What is the point of taking English classes, or majoring or specializing in English?

I snuck this entry into my FAQs, because this is a pretty deep and complex question that doesn’t get asked enough — even though asking it will make your English classes more rewarding and effective. Come to Office Hours if you want to chat in depth; for now, a few quick points.

ITEM I: THE “USE” OF STUDY IN ENGLISH—IN TERMS OF HIRABILITY AND PROFITABILITY

A degree in English is now so widely known as “useless” that its perceived uselessness has inspired a Broadway number; in the musical Avenue Q, little Princeton has doomed himself to live in jobless near-poverty because he has dared to major or specialize in English. What has confused Princeton, and the writers of Avenue Q, I assume, is that it is inherent to the nature of our discipline and our art to resist any simple assessment of the use of the study of English.  That’s why, when public discourse pokes fun at our uselessness, we generally do not or cannot respond, or cannot respond in any conveniently simple way.  

As a major, minor, or specialist in English you’ll likely come across parts of a long tradition of arguments for the importance of literature, defenses of poetry, and so forth, that hint coyly at a core paradox of the humanities: the arts and humanities, English literature very much included, do have deeply essential, vital, and often quite practical uses in human society, but their usefulness relies on their uselessness—or at least on their inability to be understood through, or reduced to, their use value.  Their real value, once felt and understood, powerfully and immediately transcends models of simple usefulness; some of their use, then, is in the way they short-circuit our tendency to assess use mechanistically or greedily, forcing us to understand the world more as humans than as money-making machines or statistical functions.  As Oscar Wilde pithily puts it, about his own literary art: All art is quite useless.  Literary art, by definition, is useless.  Its use, its massive and crucial use, is in its uselessness.

But try to put that in an opening number on Broadway.  So we let Princeton sing on, and do not pipe in to say things like “um, did you know that unemployment rates for English majors are actually generally lower than unemployment rates for majors in economics and engineering?” not because we don’t have the data to back up such a claim — we do — but because the reduction of our discipline to its use value is counter to the fundamental values of our discipline. See, for instance, work posted publicly in 2020 by Professor Aaron Hanlon of Colby College.  (Hanlon has not, as far as I know, published this material beyond Twitter, where he shared it; I’m a bit loathe at quoting Twitter as a source in any context, but Hanlon provides solid citations for his data.) Hanlon’s argument is that rates of employment and pay averages are usually poor indicators of actual hirability because they use, and I’m quoting Hanlon’s twitter account here, “Weird aggregated categories like 'liberal arts and humanities' and 'STEM'”, which “are bullshit categories and not to be trusted.” 

What you’ve got to look at, and what to look at when your parents or uncle or econ major friend or musical puppet or whoever is making fun of your choice of field, are degree-specific data.   When Hanlon says “Unemployment rates for majors ranging from math and economics to fine arts and history are not measurably different from the average for all fields of study”, he is referring to a 2017 study by the United States National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES.  In that year, the unemployment rate for US majors in English was lower than engineering, than economics, than math, you name it.  These things vary — the following NCES year, for instance, was less kind to English majors — but the key point is that these variations fluctuate easily because they’re all within a percentage point or two — they’re essentially equivalent.  The same kind of thing seems true for annual salaries, broken down by major.  There are certainly the big earners — engineers, computer scientists, when they can get those jobs — but English majors make comparable amounts in annual salary, within a couple thousand bucks per year, of science majors, ed majors, and are only about 5K lower than bio or pre-med.  

In the long-term, liberal arts majors may earn more money than those who studied in professional and preprofessional fields. And that’s taking into account the fact that liberal arts majors tend to gravitate toward careers that are less rewarding to the wallet than to the conscience (e.g. social services). It’s a good investment, too, to put your time into pursuits you find rewarding — hitting burnout at 30 and having to restart your career, because you never really liked it in the first place, will retroactively prove many “for the money” university majors to be less lucrative than expected.

ITEM II: THE REAL POINT OF STUDY IN ENGLISH, THOUGH

Critical thinking, creative problem-solving, aesthetic taste, rhetorical skill, logical assessment, attention to detail, innovation, and the ability to express yourself in words—these are things that are direct educational goals of the English major, enough that they form the core of most of the tools we use to evaluate students. Stanley Fish (see below) rightly points out that these skills can be gained elsewhere, too—but you can get them here, too, and effectively enough that they’ll help you build a potentially inspiring career and life.

The humanities are the formal, collaborative, organized study of what makes us human; we are more human because of them. Ours is the field, within that study of human-ness, that deals specifically with English literature and language. We are more ethical, more present, more complex, more sentient, more real by virtue of our connection with the humanities—and, as Anthony Kronman and others argue, we need them now more than ever. And Stanley Fish writes:

The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said… diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

The debate over the use of the humanities (aka why fund English majors or programs?) has been raging for centuries and will rage on. A good place to start is the three online readings below (the first two by Stanley Fish and the third by Natalia Cecire)— in their brilliant contributions to the debate, these writers conveniently also include cursory references to a multitude of other perspectives:

1. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com//2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/

2. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/the-uses-of-the-humanities-part-two/

3. http://nataliacecire.blogspot.ca/2014/01/humanities-scholarship-is-incredibly.html

I would love to hear from you, in any format (but particularly in class) about your thoughts on the matter.