30 years ago accounting was the major that felt like a token to financial stability and successes, today it’s computer science. After the pandemic, technology has advanced into every part of our lives, more than ever before. Societies continue to celebrate makers as Chachra said in, Why Am I Not a Maker, “a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products” (Chachra). So what about the non-makers? The humanities?
According to Heller’s, The End of the English Major in the New York Times, “from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half”. As English and humanities majors plummet, we wonder how past English majors are surviving in the workforce.
This inspired our research to investigate what happened to alumni that major in Humanities, specifically, English. Our data visualization served to represent where Carleton College English graduates ended up over time. We specifically looked at the years 2000-2023.
Another part of why we as a group chose to do our final project on this topic was because a lot of our group consists of juniors, meaning we have just over 1 year left at Carleton. We wanted to have a little insight as to where fellow Carls, like ourselves, reside after their Carleton days.
