Why the Humanities Are More Valuable Than Ever

A college education today requires a greater investment of time, money, and hard work than ever. It makes sense, then, that students and parents generally want to choose an academic path that will yield a strong return in the form of a successful career. For years, enrollment in humanities majors has been declining at universities, as students flock to STEM and business majors that they believe will best prepare them for the high-paying jobs of tomorrow. So is there still value in a humanities degree? 

Absolutely, argues Carlo Rotella, a writer and Boston College professor of American studies, English, and journalism. In his new book, What Can I Get Out of This? Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics, Rotella chronicles a semester-long experience with thirty-three students in Lit Core, BC’s required freshman literature course. The students start the course unsure what studying fiction has to do with finding success in the real world. As the spring semester rolls on, though, they are transformed by working through challenging stories together. What Can I Get Out of This? explores how analyzing literature serves a larger purpose of developing the  adaptable “soft skills”— like analytical reasoning, creative problem-solving, and teamwork—that research shows are most highly prized by employers across varied industries. In fact, Rotella writes, over a lifetime, English majors tend to earn as much as those who major in STEM courses, business, and other fields.

In the excerpts that follow, Rotella brings readers into the classroom to show how humanities educators help students build the core competencies that will serve them in life and work. —Scott Kearnan

For all the heatedness of the national conversation about higher education these days, there’s relatively little substantive public discussion about what actually happens in college classrooms: what lessons we learn, how we learn them, how they sink in or don’t, how we process what happens in school and go about connecting it to our thinking and feeling lives beyond school. That’s what matters most about the classroom, and I wanted to convey not only my experience of it but also the experiences of others in the room. So—starting about eighteen months after the semester ended, which was for most of these students the fall of their junior year—I interviewed almost all of the students who took the required freshman literature course known at BC as Lit Core with me in the spring semester of 2020, and I’m drawing on those interviews when I tell you what they thought and said. (I have changed the students’ names, one of the choices I explain in the afterword.) My decision to organize the syllabus around the literary theme of the misfit colored students’ reflections on the semester. They had a lot to say about fitting in and standing out, getting with the program and making their own way through the world of ideas and the world at large.

Giving them—and myself—a chance to reflect on that eventful spring of 2020 was the best way I could think of to try to understand what happened when we converged on Stokes South 209 for half a semester to engage with literature, then dispersed in a wild scramble to our various homes and other pandemic redoubts, then reconvened on Zoom for the rest of the semester, then went off on our separate trajectories. Because so much of the debate about the purpose and value of college, the humanities, and the study of literature is uninterested in teaching and learning or abstract to the point of uselessness, I thought it might be useful to tell you what some actual humans at college actually did with literature.

The closing of campuses and the move to Zoom forced us all to think in particular about the value and meaning of what happens in the classroom, which gave this book a strong bias in that direction. I realize, of course, that writing, which mostly happens outside the classroom, is one of the core competencies that a college education should develop. Writing is the work that means the most to me (even more than teaching). I teach writing in all my courses; I also teach nonfiction writing courses that tend to attract students who want to write for a living, and I certainly believe that teaching writing is one of the essential functions of English departments, but that’s a subject for another book.

So is the rise of AI. As a writing tool, in its current form it’s a high-end autocomplete function, a labor-saving device. But the labor of thinking—reading is thinking, writing is thinking, and what we do in class is think together about how to extract meaning from something we’ve all read—is the point of an English course. Outsourcing any of that work to a bot is like joining the track team and doing your laps on an electric scooter: yes, you go around the track, but you don’t get faster or stronger. Still, I recognize that people will find new ways to use AI as a writing and study tool as it continues to develop and that it will affect what teachers and students do in at least some ways—which include encouraging teachers to put less weight on papers and more on what happens in class. Looking back, the semester chronicled in this book was one of the last before ChatGPT and such came along to make academic life even more complicated than it already was. That development may be a worthy subject in its own right, but it’s one for another day. And, like Zoom, AI is another supposedly game-changing emergent technology that has the ironic effect of helping us see what’s unique and irreplaceable about face-to-face discussion in the classroom.

At least in courses built around discussion, what happens in the classroom is increasingly the one academic feature of college above all others that students and their families are paying for—that is, they’re paying for the admissions process that produced the other students in the room, the hiring and promotion process that produced the teacher, and the possibilities for substantive exchange within that community. What happens in the classroom feels, on the one hand, timelessly special and separate from everything else in life and, on the other hand, deeply connected to everything else in life. In Stokes South 209—and then, much less effectively, on Zoom—we were engaged in figuring out how meaning flows through texts, lives, the world. That’s part of the essential business of being human that we all do at all times and in all kinds of places, not just in a college classroom.

The crucial work of establishing habits, expectations, and a sense of community at the beginning of the semester deserves plenty of attention and shouldn’t be rushed. Among other things, it’s worth devoting some effort to building community because everyone does better work in a classroom where participating in class discussion no longer feels like public speaking and becomes more like having a purposeful conversation with colleagues you know and trust.

It was essential that I make clear that I was going to wait for answers after asking a question. Better a few early awkward silences at the outset than fifteen weeks with a class full of people who don’t believe I’ll wait as long as necessary for an answer. At this point in my classroom career as teacher and student, I’ve built up stamina to the point that I could go at least a minute or two, smiling faintly while looking around and waiting them out, and most people can’t stand to go anywhere near that long. It’s useful to remember that a discussion of literature is not talk radio or TV news: silence in a classroom is not dead air, and it shouldn’t automatically unnerve you. I appreciate a nice stretch of cogitative classroom silence, and I think there should be at least one of them in a good class discussion. People don’t all operate at the same speed, and the typical class discussion tends to over-favor those who think fast and can articulate those thoughts right away. Many people, including some of those with the most insight to offer, need a little more time to cook and digest a thought. 

Mainly, I needed to establish from the beginning, by asking genuine questions and visibly expecting responses to them and not supplying those answers myself, that the students would do the work of the class. I would be coming less than halfway to them, and they would have to come more than halfway to meet me at the place where learning happens. They needed to see and accept that I would be framing the problems and they would be doing the problems (and, in time, also helping to frame them), that there were many possibilities for finding and making meaning in any work we read, that class discussion was not just a game of hide-and-seek that would be more efficiently played if I simply came out and told them the answer. By taking seriously the different observations and ideas that came up in response to the problems I laid out for us, I could establish that there wasn’t an answer, that there were just stronger and weaker arguments for a near-infinite number of interpretations. 

In these first few classes, I was also setting tone, mood, and other intangible but essential conditions for learning—a strategy that often entails trying to convey two opposite messages at the same time. For instance, You’re all doing your best to earn good grades as individuals, and you’re each responsible for your own effort and accomplishments, but we’re also a community of inquiry, which means we also have responsibilities to each other. I had reinforced the individualistic part of this message on the first day when we went over the syllabus—the papers, the final exam, grading—but it didn’t need much reinforcement. College students already think of themselves as highly motivated lone operators who are out to maximize return on investment. But I had to build up the face-to-face, flesh-and-blood community-of-inquiry part, working against the grain of our tendency these days to consent to everyone getting sorted into the magnificent isolation of a highly curated, individualized electronic niche. That’s a principal reason why I try to create a warm and encouraging tone in the classroom, why I make a visible point of learning and using names, and why it’s worth insisting that students use each other’s names when referring to what others say—not “what she said,” but “what Jenny said.” It’s also why I make a show of melding individual contributions into a greater whole. Reduced to a kind of Mad Lib, the template for that melding might look like this: if we take what [name 1] says about [form] and what [name 2] says about [form] and try to put them together with what [name 3] and [name 4] say about [theme], then we arrive at [interpretive conclusion], which leads to [new question]. I’m trying to make clear to students that there’s a larger conversation going on that they can get in on, to their own benefit as well as the greater good. They can use class discussions to workshop ideas, practice moves, test out and refine their chops—all of which will help them do what they need to do on papers and the final. And students are modeling that same process for each other, as well as giving each other lots of ideas about how to interpret each text. I can put analytical tools in our shared kit, but other students do the greater part of demonstrating what can be done with them.