tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post2846606831303306959..comments2024-03-23T00:59:24.057-04:00Comments on Sapping Attention: Crisis in the humanities, or just women in the workplace?Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04856020368342677253noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-29504119851914153312014-12-07T14:10:06.813-05:002014-12-07T14:10:06.813-05:00Empower Network delivers the latest in online mark...Empower Network delivers the latest in online marketing techniques and content sharing software. <a href="http://home-business-mentor.empowernetwork.com/" rel="nofollow">Empower Network en Espanol</a><br />online marketing techniqueshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03632394024851380657noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-73683984465313068302013-11-10T12:57:55.193-05:002013-11-10T12:57:55.193-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.http://home-business-mentor.empowernetwork.com/https://www.blogger.com/profile/07561020317993267850noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-70542850992518556902013-09-15T16:48:33.408-04:002013-09-15T16:48:33.408-04:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.http://www.empowernetwork.com/https://www.blogger.com/profile/09144279711734075731noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-56255351325982012892013-07-01T16:17:16.838-04:002013-07-01T16:17:16.838-04:00Following up on my previous (anonymous) comment: I...Following up on my previous (anonymous) comment: I wrote up my summary of your findings, plus the bit about the changing gender ratio among graduates, here: http://cliophilic.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-continued-vitality-of-humanities.htmlCliophilehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12069638653856415201noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-62932889859177145372013-07-01T15:27:44.780-04:002013-07-01T15:27:44.780-04:00Here's one possible explanation of the 1960s h...Here's one possible explanation of the 1960s humanities boom: thanks to the GI bill, in the 1940s the gender ratio at American universities tilted heavily toward men: over 2-1 shortly after the war (prior to the war the gender ratio was more or less even, but far fewer people attended college at all). The gender ratio remained very uneven until the baby boom generation went to college in the 1960s and 70s. For specific data: http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ321/orazem/goldin_college.pdf<br /><br />So the bubble in humanities degrees may at least partly reflect a dramatic increase in the proportion of female college students in the mid- to late-1960s, at a time when career options for women remained quite limited. As career options opened up in the 1970s and 80s (as you describe) the bubble disappeared. <br /><br />What do you think? Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-65731175644615143712013-06-30T07:05:23.433-04:002013-06-30T07:05:23.433-04:00Dear Ben,
Great post, which raises great question...Dear Ben,<br /><br />Great post, which raises great questions. The middlebrow hypothesis seems very interesting. <br /><br />On similar lines: I wonder if schooling for middle class people may have pushed high school grads into humanities more than in more recent years, especially if they were in what I remember friends' parents calling the college track. Students in our town in Connecticut (OK, a tiny data point, but what do I know?) who were in the top track in the public schools did Latin (and, in some cases, French), plus a rigorous English program headed by a charismatic teacher with a doctorate, who later moved to a college, and AP US history (though that looked more like a social science in the 60s). All this before double sessions, of course, as the python bulge of the baby boom changed conditions for students and teachers. <br /><br />I really like your point number 2): everyone was trying to build Berkeley, you can still see this, like tree rings, in the great library collections created or enlarged around the country in those years, to support the advanced teaching and research that were going to take place everywhere.anthony graftonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05588520143876853373noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-59602096174165671742013-06-27T12:56:50.408-04:002013-06-27T12:56:50.408-04:00Really good questions, and I don't really feel...Really good questions, and I don't really feel confident I can answer them: in places where I've had a gut feel about changes in majors (the one I say here, that more women majored in the sciences over the 70s and 80s; I also had, for a time, a theory that changes in the Vietnam-era draft were helping artificially inflate the number of men at universities) I'm very frequently wrong. (Although the GI bill is an important missing factor in the whole equation).<br /><br />I have most of the big drop from 1970 to 1985 still unexplained. All I explain in this post, I think, is the drop in women <i>excessive to</i> the drop in men--which is all that's needed to explain the difference between 1950s universities and modern universities.<br /><br />To give an explanation that has nothing to do with culture, although I think there may be some real stuff going on with your middlebrow explanation:<br /><br />If you look at Ph.D.s, the situtation is quite different. The humanities are about 23% of all PhDs from 1920-1940, followed by a sharp drop to be stable at 14% 1945-1968, followed by a slower drop down to 8% in the last thirty years. So there's some truth, I think, to the idea that the humanities are a smaller part of the R1 universities now than they were in the postwar era.<br /><br />But higher education has become much more R1 centered in the last 50 years; back then, normal schools, seminaries, and conservatories were a higher percentage of degrees. (I'm guessing without data, here). <br /><br />So maybe the 60s rise is an attempt to cram all the new students into the model of the R1, while redefining it as only slightly less humanities-centered (Kerr's "multiversity.")<br /><br />And then in the early 70s, after tearing themselves apart for 5 years all the research universities started to drift into offering more business/applied majors, whether they started the period as an Ivy/Flagship or as a normal school (Say, a place like Ball State University (<a href="http://cms.bsu.edu/about/historyandmission" rel="nofollow">Ball State Teachers College until 1965</a>--not an atypical timeframe, I don't think). <br /><br />In short, that explanation would say<br /><br />1) the drop <i>just happened</i> because of inertia: the rise to 1970 was unsustainable. (This is unsatisfying).<br /><br />2) The rise happened to 1970 because the baby boom put an enormous strain on the nation's higher education system, and the uniform response was to try to turn every college in the United States into Berkeley.<br /><br />One way to test that theory would be to check if humanities degrees at the Berkeley/Harvards of the world rose from 1955 to 1970. The more they did, the less this theory is useful.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Benhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04856020368342677253noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8929346053949579231.post-26679386678365845452013-06-27T11:56:11.100-04:002013-06-27T11:56:11.100-04:00I'm still trying desperately to wrap my mind a...I'm still trying desperately to wrap my mind around what happened in the 1960s - which, in some sense, is the real anomaly, with the collapse of the 1970s being something more like a reversion to the mean. I can think of any number of factors. It was a golden decade, with persistently low unemployment. At the same time, the long-shrinking college wage premium began a precipitous rise midway through the 1950s. Both of those trends reversed in the 1970s - jobs were harder to find for everyone, and the wage premium sank again. So perhaps this allowed students to pursue their interests in the 1960s, relatively insulated from concern over their careers. Or maybe it was the concurrent rise of the oft-maligned middlebrow, which meant that students grew up in homes with Books-of-the-Month and Reader's Digest, and so even first-generation college students felt that the humanities were attainably within reach and not the exclusive property of cultural elites. Or it could be precisely the crumbling of the pre-war elite and the rise of the putative meritocracy, creating a decade-long transitional window during which the acquisition of the cultural status conferred by humanistic pursuits still seemed like a passport to a better, or at least a more respectable, life.<br /><br />But I can't quite square that with the gendered narrative you present here. If entry into a broadening array of career fields, and sudden concern over employability, led to the decline of the 1970s, then what accounts for women's sudden embrace of the humanities in the 1960s, at both a relative rate and an absolute percentage higher than men of the era? If the 1970s decline looks something like a reversion to the historic mean, then shouldn't it be at least partially attributable to a reversal of whatever factor had driven the equally precipitous rise a decade earlier?<br /><br />There's certainly room enough for multiple explanations. From your graph, it looks as if women majored in the humanities at rates ~14% in the 1950s, surging to a peak of around 23% around 1967, before falling to a contemporary band of 7.5-9%. (Do I have that right?) So I'm perfectly willing to be convinced that the sharp fall from ~14% to ~8% is a consequence of broader career opportunities and the increasing availability of pre-professional majors. But I still don't understand the surge up to 23% - and so I'm not quite persuaded that I understand the entirety of the drop that followed. Thoughts?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02151663590594341211noreply@blogger.com