What do you do with a major in French? Or philosophy, history, or English?

This is the question at the heart of all the challenges that now bedevil liberal-arts departments on campuses across the country, a problem once dubbed the “translation chasm.” It’s the gap between what students and their parents think a French degree leads to and what doors it could actually open up in the world. Bridging that chasm has ostensibly been the work of advisers and career counselors, scholarly associations, and professors themselves — to help students see how a major in the humanities can lead to a career, while also bestowing all those “human skills” so coveted in the workplace and so necessary to run a democracy.

But the value of the liberal arts seems to be getting lost in translation. Humanities and social-science disciplines are in alarming decline at many colleges. Popular media accounts are rife with stories about the poor job prospects for “useless” majors in French and philosophy, and college leaders and public figures believe that literature and art history are mainly for wealthy students. The numbers are dramatic, just to cite the trends in languages: In the years leading into the pandemic, enrollments in foreign-language courses fell by 17 percent, the largest decline the Modern Language Association had ever seen; in grappling with its recent budget crisis, the University of Connecticut, the state flagship, listed French, German, Chinese, Italian, and other languages among the programs “under review” to align with budget cuts. Meanwhile, other disciplines, like philosophy, have suffered, too. The Daily Nous, a popular news blog for academic philosophers, has bemoaned the lack of demand in the field, the difficulty philosophers have in demonstrating the value of philosophy for careers, and the various efforts to stave off program closures. Anyone can find similar stories for sociology, history, religious studies, and so on.

Generations of scholars have presided over the widening of the translation chasm. Many of them came of age when the study of their discipline was accepted as a self-evident good, the mark of a well-educated person. Honing the sales pitch for one’s discipline — or even making sure that the discipline was relevant to any kind of work outcome — was hardly a concern, and certainly not something most institutions incentivized. Take Ella Kirk, a professor of French who has taught at Hiram College for more than 30 years. Kirk has seen her discipline fall into decline as Hiram has cut back its offerings in the humanities and placed more emphasis on majors that seem to have a clearer application to a career, like business or sports management.

Kirk seems flummoxed by the question of what to do with a major in her discipline. People should take courses in French, literature, and other humanities to read and expand their minds, she says, rather than worry about what they lead to. When pressed, she offers some generalizations: Learning another language can help someone learn the grammatical structures of their own native tongue, she says, and certainly French has been an important historical and diplomatic language. But, she says, “it’s increasingly difficult for me to argue that learning French in college and majoring in French is a good choice.” It was easier in the past when the department could lure students with study abroad, where they would need a working knowledge of the language to navigate daily life. “Here in northeast Ohio, there’s not much opportunity to get them to speak or anything like that. So why would you major in French?”

“I’m pretty tired of trying to answer that question,” adds Kirk. “It doesn’t even seem like it should be a question to me.”

That response would surely leave the average student or parent wanting. Many faculty members might see something of themselves in Kirk, caught in a swirl of pressures to generate revenue amid the changing life patterns of students.

When academics make the case for the liberal arts, they’re often making the case to each other. This inward focus on the structures and traditions important to faculty members may enhance their positions in the academic caste system, but it has little to say about what matters to students. Last fall’s issue on “How the Liberal Arts Work” from MLA Profession, a publication of the Modern Language Association, promised to answer the question that students and faculty grapple with: “In an era of neoliberal restructuring, political division, widespread misinformation, rising costs, and skyrocketing student debt, how and why and when do the liberal arts ‘work’?”

But a professor like Ella Kirk would find very little in the issue to help her answer a student’s question, “Why French?” One essay describes the professional path of the author to academic administration, while another looks at the impact of undergraduate humanities research (it deepens the experience, no surprise). Some authors lament that universities are run like businesses — but don’t discuss the financial problems that arise when professors can’t sell humanities majors to students. Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University who writes for The Chronicle about graduate education, ponders the discomfort academics in the humanities have with the term “skills,” for its association with the capitalist system, its threat to turn humanities departments into service units for business and engineering colleges, and its potential to diminish professors’ status as researchers. But the climate in academe is changing, he concedes: “The pursuit of skills has been a goal of American academia since its beginnings. We deny that fact at our peril.”

Those who have successfully crossed the translation chasm can’t always elucidate how they did it. MLA Profession features a survey of about 400 liberal-arts graduates of the University of Texas at Austin — who have been in the working world for years, if not decades — and found that most were satisfied with their job positions and incomes, but it’s not clear that the liberal arts had an impact on those life outcomes. The authors were struck that “liberal-arts skills” apply “to work that appears unrelated or distantly related to liberal-arts fields” — like a linguistics major who became a physician and now uses his training to understand patients who don’t speak English. Stories like these show that French or philosophy are not so distant from medical school or hot tech fields — but none of the articles offer a sense of how to help students studying in the liberal arts find their way to such positions. (Even the survey respondents raised questions about “whether the nonvocational emphasis of a liberal-arts degree remains viable for students in the current economy, given the price tag.”)

Educators have remarked on a broad decline in reading — a difficult situation for liberal-arts disciplines, which are often based on long texts and analysis. But to some extent, the humanities and social sciences have poisoned themselves, putting an emphasis on hothouse academic topics and arcane scholarship, churning out unnecessarily complicated prose. The Economist recently analyzed the dissertations produced at British universities according to the Flesch Reading Ease test, which would score a typical New York Times article at about 50 and give very difficult texts a score of 30 or lower; according to The Economist, readability scores of humanities and social-sciences dissertations had fallen dramatically, from 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s.

To add to their translational troubles, these “useless” liberal-arts disciplines have paradoxically long been seen as dangerous, too. Despite a campaign to separate “liberal arts” from any political connotations — and even as some conservatives have rediscovered the value of liberal education as an antidote to groupthink — humanities and social-science departments have become lightning rods of the aggressive new right, frequently picked out as havens for radical leftists and targets of curriculum reforms. Even the word “critical” — a standard term within liberal-arts disciplines — has become a problematic label.

Whatever the challenges in conveying their value, studies show that the humanities and other liberal-arts disciplines have utility in the job market — but the translation chasm portends a much bigger educational crisis than people acknowledge. As liberal-arts departments disappear, the campus environment becomes more homogenized around vocational disciplines. Students are left with fewer opportunities to encounter a peer, professor, or mentor from another major who uses history to open up a world of architecture or cuisine from another culture, or calls on ethnic studies to present challenging thoughts about the dynamics of multiculturalism in America, or points to philosophy to rethink the nature of the social contract. That loss of variety and depth on campus threatens the very nature of the undergraduate experience — particularly among a set of financially stressed colleges and mid-tier private institutions that serve rural, nonwhite, and first-generation students, and those from modest family wealth. As those students head to jobs and adult lives, the loss of exposure to these humanistic disciplines may have resounding implications for society, the workplace, and their day-to-day lives.

If students aren’t going to choose the liberal arts, many institutions have found bureaucratic ways to require them — both to give students a well-rounded education and to preserve departments. They couch some sliver of the humanities and social sciences in marketable terms — for example, a philosophy course on ethics designed for health-science students, often recast as “medical ethics.” Other colleges might construct certificate-like minors, which pull together a smattering of courses to challenge students to consider the social impacts of the natural sciences or engineering on their day-to-day existence. Or they jazz up general education, hoping liberal-arts courses might lure a student who isn’t quite committed to accounting or international business to major instead in sociology or anthropology. Often, they pursue some combination of these strategies.

Following the financial crisis of 2008, the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University started losing students. “You would walk into a class where you used to get 200 students and suddenly you’ve got 70,” says Melinda S. Zook, a professor of history; smaller, more-focused courses — on, say, the history of civil rights — would be canceled altogether. In 2016, Zook was charged with the daunting task of trying to make the liberal arts relevant to the science-and-engineering-oriented students at Purdue. She focused on general education, starting a program called Cornerstone.

“I told the dean that this was not going to work unless we took over requirements,” she says, and Cornerstone initially focused on the written and oral communication requirements for gen ed. At first, she had to lure faculty members with money, but also gave them lots of leeway; in time, they came to appreciate the freedom of teaching “transformative texts” — essentially a more-inclusive list of great-books authors. Over time, the program has grown from 100 students to more than 5,000. Purdue students can pursue a five-course certificate in liberal arts through Cornerstone, but relatively few go beyond the two required general-education courses.

The humanities courses have to yield to the demands of the engineering curriculum and the students’ busy lives, with relatively short books on the list. “They’re not going to read Victor Hugo,” Zook says. “They’re not going to read Bleak House, but they can read 1984.”

Studying fundamental human questions and history through the humanities, she feels, is even more relevant as a shared understanding of facts and reality becomes fractured. “We’re just bombarded by information. But most of it is complete nonsense and noise, and no one is able to seem to put things together anymore.” Zook’s husband, also a historian, used to teach a course at Purdue on conspiracies but discontinued it about 10 years ago when he found that students started seeing conspiracies everywhere. “It was impossible for them to realize that there actually was a truth,” Zook says.

Like Purdue, the University of Colorado at Denver has been experiencing a “long-term decline in enrollment in the humanities and social sciences,” says Richard Allen, senior associate dean for academic and strategic planning in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And the university has found bureaucratic levers, finding ways to tuck liberal-arts courses into more vocationally oriented majors. For example, CU-Denver has created a certificate in Spanish for health-care programs. These aren’t examples of the humanities merely in service to vocational disciplines, Allen says. “They are examples of that important interaction between disciplines.”

“We spend a little too much time thinking about a major — a major is 30 of 120 credits here,” Allen says. General-education and elective courses are opportunities for administrators like Allen to ensure that a CU degree still has “at its foundation a liberal-arts and sciences core.”

But students are unlikely to get exposure to the core texts and tenets of disciplines like philosophy, the languages, or literature with just a seasoning of a few liberal-arts courses in an otherwise vocational track. With fewer majors offered and fewer people pursuing them, college students are missing the deep interactions with other students who study in those disciplines and the unexpected conversations that come from them.

Wayne Miller, chair of the English department at CU-Denver, notes that enrollments in the department’s creative-writing major have held relatively steady, with a decline of about 5 to 10 percent — the English department’s courses in writing still tend to be popular, given that writing is still seen as a work-applicable skill.

But the character of the discipline has shifted, reflecting the solipsism driven by social media. Students today are interested more in self-expression and tend to avoid the narrative analysis at the heart of literary study. “For me, that’s the biggest change in English,” says Miller. Because of enrollment declines — up to 60 percent over a decade — the department has had to merge its programs in literature and film, where students deconstruct and interpret the works in the classic English-major fashion. Some scholars spend years or even decades deconstructing a single work, like Moby Dick or The Odyssey, where the depth of that inquiry can lead to new insights or a distinct lens on the world. But with a deluge of information all around us, Miller laments, everyone lives with an underlying fear of missing out by getting stuck on one text for too long.

For the past decade, Hiram College has been trying to crack the code of survival while also maintaining many of the liberal-arts traditions of the college, which date to its founding. “We’re not keeping the liberal arts around because it’s quaint,” says Jeffrey Swenson, a professor of English who is also vice president for academic and student affairs and dean of the college. “We’re doing it because it’s part of our core mission.”

But this is a difficult balancing act at a college whose mission has been under pressure for years. In 2018, under President Lori Varlotta, the college toyed with how to rebrand and reorganize its offerings under a new interdisciplinary curriculum called the “New Liberal Arts”; during the restructuring, Hiram eliminated religious studies and cut faculty in various humanities and social-science disciplines, while adding programs in marketing and sports management. The college also boosted athletics recruiting for students who wanted to play Division III sports.

“We had been cut to the bone,” says Robert E. Bohrer II of the scene when he arrived as vice president for academic affairs and dean in 2022. Named president of the college early last year, he takes a very “practical” view that Hiram needs to attract more students through majors that easily translate into job slots in the minds of students and parents — like nursing or accounting — while also trying to add depth to those programs with courses in sociology, philosophy, or history.

Growth has to be a key goal of the college, administrators say — not just to keep the institution going, but to also provide a cushion that can support those “nonvocational” majors. But that doesn’t mean the college is going to keep everything: What’s valued in the humanities and social sciences can change, Bohrer says — after all, Greek and Latin aren’t part of college entrance exams, like they were a century ago. Hiram students, he notes, tend to be driven by practical pressures compared to students from more-exclusive colleges.

“We’re a blue-collar liberal-arts college,” says Bohrer, an institution that has always been open to women, nonwhite students, and the poor — which includes its most famous destitute student, a young James A. Garfield.

At Hiram, the liberal arts are talked about as an element that refines and softens those applied or technical majors — it’s part of that well-worn argument for the “soft skills” that the humanities purportedly develop in students. “You want a nurse who’s got that liberal-arts background, who’s dealing with the whole human, and not just maybe what’s on a chart,” Bohrer says. “I don’t think that there’s a division between what students want today, what employers want today, and what we do at a place like Hiram. What I think is, we have failed miserably at communicating that with employers and sometimes with families and students.”

Bohrer emphasizes that he is talking about “the royal we,” meaning that all of higher education has trouble with translating the liberal arts — although Kirk and other professors at Hiram complained that the college’s advising and career services weren’t helping students see the possibilities in humanities disciplines. It’s a common situation: A recent report from the Strada Educational Foundation found that only 20 percent of graduates of public universities had received “quality coaching,” defined very broadly with three elements: personalized career guidance, timely information about career tracks and potential outcomes, and support in reaching goals. The report noted that students in programs with “direct professional alignment” were more likely to get quality coaching — 29 percent of graduates in accounting, for example — while liberal-arts majors ranked at the bottom, with only 16 percent getting sound guidance.

Whatever challenges Hiram has in bridging the translation chasm, it is also grappling with some broad trends in elementary-, middle-, and high-school curricula, which have shifted away from engagement with longer texts and deep knowledge, and more toward discrete skills that can be measured on standardized assessments — much to the alarm of some educators and cultural critics, who see students arrive on campuses unprepared to analyze complex texts.

Just a month into the semester, Colin Anderson, now the only professor of philosophy at Hiram, was preparing for an upcoming major fair by scanning the responses of students who had been surveyed on what they were reading outside of course assignments.

The students said they weren’t reading anything, to Anderson’s exasperation. Many students have told Anderson and his colleagues that they primarily came to Hiram to play a sport and secondarily to get a degree and land a job. The fact that students weren’t arriving at the college with declared interests in philosophy, religion, or French formed the most influential rationale for the cuts at Hiram, Anderson noted.

“The administration said, Well, nobody says ‘I’m coming here for philosophy,’ so we don’t really need you because you’re not bringing students in,” he recalls, a position that he believes “fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of higher education.” The college has “much more of a focus on getting people through now,” and it pushes students to pick majors early, which is at odds with the exploration they were allowed in the past, he says.

Hiram still draws some students who are “true liberal-minded undecideds,” says Anderson, but most other students choose majors that sound like careers, without much consideration for what that major actually means or where it leads. He sees a lot of anxiety in students in professional programs like nursing or accounting who suddenly realize it’s not for them, and he has read research indicating that those students are more likely to leave the college. Under pressure to get students in the door, he believes, Hiram has lost sight of what keeps them around.

“They’re not coming here for the whole experience,” Anderson says. “They’re just here for that one instrumental function of the institution.”

When he started at the college 25 years ago, about a third of the degrees awarded were in professional programs; now well over half are. Back then, he says, philosophy and religious studies had five faculty members between them, teaching maybe 30 courses over the year; now Anderson is the only one left, teaching six.

“The place of a program like philosophy now is largely, you know, intro to ethics, intro to logic, and a couple of specialized courses that have crossovers with other programs,” he says. Gone are the days when a student could amble into a course on existentialism or Buddhism, find an enriching intellectual interest, and take off onto a new path in life that opens up a hidden professional world. As the college has shifted from faculty advising to professional advising, he says, professors have fewer opportunities to connect with students. Sometimes he encounters students who discover philosophy in their junior or senior year, but by then it’s too late to even minor in it.

Kirk, the French professor, feels the isolation even more acutely. Students come to class unprepared and struggle to carry on conversations with her in English, let alone French. “We used to do language-club events and weekly tables where we would go and sit, speaking French or Spanish, but there is no one to do that with anymore,” she says. She has discovered she has to be proactive to draw students in, and she recently approached some of them in a course on immigration. “I said, ‘Do you mind if I kind of adopt you and have you come over to my house for dinner?’ Because that’s where you have good conversations.”

For much of her three decades at Hiram College — back when the modern-language department was in a large building on the campus quad, alongside the departments of philosophy, communication, and others in the humanities — Kirk would spend her days in ”a constant mix” of students hanging around her office. “Coming in and out, going to classrooms, passing in front of our offices, stopping just to say hi, stopping to ask a minor question,” she recalls. “Those kinds of things just don’t happen to me anymore — and I miss it.”

Kirk’s office has since moved to Bonny Castle, a former 19th-century inn on the edge of campus that houses the English department (“They were kind of dwindling, too,” Kirk says), and her sole remaining colleague in philosophy, Anderson. “We kind of feel ostracized over here,” she says. “There’s no student traffic by our offices at all. So I have forced my students to come and be in my office with me, just so they know where I am.”

The decline in liberal-arts disciplines is happening because, on many campuses, no one has taken ownership of explaining them. Given the focus of parents and students on getting a job and earning money after graduation, bridging the translation chasm has to start with the career possibilities — and they are out there, even for a French major in Ohio. It can start with a simple question: Who sells Ohio internationally? The state’s economic-development corporation, JobsOhio, runs a division devoted to the dozens of French companies in the state, which employ 24,000 people and have seen 50-percent growth in jobs over the past 10 years, generating more than $2.3 billion in trade between France and the Buckeye State. JobsOhio works closely with the Ohio chapter of the French-American Chamber of Commerce, which offers mentorship and accommodations to French entrepreneurs seeking to expand to the Midwest.

Or a French department could draw connections to the state’s social needs, highlighted in the recent election: In Springfield, Haitian immigrants had been subjected to bomb threats and neo-Nazi marches after Donald Trump, in a September presidential debate, falsely claimed they were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. Many Haitians speak both of their country’s two official languages, French and Haitian Creole, which is derived from French.

Internationally, French consistently ranks as one of the world’s five most-useful languages, applicable far beyond France. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, has more French speakers than France itself — that’s just one African country on a demographically youthful continent poised to take a rising role in global business and culture in the 21st century.

Through simple outreach, a French department could make contact with the French business community and start to work out pipelines between French majors and experiential-learning opportunities, which would help students and their parents see the possibilities already present around them. Or, a college could show French majors how to employ their language skills to work with social-services and community-health agencies in communities like Springfield.

One possible approach is to invert an often-used solution to the translation chasm. Instead of setting up the humanities and social sciences in service to preprofessional and vocational programs, why aren’t the vocational courses more often in service to French, or philosophy, or history? After all, the major is typically only about a quarter to a third of the credits required for an undergraduate degree. A student majoring in French, for example, would have plenty of room to add courses in web development, marketing, and accounting to build out a career in helping small businesses in Ohio sell their wares internationally. French could easily be combined with the pre-med sciences to pave a route either to medical school or to physician-assistant programs. Or French could be teamed up with courses in sports management to open up a variety of avenues in soccer, lacrosse, hockey, or other sports popular in French-speaking countries. What’s more, a student immersed in Francophone culture is more likely to appreciate French history, social mores, and trends, helping companies and organizations see the pitfalls and opportunities in ways that a management or health-sciences major might not.

Almost any liberal-arts program can embrace this broader perspective to connect students to viable career routes that also resonate with their personal and vocational interests — this is a prominent theme of our forthcoming book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does. Colleges need to do more with orientation and first-year-experience courses to help students see these possibilities, and to create a narrative about the value of liberal arts that goes beyond mere human or “soft” skills. Students need to understand that college is not an either-or proposition — a matter of choosing a major in the liberal arts versus a “vocational” one — but an exercise in learning to integrate the pieces of their undergraduate degree, and to realize that employers want more than just majors that sound like jobs. For anyone doubting the value of philosophy, Anderson, the philosophy professor, tells of his students who have minored in the philosophy of ethics and then later found that of all the things prospective employers could have raised in job interviews, many wanted to discuss how a training in ethics would influence their work as lab technicians or salespeople.

In an attempt to explain the value of the liberal arts in a fluid job market and world, many educators have relied on various lists of marketable competencies and skills as a selling point — Anderson has been involved in work at Hiram to tie skills like written communication or critical thinking to his own discipline. But he is conflicted about a paradox in it: Somehow you have to convey the value of the liberal arts to people who have never really been introduced to a deep study of history, novels, art, or ideas, and often that experience is deeply personal and its value sometimes becomes apparent only years later. Someone majors in European history, for example, and then later realizes how that cultural background informed a successful business expansion in a new region of the continent.

It may be even harder to convey to young students how these disciplines could one day nurture aspects of their lives beyond work, by influencing their commitment to civic engagement, or offering a new approach to parenting, or providing a helpful perspective on the death of a family member or friend. Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, has made a career out of telling people “How to Build a Life,” his popular column in The Atlantic. Much of his advice relies on the modes of reflection and contemplation found in philosophy and the rest of the humanities. “I’d propose a hypothesis that, as a society, we have become spiritually flabby and psychically out of shape because we haven’t been getting in the reps on challenging existential questions,” he wrote recently. “The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, I believe, at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle.”

All of those potential returns on a college investment are difficult to sum up as job-ready “skills.” And besides, it’s not clear that students are going to pick up the purported human skills like communication, empathy, or critical thinking if they’re getting just a sprinkling of literature or philosophy in a business or engineering track — or if they see those courses as merely a gen-ed speed bump on the way to an otherwise “useful” utilitarian degree.

“Somehow along the way, that focus on skills — sort of the exoteric message — ended up undermining the esoteric,” Anderson says. “There’s good reason to believe that skills are not as transferable and robust as people would like to think they are — because of exactly that dependence on context and that dependence on knowledge.”

Knowledge works most effectively across society (and on a college campus) if it is varied, deep, and scattered across the population, allowing for people steeped in a discipline to encounter those from others. Creativity and innovation, after all, often come from the unexpected combinations of different ideas, cultures, perspectives, and worldviews — a dynamic documented by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the cultural critic Arthur Koestler, the corporate research scientist Jim Link, and the engineer Joseph T. Tykociner, who devised the idea of “Zetetics,” arguing that each discipline influences the creation of knowledge in other disciplines. It’s the formula behind the “T-shaped” professional so coveted by the business world. It’s what happens when a baseball general manager learns to see the game through the eyes of an economist to transform the Oakland Athletics into a winning team, or how an anthropologist who became a doctor used his skills in ethnography and medicine to devise solutions to health-care challenges in the world’s poorest places.

We’re all naturally multidisciplinary anyway. Miller, from CU-Denver, was a history major as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, and then later specialized in poetry. The best advice he got in college came from a sociology professor who was also a lawyer: Study what you want, because the disciplines are just different lenses on the same human problems. A degree in English literature is essentially a study of psychology, sociology, economics, history, politics, and more, all rendered through the prism of stories. Students of literature who understand the power of narrative to teach and persuade can apply that skill to a range of personal and professional settings. It all depends on how a student complements their studies in literature with the other possibilities in the college catalog and surrounding community — and whether college professors, advisers, and other staff show them how to cross the translation chasm.

The beauty of education happens when students start to see the richness of the world through a disciplinary lens, and then share those views with people around them, who are wearing different lenses. With fewer people encountering the variety of human ideas across disciplines, and fewer people analyzing those ideas in depth, we are “ultimately living in a world that still is full of all of those narratives, but fewer people are attuned to them,” Miller says.

“Which makes the world, on one hand, in a purely personal way, I think just less rich,” he says. “There’s also the larger question of what are the sociopolitical effects, what are the effects for a democracy of a place where fewer people are attuned to the narratives that shape the world that we live in? And I think those effects are scary, potentially.”