[lg policy] Traditional Language Programs Have Declined Steadily Over Decades

[Harold Schiffman]

Traditional Language Programs Have Declined Steadily Over Decades
By David Glenn

Can you say "decline" in French, German, or Italian? Undergraduate
majors in German and the Romance languages have been slowly vanishing
from the American higher-education landscape since before many of
today's faculty members were born, according to a new analysis by four
scholars at the University of California at Riverside.

The paper, which has been accepted for publication in The Journal of
Higher Education, mines federal data to identify degree programs that
significantly declined between 1971 and 2006.

The researchers wanted to examine the factors that cause the erosion
of academic fields. Do fields decline primarily because
long-established colleges drop them, or because new colleges choose
not to offer them? Does a college's size or prestige matter, or
whether it is public or private, or how many competing colleges are in
its region?

Those are all interesting questions. But most readers' first reaction
to the paper's raw data will probably be: My goodness, things look
dire for European-language programs.

In the 1970-71 academic year, Romance-language majors were offered by
close to 76 percent of American four-year colleges. But by 2005-6,
only about 59 percent offered them. German programs saw a similar
decline: In 1970-71, about 44 percent of colleges offered the major,
but in 2005-6, just under 27 percent did so. Leaving aside
"secretarial science," those are by far the largest relative declines
discovered by the Riverside scholars.

And those numbers, of course, do not cover the effects of the recent
recession. The last year, for example, has seen proposals to do away
with certain European-language majors at a number of institutions,
including the State University of New York at Albany, the University
of Central Missouri, and the University of North Carolina system.

Related ContentFastest-Declining Academic Fields at 4-Year Colleges
"We were just looking for patterns, and we certainly don't mean to
endorse the decision to drop any of these programs," said the paper's
lead author, Steven Brint, in an interview on Monday. Mr. Brint is
associate dean for student academic affairs and professor of sociology
at Riverside.

A Mixed Picture
The decline in European-language degree programs does not necessarily
signal a general collapse in foreign-language study at American
colleges. Spanish programs have been largely immune from the declines
in other Romance languages. Many institutions have added majors in
Chinese and Arabic. The overall number of bachelor's degrees awarded
in "foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics" increased by
roughly 30 percent between 2001 and 2008, according to federal
statistics.

But the reduction in many traditional language programs is still
troubling to some advocates of the humanities.

The Riverside paper's findings are unsurprising but still disturbing,
Timothy G. Reagan, a professor of education at Central Connecticut
State University and the author of several books on foreign-language
study, said in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.

Mr. Reagan said he feared that proponents of foreign-language
education have focused too much on the purported career benefits of
becoming bilingual. That line of defense, he said, misses some of the
most important values in language education.

Proponents, he said, should emphasize "the benefits of
foreign-language study itself, rather than focus on the benefits of
true bilingualism that will be achieved by only a small percentage of
our students. I believe that there are incredibly powerful arguments
for foreign-language study, and that these arguments fit beautifully
into the core defenses for humanities and liberal-arts education writ
large."

The Path to Decline
Meanwhile, what did Mr. Brint and his co-authors learn about the
forces that shape declines in academic fields?

In general, as they expected, they found that smaller and
less-prestigious institutions were more likely than their bigger and
more-prestigious counterparts to drop degree programs. That pattern
was more pronounced among private colleges than among public
institutions. At public institutions, the authors speculated,
low-enrollment programs may have been relatively insulated from market
forces. (But that might be changing quickly in this recession, Mr.
Brint said in the interview.)

Colleges with a strong liberal-arts tradition were especially unlikely
to eliminate programs in the humanities, and large doctoral
universities were especially unlikely to drop science programs. Those
patterns were expected, but the authors write that they were surprised
by the rate at which smaller, less-prestigious doctoral-granting
universities dropped traditional arts and sciences fields.

The authors found that some fields, including mathematics and history,
experienced relative declines only because most new colleges have not
included them. At colleges that had been established by 1970, those
fields have held their own. But other fields, including German,
Romance languages, and classics, have been dropped by many
institutions that once offered them.

For their analysis, Mr. Brint and his colleagues looked at federal
data for all American four-year colleges, excluding specialized
colleges with narrow focuses in specific fields such as business or
the performing arts. There were 1,263 such colleges in 1970-71 and
1,416 in 2005-6.

In determining whether a degree program was offered at a college, the
authors looked at whether any students actually graduated with such a
degree. "Ghost" degrees that lingered in a college's course catalog
did not count. If no students graduated in a certain field in two
consecutive years at the beginning or the end of the study period, the
authors deemed that the program did not exist at that college.

The new paper is titled "Declining Academic Fields in U.S. Four-Year
Colleges and Universities, 1970-2006." Mr. Brint's co-authors are
Kristopher Proctor, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford
University; Kerry Mulligan and Matthew B. Rotondi, who are graduate
students in sociology at Riverside; and Robert A. Hanneman, a
professor of sociology at Riverside.

http://chronicle.com/article/Traditional-Language-Programs/126368/

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