[Edling] JNCL-NCLIS Statement on the 2021 MLA Report on Enrollment in Higher Education Language Courses

[Francis M. Hult via Edling]

JNCL-NCLIS Statement on the 2021 MLA Report on Enrollment in Higher
Education Language Courses

The Modern Language Association's (MLA) 2021 report on the 16.6% drop in
college and university enrollments in world language courses is
devastating. Twelve of the fifteen most commonly taught languages saw
declines in college course enrollment since MLA’s last report in 2016, with
many seeing double-digit reductions. For instance, college and university
enrollments in German fell by 33.6%, in French by more than 23%, and in
Latin by 21.5%. Despite Spanish being the second most spoken language in
the United States and the most widely studied, enrollments in Spanish
dropped by 18%. Even languages critical to the nation’s diplomatic and
intelligence missions saw significant retrenchment – Chinese language
courses lost more than 14% of their students, Arabic courses lost more than
27%, and Russian lost 13.5%. Even worse, nearly all of these declines
represent an acceleration of trends that began as far back as 2009. While
there are bright spots in the report  – the more than 38% growth in Korean
language enrollments, for example, they are dwarfed by the overall loss of
more than 235,000 students studying the most commonly taught languages
since 2016 and more than 490,000 since 2009.

Full text:
https://www.languagepolicy.org/post/jncl-nclis-statement-on-the-2021-mla-report-on-enrollment-in-higher-education-language-courses
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/edling/attachments/20231121/ec5079f3/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------


_______________________________________________
Edling mailing list
Edling at lists.mail.umbc.edu
https://lists.mail.umbc.edu/mailman/listinfo/edling