The current research question goes as follows:
Since the change in the price of college, is there a relationship to the increased cost of college and choosing higher paying educational degrees?
Charles A. Malgwi, Martha A. Howe & Priscilla A. Burnaby (2005) Influences on Students' Choice of College Major, Journal of Education for Business, 80:5, 275-282, DOI: 10.3200/JOEB.80.5.275-282
Josh Kinsler and Ronni Pavan, "The Specificity of General Human Capital: Evidence from College Major Choice," Journal of Labor Economics 33, no. 4 (October 2015): 933-972.
It is good you are looking at data, and it might be worth looking at the data for particular majors with a focus on what happened before and after 2008, which most critics point to as the breaking point for the liberal arts. It would be good to have several articles to document that trend away from the liberal arts -- perhaps with a focus on a few majors as your key cases. A really interesting one -- and one that might interest you: Economics.
ReplyDeleteEconomics has an interesting history, and there was a time at the turn of the century (around 2000) when the rise of business schools seemed to threaten the economics major. But now the economics major is returning -- especially since 2008, as more students double major in Economics (see for instance TRENDS IN ECONOMICS AND OTHER UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS
by Wendy A. Stock). It may be that Economics gives business majors a chance to adjust to changes in the market more easily. Meanwhile, English and history are like the canaries in the coal mine for the humanities, and both are in a long decline, with history in particular seeing huge losses. There are many articles about this -- especially in the Chronicle of Higher Education -- most famously the essay "Academe’s Extinction Event: Failure, Whiskey, and Professional Collapse at the MLA" by Andrew Kay, which you can see from a Rutgers computer or through the libraries.
There are a lot of articles fighting against the decline of the hunanities -- especially in The Atlantic, e.g.:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/
An interesting article is "From Hard Times to Better Times," which traces the effect of the 2008 financial crisis on various majors:
ReplyDeletehttps://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED558169.pdf
Or start here:
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED558169