Last week the Modern Language Association issued a report on enrollments in foreign language courses. The authors found reason for optimism, noting that enrollments jumped 12.9 percent from 2002 to 2006. Spanish gained by 10.3 percent, Arabic 126 percent, while French inched forward 2.2 percent, German 3.5.
These are absolute numbers, though, and they don’t look quite so strong given that total U.S. student enrollments went from 16.61 million in 2002 to 17.65 million in 2006.
And if we extend the comparison further back, it looks a lot less so. When the authors calculate language-course enrollments per 100 total enrollments, they come up with 8.6 in 2006, a solid gain over 2002 (8.1) and a larger one over 1995 (7.7). But back in 1965, the ratio was 16.5 language enrollments for every 100 enrollments. That means that in 30 years the popularity of language courses has dropped 50 percent.
And that trend goes along with related numbers in another study, the annual American Freshman Survey. When asked in 2006 what they expect to major in, first year students rated “Language and literature (except English)” an abysmal 0.7 percent. In fact, all the arts and humanities only tallied 13.1 percent. Back in 1966, when the American Freshman Survey started, all the humanities (including political science, which was rated a social science in 2006 and scored 3.5 percent) reached 26 percent.
We have another plummet over the same years. Those numbers should curb the optimism of the MLA report, and should make humanities professors ponder why their fields seem to occupy an ever-more-marginal place on the campus.
