The Decline of the English Department | Hacker News Reader

The Decline of the English Department

theamericanscholar.org

This is just an honest, curious question as a CS undergrad right now: what jobs are there for english majors?

As much as I might love reading and writing, and as much as I believe that a lot of literature is an overall human good, even writers & scholars need to feed and clothe themselves, right?

Unless you plan on teaching the subject, a lot of places don't care what your major was, so long as you have the piece of paper that says you graduated. My dad is a Mech. E. with a music education degree, for example. He still makes music, and knows music theory better than anyone I know. A major in English would likely be valuable in almost any field, so long as you could use it to play up your communications skills. Grammar, written and verbal communication are skills that are often found lacking in today's technical work force.

In particular, my impression is that outside of technical majors (CS, math, sciences, and engineering) the classic liberal-arts degrees can often be more valuable than one tied to the particular job. I've heard lots of places hiring for nominally "business" type jobs actually skeptical of people with BAs in Business, for example.

Ironically English majors typically don't fill the literary world, or even the ranks of journalists and magazine writers. Quite frankly, when have you ever read a magazine about any topic touched by an English major. How will an english major help you write about mechanics, make-up, or interior decoration? It won't.

I got work as a reviewer at 16, why? Because I love movies, video games, books and people can't get me to shut the fuck up about them. It only helped that I'm a naturally talented writer. In fact the information I gained from doing the job was that taking courses in Journalism and English typically excluded you from doing the work, New Journalism killed any prospects of a classically trained Journalist from hitting it big.

Python developer. That's where I ended up.

For those who wish to pursue their passion for literature, a lot end up as teachers or indentured servants for the university system. Louis Menand explains the dynamics behind this latter phenomenon in his recent book The Marketplace of Ideas.

Pretty much the same jobs there are for anybody else.

Unless you're actually planning to become a professor, a scientist, or a Professional Engineer (note the capital letters!) it really doesn't matter much what you major in as an undergrad. It's only four years out of your 80-year lifespan. (And, since not every course in college is a course in your major, it isn't even that.)

You do have to be careful to take enough science courses if you want to go to medical or dental school, but even that can be fixed after the fact. A friend of mine graduated in English, then decided to go to med school, and her college allowed her to come back and take a couple years of intense science courseload. No problem. (Unless you count debt, of course. Make no mistake: Math and science courses are good investments, even if you're an English major. You never know when chemistry or statistics will come in handy.)

I couldn't have majored in my own current profession -- web development -- even had I known to do so, because the web was invented the year after I graduated from college. My own misspent youth was in EE and physics, but I have colleagues -- many more talented than I -- who majored in English, worked as professional actors, or played in symphony orchestras. They learned their current careers like almost everyone does: A mixture of "teaching yourself in your spare time" and "working your way up from the bottom".

One's major is too understated when described as simply 4 years out of a 80 year lifespan. It is the moment in your life when you decide your career path. It is the time when all of society give you a pass to spend your time preparing for greatness.

After it is over you have responsibilities, bills, and work becomes a necessity if you live with any ambition. 40 hours a week you will be working to fulfill someone else's desires, if those are you customers or your own. But you will almost never again be given a free pass to spend four years ostensibly studying.

And getting a good start towards a career is extremely valuable. Most success, in math, science, or industry come as the result of a long journey. A good start can significantly shorten the duration between start and finish.

I can't answer as an English major, but I can answer as a Philsophy major. (Humanities --Burger King-- right?).

I'm now a lisp programmer.

I imagine that I would be making more money (potentially anyway) had I gone through a computer science department, but I don't think I would have been as good a programmer. Nothing against computer science departments, especially the good ones. Where I went to school, it seemed like they were teaching a lot of 'how' and not as much 'what' or 'why'.

I would have learned a lot of very relevant and useful math working my way through the computer science department (and probably a working knowledge of Java), but I don't think I would have has as much experience really thinking things through. (I can teach myself the math anyway...)

I also know quite a few English majors, the jobs occupy a pretty wide range. A couple are singer/songwriters (starving, of course), one is an administrative assistant at a hospital, and another is working for a textbook company.

Other potential 'after graduation' things include technical writing, getting a masters in something else (like journalism).

I think programmer is kind of an out-lier among humanities, as it is harder to break into (You have to prove you can write code, whereas the CS major does not...) I started in a sort of technical writing position, and 'apprenticed' until I understood enough of the code to be useful. I also did a lot of learning on my own...

I can TOTALLY see alot of philosophy majors doing LISP (or CSS/XSLT) programming. I remember my philosophy credit in college (working toward my equally touchy-feely degree in English Lit.) was Symbolic Logic. Tarski's World was my friend and nemesis for that semester. They should seriously consider putting happy faces on the dodecahedrons at least.

First-order logic is not to be fussed with. The latter part of that course kicked my ass, but that might've also been due to me smoking an inordinate amount of weed at the time.

you can teach. or you can spend your life blogging poetry/prose in hopes of a life of non-obscurity.

but neither pays well... take it from me. an english major.

For some of us, technical writing. You know those (non-Engrish) manuals you toss aside (or leave uselessly bonking around in the box) for your software package or electronic thingy? Yeah, that's our work. You're welcome.

So, usage manuals, reference books, instructional posters, Material Safety Data Sheets, quickstart guides, and so on. Every company that makes anything needs at least one writer (unless you do agile programming, which for some reason shuns documentation being a resource unit and more of a PITA). And, I suppose you can make someone on your development or QA staff write docs, but who would want to? That's where we step in.

I mean, the guy mowing the lawn outside your office complex has his job, I've got mine :D Mine does pay 90k year (and this is in the South), but my colleague in Sunnyvale is just over 6 figures. Yes, solely from writing for a major software company.

Of course, there is the entertainment industry where, if you can get a good "holding" or "development" deal with a major studio, you're well into 6-figures, probably quarter-to-half million a year. Scriptwriting teams that don't get the byline in a movie make about 60-80k a film, depending on overall budgets. That's 2-3 months of work for some, so you can see how that stacks up in a year. I don't want to live that world, though, because you basically must be in Hollywood unless you're a superstar.

Finally, there's game design and story writing, which for the most part, you'll find everyone there are from an English Lit. background. Talk about hand-to-mouth, though. A true feast/famine career. But, if you have a solid track record, you tend to "fail upwards" to bigger budgeted games at major studios. Be prepared to move to Vancouver, BC, though. I like that route, personally, but I don't have anything game-related under my belt (yet).

Our society simply does not value intellectual achievement or learning as ends in themselves.

What is valued and rewarded is making money, entertaining, acquiring power, and being "practical", which the humanities are just not focused on.

The humanities are also constantly denigrated (especially by the right-wing, but also by many in the sciences). This trend is fueled largely by ignorance, but also somewhat by a reaction to the criticisms they see coming from the humanities departments towards the status quo, "traditional institutions", and the view of science and technology as savior (ie. scientism).

Given these attitudes, financial disincentives, and attacks, it's really no wonder fewer young people choose to major in the humanities.

Our society simply does not value intellectual achievement or learning as ends in themselves.

Does intellectual achievement or learning happen in the typical English department? Frederick Crews,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Crews

mentioned in the submitted article, is a smart man whose essays are well worth reading, but he is very much of an exception among professors of English.

/Does intellectual achievement or learning happen in the typical English department?/

Huh? What type of question is that?

You seem to be at once completely proving the parent comments point (that the humanities are consistently denigrated), and failing to provide an argument.

(Outside of a backhanded attack with the implication that English professors whose essays are worth reading are few and far between.)

At least provide some evidence that Literature degrees are useless. (Or that other degrees are less useless than Literature...)

I have a humanities degree myself (as my profile makes clear). It has been my dismaying observation that students in various colleges (sampled through parents I know trying out distance learning programs for their children) can't count on English departments to teach English grammar or English literature anymore. Perhaps it reinforces my point to mention that both of my paternal grandparents had degrees in English, so we have a family tradition of expecting achievement and learning to happen in English departments.

Frederick Crews is a good example of an English professor who is an intellectual, but he is a rare example.

provide some evidence that Literature degrees are useless

The submitted article already provided the example of the revealed preference of college students. But I suppose to that the objection is that college students are gauging usefulness along a dimension of expediency in getting a job after college graduation. That's a good criterion of usefulness, but to turn to "intellectual achievement or learning," I'll point out that business majors probably write quite as many thoughtful, evidenced books about public policy per year per 100,000 graduates as English majors do. Computer science majors very likely write considerably more thoughtful, evidenced books about public policy per year per 100,000 graduates than English majors do. I consider writing a book that provides good information value to readers to be a good criterion of intellectual achievement.

If that is true then it is indeed dismaying.

I will mention that college level English departments should not need to teach basic English grammar. I would expect that anyone requiring help in that area would be directed towards remedial courses (or a different discipline).

My (small) experience with the English department , was that it did indeed teach English literature... (although really you should be getting an education in not just English literature, but literature in general). Of the few classes that I took, I found it to be very multidisciplinary. It bridges philosophy, sociology, history and art (at the very least).

In reality, very few people who graduate from college actually end up publishing a book, let alone a one that is really worth reading.

I think it will be very hard for you to pull together specific data about what major will write a well evidenced book in some subject, but it seems to be begging the question to say that a computer science major is more likely to write a book on public policy than English or Business majors. It is kind of a speculative claim.

I personally consider college education to be a process of learning how to learn.

Yes you are forced to focus in a specific discipline, but the end result of an English undergraduate degree is not to be an expert able to discuss the western literary cannon (that is the point of a PHD). I would expect an English undergraduate to spend his or her time reading books mindfully and learning how to recognize the themes, ideas and relevant social commentary from the book.

That sort of meta-cognition is what makes you good at learning in general. Being good at generalized learning is much more useful that having abstruse knowledge of Chaucer...

So is there evidence that English majors are better at that kind of metacognition than, say, engineering majors? (I certainly don't credit MOST business majors with a high level of metacognition, but maybe all we have going on now is yesterday's former marginal English majors becoming today's marginal business majors. Maybe neither major program adds value to the students enrolled in it.) I strongly suspect that engineering majors have more experience reading harder material more closely than most humanities majors, but I'm basing that mostly on my close acquaintance with my contemporaries. There may well be published research on this subject--what does that research say?

I wouldn't be surprised if it was the case that the best English majors and the best Engineering majors (or business majors) have similar (high) levels of meta cognitive ability. I also wouldn't be surprised if the mediocre students all had similar (low) levels of meta-cognitive ability.

Having fought my way through a number of Greek and German philosophers, I can tell you that there is no shortage of dense and difficult material to read in the humanities. (There is plenty of English lit that isn't a cakewalk either). In my current line of work I often find myself reading technical papers involved in computer science and engineering. I can tell you that while there is sometimes math that I have trouble with and have to learn, the level of of writing is certainly not more difficult than Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Joyce.

What I intended to convey was that in general the particular major probably doesn't make as much difference as we would think. I think it is misguided to believe that you can learn any career in four years at college, I would argue that it is more important that you learn how to learn, so that you can keep learning for the next 60 years of your life/career. A good student will use his or her time at college to develop meta-cognition.

As a matter of fact, a quick Google turns up a plethora of information about reading comprehension and meta-cognition (in both the sciences and liberal arts). There seems to be much less information about specific majors and meta-cognition.

"Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers."

Business jobs come and go--humanities jobs never are, never were, and never will be there.

I am a native English speaker and an American. I would never major in English because the grades are too subjective. I would not want to put my future outside of my own hands.

I prefer my grades to be based on quantifiable data, not subjective gobbledy-gook.

I dunno, the grades are pretty subjective in a lot of majors. I'm TAing for a machine-learning / data-mining class right now, and the assignments aren't mostly ones with objectively correct answers (it'd be easier to grade if they were). Instead, I have to read their writeups and determine if they picked interesting problems and formulated coherent hypotheses; if they used algorithms suited to those problems and explained why; if they demonstrated knowledge of how choices in algorithms or parameters would affect their results; and if they knew how to interpret the results properly and use a mixture of graphs and prose to effectively convey them.

It's possible it's less fuzzy, but there's still a good deal of fuzziness...

put my future outside of my own hands

Unless you're going on for further schooling, grades don't matter at all. Employers certainly don't look at them. Study what you love and work hard, no matter the grades.

Well, yes, but... Anyone wishing to assess the point reached by the English Departments in the days he mourns should also have a look at what a generation of poets and critics said of the Modern Language Association (Randall Jarrell and Edmund Wilson come to mind) or Ivor Winters's essay "What Are We to Think of Professor X".

What jobs are there? Well, there's law school--a number of English majors I knew took that route. One can try for a job in publishing, though that looks unpromising now. Or you can end up in the tech world

its true. the thing thats funny about this though is the understanding that if you go into English you're going to want to teach others. but apparently we English majors have failed.

i have an English degree... but I LOVE complex problem solving... hence the love for programming...

its difficult to pitch the old man and the sea to anyone with 1/2 a brain.

tl;dr

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