The English Major Has a Marketing Problem
Last week, The New Yorker published a long essay about the decline of students declaring themselves to be English majors at colleges and universities across the country. It quickly became one of those pieces that plays well on Twitter—where a lot of past English majors reside—and it has been shared and commented on by seemingly every writer in my personal feed.
The piece is not the first of its kind. There have been recent stories in other outlets about the Classics of literature falling out of favor, and other stories reporting largely the same thing as this new one: Fewer students seem interested in studying the humanities in general, and are opting for “safer” bets like business and STEM related fields.
Reading this latest New Yorker piece—and the ensuing commentary online—made me reflect upon my own time as an English major at Cornell between 2009 and 2013. Especially the part of the piece focused on students who come from immigrant and low-income backgrounds.
“My parents, who were low-income and immigrants, instilled in me the very great importance of finding a concentration that would get me a job—‘You don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving’ was one of the things they would say,” she told me. She was a member of the first generation in her family to attend college—the sort of student that élite schools are at pains to enroll. “So, when I came, I took a course that was, like, the hardest course you could take your freshman year. It integrated computer science, physics, math, chemistry, and biology. That course fulfilled a lot of the requirements to be able to do molecular and cellular biology, so I finished that, for my parents. I can get a job. I’m educated.”
She paused, then added, “I took courses in Chinese film and literature. I took classes in the science of cooking. My issue as a first-gen student is I always view humanities as a passion project. You have to be affluent in order to be able to take that on and state, ‘Oh, I can pursue this, because I have the money to do whatever I want.’ ” Nice work if you can get it. “I view the humanities as very hobby-based,” she said.
I came from a poor background before arriving at Cornell (something I didn’t realize until I got to Cornell and I was around rich kids, but that’s another story). Some family members and friends who were, at first, thrilled to hear that I’d gotten into Cornell, were dumbfounded when I expressed my intention of studying English and my goal of becoming a writer. The responses I heard ranged from “but you already speak English” to “you’re gonna be broke” to “you gotta be the dumbest, smart motherfucker I know, son.”
I received these responses because for my working class loved ones, the idea of going to a fancy college like Cornell and just reading, thinking, and writing about great books seemed silly. It seemed—as the student in the New Yorker piece noted—like a hobby, like the sort of thing that rich kids who didn’t need to worry about money after college did.
Why wouldn’t I study something like engineering, computer science, business, or medicine, so I could graduate, make the big bucks, and change my family for generations to come?
The line of thinking makes sense. Which is why I don’t fault freshmen—particularly first-gen kids, or kids from families that don’t have money—for making this decision, even if they do have a passion for literature or writing. I also don’t think it is very likely that professors, journalists, or thinkers are going to change the minds of these kids with hand-wringing pieces in the New Yorker.
In my experience, there is one big, looming problem with the English major as it is constructed and presented in most universities today. And it’s a marketing problem.
Throughout my time in the English department at Cornell, there was basically no communication by professors or the department as to how the courses I took and the skills I built would be useful in the world outside of campus. In many of the classes I took, and especially those outside of my Creative Writing course load, the writing that was prized was, in fact, overly academic. It seemed many of my professors preferred I use 50 big words to make an argument that people on my block could have made using five simple words.
It is no wonder then that the only roads I saw ahead of me in terms of a career post-college was a) attend graduate school to kick the can down the road a bit more, b) go to graduate school with the intention of becoming an academic who wrote long, boring papers that only five people would read, or c) try and make it as a novelist or poet. (Thankfully, at least one of those options was personally appealing to me—but I was certainly in the minority.)
It took me graduating and entering the real world to realize that perception was false. The truth is, there are way more options available to English majors out here, but too many kids don’t know that because no one tells them.
People who graduate as English majors at good universities tend to leave with a lot of important skills. Skills like being able to write a lot of words fast, write concisely, write clearly, and write persuasively. They’ve usually been trained to read and comprehend varied and often complex texts quickly, and how to synthesize information from those texts, and make connections to other texts. They’ve learned how to conduct basic fact-finding research, cite references, and build off of those references to make new points. I could go on and on.
My point is, despite the fact that there was a lot of consternation from loved ones as to whether or not I would find a job upon graduation, it has been a decade now and I have never once been unemployed. I’ve had stints as a full-time journalist and a freelancer for big outlets, yes, but I’ve also had great jobs where my main tasks were to write social media posts, company blog posts, and copy for decks and speeches.
I’m not rich. I don’t drive a nice beamer like my homegirl who studied Engineering does. But I’ve made a solid living using the skills I honed as an English major. And I’m not alone.
Because while, yes, many English majors go on to become writers, professors, journalists, or players in the world of film and television, just as many end up in adjacent, less-creative fields that pay well, like marketing, public relations, management, law, nonprofits, and even tech.
It’s a travesty that students often don’t realize they have these options available to them when they’re in college. I know I didn’t, and all of the kids I’ve tutored or mentored since graduating didn’t. They think, like I thought, that if they become an English major, they’ll either end up a tweed jacket wearing professor, or a broke writer.
So, what to do? For one, we learned people who care about English departments must stop all the bitching about how democracy and our populace will be in decline because not enough people are studying English. As much as I love literature and reading and thinking about great writing, that’s horseshit. More people studying English isn’t going to save the world.
What English departments can do is a much better job of communicating the avenues that an English major actually opens up to you. They can better communicate the premium on the market that there is right now for being able to write clearly, effectively, and convincingly.
Almost every big company in the U.S. today has a blog on their website. They’re all producing content in the form of newsletters, internal memos, and LinkedIn posts. The CEO’s are delivering speeches that need writing and crafting. The website copy is constantly being updated. The slides for presentations and sales meetings are constantly being reworked and rewritten. And this is just one example of a type of job you can get.
Even outside of academia or journalism, there is a dire need for writers that can complete the sorts of tasks English majors are in a prime position to do.
English departments should tell that to students. They should bring in speakers and alumni who have these jobs and made the transition. They should maybe even hold career fairs—like lots of other departments do.
The problem is, some of you reading this—particularly the literary folk—are rolling your eyes. That is not what the humanities are for!, you might say. That sounds like the communications department, or, god forbid, the business school!
Well, that attitude, that snobbery, is another thing English departments must lose.
Yes, it is important that students to engage with great books and think about the meaning of those books and debate them and write critically about them. I’m not saying we throw that out. But departments need to stop acting like students are making the biggest mistake of their lives by not signing up for that—as if that prospect in itself is enough to compete with all the other things vying for young adults attention and concern these days (do you know how much debt kids graduate with?).
This isn’t 1950. It’s 2023. Students have different priorities—and they go beyond looking poppin on TikTok. Humble yourself. Try and make a practical appeal to these students that goes beyond: You know, if your generation had any sense, they’d be lining up to get inside of these classrooms and get this flaming hot knowledge.
It was ironic, clocking the reactions to the New Yorker piece on Twitter, to see so many people making fun of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt pointed out, essentially, that although students these days may not be interested in Shakespeare, they will devour and discuss television shows with high literary value, like The Wire and Breaking Bad. He wondered whether literature departments “should do more with TV.”
In response, hordes of people screenshotted that section of the piece to make fun of it and Greenblatt. Some suggested he was “just discovering” media studies or film studies programs.
But I think Greenblatt is on to something. And if you pause the urge to run to Twitter to make fun of him and simply take what he said on face value, I think his point is that if the English Department wants to survive, it has to make a stronger, more appealing pitch to prospective students.
I agree. And I would add that it also has to show students there are opportunities upon graduation out there for them that feel exciting, open-ended, and at least a little bit prosperous—much in the way that studying coding probably feels these days.
But if English departments don’t do that, if they, instead, bitch and moan about the books students aren’t reading and the classes they aren’t attending, and the knowledge they aren’t getting and say nothing about what all these knowledgeable kids are supposed to do after they get all this knowledge, then they shouldn’t be surprised when the majority of students—and especially those who, by necessity, must make very careful decisions about their futures—decide to go another route.
Peace,
Andrew
Recommendations:
Chris Rock’s latest special, Selective Outrage, was incredible. Rock seems fearless and in his greatest form. I highly recommend it.
The 0s&1s, which describes itself as a “literary playground” has a cool interview series called “Thick Skin” in which authors analyze and respond to negative feedback and reviews on their work. I love the concept.
The excellent critic Christian Lorentzen has a fascinating piece in Harpers about the failed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. I love this quote from it: “Yes. We invest every year in thousands of ideas and dreams, and only a few make it to the top. So I call it the Silicon Valley of media. We are angel investors of our authors and their dreams, their stories.”
Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert Podcast interviewed rapper-turned-actor Ice-T last year. Don’t remember how or why I stumbled on the interview now, but it was wonderful. Ice-T drops the sort of useful game that only a reformed gangsta would have.
Paula Span has a lovely piece in the New York Times about a new generation of hands-on grandfathers and how they’re challenging cultural norms.
I understand you as saying that there are three career routes. One is a paid gig as a journalist. Another is freelancing writing corporate reports, blog content and newsletters. The third route is to go for broke and do what every English major really wants to do, to write creatively: genre fiction, non-fiction such as biographies and political analyses, and screenplays. A very, very few make enough to survive from their substacks. The two writers that I know write commercial stuff and columns in order to pay the rent. This enables them to write creatively without starving to death. The trouble is that their creative work isn't going to make the best seller lists. They might was well do what I did, which was to take a well-paying career and write in the evenings and publish through a vanity press and if each of my books has been read by twenty people, I'm... satisfied. Writing is something that you have to do like an addict needs to use or a gambler needs to gamble.
Totally. My whole job is to help visionary founder and CEOs put big ideas into “words.” It’s harder than it sounds :)