I was very pleased to see AHA Teaching Division Vice President Elizabeth Lehfeldt take on the issue of declining enrollments in undergraduate history programs in the October edition of Perspectives. Anyone who reads this blog with regularity knows that enrollment issues have figured prominently among the topics I cover, most recently here and here.
The decline in history enrollments around the country isn’t news to anyone teaching at the post-secondary level and the AHA has done a thorough job of documenting some of the parameters of the decline. What’s lacking in this whole discussion is solid data on exactly why students have moved away from history and into other fields. We have lots of reasonable propositions, and I have offered my own suggestions in the posts linked above, but all of us are, to a degree, shooting in the dark because we don’t have actual data from students.
One obvious place to look for such data would be from our campus enrollment officers. Admissions offices, enrollment management consultants, and research centers like the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA have reams of data on student preferences, predispositions, demographic characteristics, and other factors that could be plugged into the kind of regressions that might just tell us a lot about what’s going on. At a minimum, these data would add richness to our anecdotal or surface studies of the problem. I hope the AHA will consider investing in some of this sort of analysis so that we get beyond just asking department chairs what they think is happening.
A second issue I have with what Lehfeldt writes in her essay is the assumption that doubling down on the History Discipline Core of the Tuning Project is going to be a solution to our enrollment problems. I completely agree with Lehfeldt that, as she writes, the Tuning project has “created a common, broadly accessible vocabulary about the value of majoring in history.” But to assert that “Tuning has helped allay students’ and parents’ concerns about ‘what to do with a major in history’,” based on no data to support such an assertion is really troubling. If such data exist, I’d love to see them.
So, yes, Tuning is a good step forward. But, no, I don’t see any evidence cited by anyone that adopting the framework and goals of the Tuning project has either allayed concerns in the market about the value of a history degree, or that the adoption of Tuning has helped change the enrollment trajectories of those departments who have signed on.
In previous posts on Tuning, I’ve been very critical of the fact that, at least to my mind, the Discipline Core is neither forward looking, nor aligned with the world our students live in. As evidence for my contentions, I would offer the fact that in the entire Discipline Core document the digital world our students (and we) live in shows up exactly once…toward the end, where one of the competencies students might gain is the ability to build a website on a historical topic.
Once.
Doubling down on Tuning as the solution to our enrollment problems strikes me as saying that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, but do it more, and do a better job of explaining to students why doing it the way we’ve always done it really, really is good, everything will turn out fine in the end.
The last time I checked, Professor Pangloss was teaching in a different department.