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coldhealing's avatar

I'm Gen-Z (somewhat, graduated 2019) and majored in both Statistics and English so this is a fun piece for me.

I truly believe in the power and importance of the English major, but I'm employed because of my Statistics major, and it's nice to be employed. Statistics classes aren't directly relevant to what I do at work, but it proved that I knew how to move numbers around a spreadsheet. The English major is relevant to what I do on Substack, but I do this for fun not for employment. I view my English degree as a nice hobby I got to indulge for a few years in college with really talented professors who taught me a lot about art. Many people who don't do an English major see it the same way.

I also don't think there's anything wrong with that though. Art doesn't provide the same strict utility as the cold numbers can, and that's fine. What's sad and scary is that the standards of the English major decline alongside its relevance.

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CrsVnBk's avatar

I’m gen z (19 and in college) and I think the cause and effect here are a little backwards. We don’t see English as formulaic essay-production where you connect old texts to Current Politics and our Personal Issues just cause. That’s how we (or at least I) are taught. Essay writing in high school (and as I hear from a friend, community college) is not at all “impossible to quantify”! Write this many words, in this format, on this question. Hook, intro. Body, body, body. In conclusion. Not all of my English teachers wanted that, but those others were often perfectly happy with progressive politics in a certain tone. Getting good grades and “very insightful!” responses to vague nonsense lowers one’s opinion of the whole game for attentive students. Generative AI (which I wrote my English paper final on months before people started going crazy on twitter and really disturbed by English prof) writes at about the level a lot of us write at, or better. I’ve also taken playwriting classes, which were very different than analysis-type classes but I violently hated and don’t remember them well, so I can’t talk much about fiction writing.

I also think the stats increase is more response than effect wrt the relentless graphs. We’ve grown up with numbers and averages and graph bombardment, and need to know how to read them. They are stories, with viewpoints and messages and omissions, and understanding that is crucial to anyone trying to engage with modern life.

It’s also true Youths can’t/don’t read much longform, dense text. I do, but I’ve been weird for that all my life. On the other hand, we’re processing information at incredible rates, all the time (email, text, ads, headlines, podcasts, yt videos, twitter, insta, etc.). There just isn’t much space left for Brothers Karamazov.

[edit: minor grammar fixes]

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