has declared his or her proposed field of study has long been, “And what are you going to do with that?”
Is it true, then, that the human capital model has triumphed in higher education worldwide? Some might disagree, pointing to other educational models are alive and well in the world. Progressive education has many adherents and practitioners for example, and many countries offer educational varieties that speak to the cultural roots of their people, but this is largely happening at the elementary and secondary educational levels. UNESCO, the United Nations education and culture agency, is known for its promotion of a different vision of higher education, one that emphasizes social responsibility, but in its recent Paris communiqué it made clear that the chief means of achieving this is through science, technology, engineering, and math education, as well as vocational training and entrepreneurship education. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the human capital model at the higher education level comes from religious schools, which have a decidedly different agenda. Supported by governments in some countries, many will continue to thrive. However, while in the educational free market that is the U.S. many Christian colleges continue the liberal arts tradition, they, like English departments, are threatened by their reliance on tuition and the pull of students in the direction of colleges offering more professionally focused degrees. Indeed, in the current economic climate, many are experiencing financial difficulties and closure, and we can expect to see their presidents and boards, like William Chace, wringing hands over declining enrollments and endowments. There does not, in fact, appear to be an educational model robust enough to give a serious challenge to human capital-based education.
Set against this background of increased global competition for work, the increasing vocationalization of education worldwide, greater access to education in developing countries, and the flow of financial capital into basic and applied research, the teaching of English and the other humanities begins to look like a throwback to a time when the world was less connected, when work was more localized, and when it was easier to compete in the job market even with a degree attained for the love of it. English will not disappear, of course, but it will continue to become less popular as a major, and its faculty will likely spend more time teaching functional writing courses. The good news for those teachers is that the decline of English teaching in the U.S. may not be as much their responsibility as William Chace would have them believe; the bad news is that their discipline is at the mercy of forces far beyond their control. Human capital education theory has triumphed, and only a profound re-evaluation of free-market thinking the world over (think global hippiedom or a revival of Marxism) is likely to be able to bring a return to learning for personal enrichment, learning for the sheer love of it. None of us should hold our breath.
References
Armstrong, J. (2008). Transform Into Friends of Society. The Australian Retrieved October 10 2009, from http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24706676-25192,00.html
Audretsch, D. B. (2009). Rethinking the Role of the University for the Entrepreneurial Society. In C. F. Bonser (Ed.), Adapting Universities to the Global Society - A Transatlantic Perspective. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Blinn, H.-J. (2009). The Role of European Regions in the Higher Education Process of the EU. In C. F. Bonser (Ed.), Adapting Universities to the Global Society - A Transatlantic Perspective. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
Bucur, M., & Eklof, B. (2007). Russia and Eastern Europe. In R. E. Arnove & C. A. Torres (Eds.), Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Chace, W. M. (2009). The Decline of the English Department. The American Scholar Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-decline-of-the-english-department/
Institute of International Education. (2008). International Students on U.S. Campuses at All-Time High. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=131590
Jaschik, S. (2009). International 'Leapfrogging'. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/05/global
McMillon, J. (2009). Christian Colleges Respond to Financial Firestorms. Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.christianchronicle.org/article2158715~Christian_colleges_respond_to_financial_firestorms
Spring, J. (2009). Globalization of Education. New York: Routledge.
Thornton, M. (2008). The Decline of the Humanities: are the Humanities Being Singled Out? Retrieved October 10, 2009, from http://www.publicuni.org/journal/volume/5/JPU5_Thornton.pdf
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment