Why Writing Matters: Helping Students Rethink the Value of English and Writing Studies

Joining the content from the 2018 ADE report is data available through Humanities Indicators, A Project of the American 

Academy of Arts & Sciences, which also affirm that the number of individuals completing. English degrees has fluctuated for decades. While the number of completed English degrees experienced an increase in the 1960s, there was a dramatic decline in the 1980s before a slight resurgence in the 1990s. The current decline has been particularly significant since 2009: the only humanities degree programs to experience notable growth since this time have been in communications, with an eight percent increase (American Academy of Arts & 

Sciences, 2017).

Perhaps the number of students pursuing a communications degree is growing

because students assume it is more applicable to a professional setting or provides more practical skills than what is perceived as a vague, traditional English degree. A recent perusal of advertisements with “communications” as a part of the job title—for example, communications specialist, social media communications associate, digital communications 

coordinator, and communications officer—revealed required skills and experiences not  exclusively germane to students in communications programs. The expertise desired by employers often included writing, editing, and proofreading; independent and collaborative work experience; familiarity with style manuals and formatting concerns; and knowledge of

digital publishing and social media platforms. These qualifications are foci of development for many humanities programs, including specifically English and writing studies. Helping students discover the range of degree programs that provide instruction and experience in these areas is essential to prompt rethinking of their courses of study.

Louis Menand (2010) in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the 

American University recognized the pre-professional focus of many students in the selection of their degree programs. He argued that the value of humanities degrees has been in question because there are not always straight lines between college majors and career paths. Menand contended that this can be traced to curricular decisions made in the late nineteenth century by the president of Harvard University, Charles William Eliot. Under Eliot’s direction, Harvard changed the structure of academic degree programs by making a bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for admission to medical and law schools; the undergraduate degree was now considered a distinctively separate facet—a preparatory stage—of one’s college pursuits, occurring before career education and training. Menand saw the change as essentially professionalizing the professions (p. 47), as it required students to obtain additional professional training through formal education programs after 

completion of bachelor degrees.

Menand explained that these curricular changes have impacted twenty-first-century 

humanities degree programs because they resulted in “the idea that liberal arts education is by its nature divorced from professional education” (2010, pp. 49–50), and many students today want the investment in college to lead directly to jobs and income. Consideration of 

Menand’s theories was useful for us to better understand what contributed to narratives undermining the value of humanities, and specifically English, degrees; however, it was Menand’s assessment of what a humanities program offers students that prompted a new direction for our project: “[Humanities] is pursuing an ongoing inquiry into the limits of inquiry. And it is not just asking questions about knowledge; it is creating knowledge by 

asking the questions. Skepticism about the forms of knowledge is itself a form of knowledge” (p. 92).

In considering how knowledge is generated, we started to rethink the project. Our aim was to develop materials to help college students understand the value and opportunities within English and writing studies, but as we reflected on our own experiences in college and professional settings outside of universities, we were prompted to analyze what brought us to English studies. What arguments, data, and knowledge motivated us? How were they presented? Why were they persuasive? What we found was that it was not data or a simple deductive argument that pulled us to English studies, but rather individual understandings of where we wanted to situate ourselves both academically and professionally. As Stanley Aronowitz (2019) wrote in the foreword to Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibilities, a goal of education is “self-reflection, that is realizing the famous poetic phrase ‘know thyself,’ which is an understanding of the world . . . its economic, political and, equally important, its psychological dimensions” (p. ix). Through these considerations, we found that Peckham’s definition of critical thinking and tenets of critical pedagogy might offer an approach for reaching twenty-first-century college students to help them rethink the place of writing in their academic and professional careers.

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Name : Arisya Putri 

Class : 4 A

NIM : 2223200027