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.