How Upstate’s programs are adapting in the face of nationwide declines.
It’s a tough time to be a humanities or social sciences department.
Between 2012 and 2021, bachelor’s degrees in the humanities – which includes English, history, philosophy and foreign languages – dropped 18% nationally, according to the Humanities Indicators project. In South Carolina, the decline was even sharper – 24%. Majors in the social sciences declined 10% between 2011 and 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Some budget-strapped colleges have even eliminated a few humanities and social sciences programs.
But at USC Upstate, the trend is being treated as an opportunity rather than a cause for dismay. In the fall, enrollment in the English major rose 14.5%, while history was up 18.8% and political science up 34%. Spring majors also increased from a year earlier: 19.6% in English, 35.5% in history, and 39.7% in political science.
So what happened?
Online options
Esther Godfrey, chair of the Literature, Languages, and Composition department and an English professor, says online learning has played a big role in the English major’s turnaround. When Upstate’s program was added to Palmetto College, the University of South Carolina system’s online platform, enrollment went up.
“The reason it’s so desirable, and I think why we’ve gotten so many more students, is that it’s just so flexible,” Godfrey says. “Some of these students don’t even live in the state anymore, but they want to finish up, and we are the avenue to do that.”
Qwinlyn Osborne, who will soon complete her English degree online, is grateful for that flexibility. Virtual classes have made it possible for her to pursue her dream on a schedule that works with her family life. Osborne had started college right out of high school, but thought the only pathway for English majors who liked to write was journalism.
That wasn’t for her, however, so she dropped out of college in her second semester, got married and focused on raising her three children. But she never abandoned her dream of getting an English degree.
“Literature ties into so many other facets of our life, like sociology, history, even psychology at times,” Osborne says. “For some of these writers, that was their outlet for dealing with things, for trying to speak their mind. It’s such an important major, because these are things we don’t want to lose.”
Godfrey notes that many adult learners who have been out in the work force awhile, or served in the military, or had a family, understand the value of an English degree. “You see the power of being able to communicate, to think critically, to come up with your own ending, to think outside of the box,” she says.
That was the case for Ethan Murphy, who is earning his degree online while working in plastics manufacturing. Murphy also serves in the South Carolina Army National Guard and plans to eventually become an English teacher.
“It used to be I just wanted to read in general,” Murphy says. “But then in high school, it was like, oh, you can have discussions about what you’re reading and how it applies to things in the real world.” Those are the kinds of conversations he hopes to one day have in his own high school classroom.
Now in his second year at Upstate, Murphy has enjoyed being introduced to new genres of literature. He cites a book he read in his adolescent literature class that tells the stories of three different refugee children. One of them, about a modern-day Syrian child, resonated with Murphy.
“I was in school watching CNN when this stuff first started in Syria, and you can see it and digest it at 15 or 16 years old, but it’s not the same as reading it in this book,” he says. “It’s like you are them, or right alongside them. So it gives you the ability to be more empathetic, even though you’ve never been through anything like that.”
The four Cs
Tanya Boone-Holladay, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, often makes a similar point about the humanities in general when she is talking to students and their families. “The word ‘human’ is in humanities,” she says. “It’s about who we are as humans, and can we understand other people as humans. That is basically social and emotional intelligence.”
Too often, she says, people focus on majors with the best salaries right out of college. While that’s understandable when students are paying more for college now and accruing loan debt, it’s also simplistic, Boone-Holladay says.
She notes humanities students develop important skills that employers repeatedly emphasize they need: critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity. “Our students come out of our majors with those things in spades,” she says.
Godfrey agrees. Part of studying English involves examining different interpretations and considering other arguments that might be different from yours, she says. Then you figure out a way to bring all those viewpoints together, much as you would when working on a project at a job.
“I think people too often reduce English and English majors to, ‘Why do you need that with ChatGPT?’” she says. “But it’s the critical thinking skills that come with being a reader and lover of words and language and stories. That’s what we do.”
Retail politics
Online offerings have benefited political science as well. Trevor Rubenzer, a political science professor who chairs the department of history, political science, philosophy, and American studies, says about 20% of the students admitted for the spring semester were through Palmetto College. On-campus students, too, like the flexibility of being able to take a course or two online if they need to.
While online learning is a strong recruiting tool, it’s part of a larger, highly personalized two-pronged strategy that Rubenzer has developed. The process begins when prospective students indicate interest in one of the department’s programs. Rubenzer meticulously tracks them on a color-coded spreadsheet. Names are marked orange once a faculty member contacts them, then purple if they enroll and red if they don’t.
Throughout the application period, prospective students receive emails tailored to their interests. Political science is particularly specialized, with messaging subcategorized for those interested in pre-law or online studies. Rubenzer and his colleagues in political science also reach out personally to students to tell them a little about themselves and any upcoming events they might be interested in attending.
“After doing this for three years now, I think it’s fairly well demonstrated that you get a bump by contacting students,” Rubenzer says. By his estimates, the faculty outreach can improve enrollment by 15%-20%.
Once students arrive and declare a major, the strategy shifts to retention. That means doing everything possible to keep students on track, Rubenzer says. “We have to work hard to structure our advising and mentorship and everything else towards getting students to schedule their school time as if it’s work time,” he says.
In collaboration with the Student Success Center, the department has helped struggling students get assistance early so they don’t drop out. That has resulted in better retention between semesters – an average of 93% between history and political science, Rubenzer says.
Choose your own adventure
English, political science and history have also retooled their programs to make them more flexible. In English, once students have completed their six required core classes, they can select the rest of their classes based on their interests. Godfrey says creative writing is popular with many students who want to hone their storytelling skills, and there are several options in linguistics or film studies that can count toward the major.
History and political science have taken a similar approach, Rubenzer says, adjusting their core requirements and then letting students follow their interests for the rest. Students who are interested in international affairs might focus more on that area, for example, while those planning to attend law school can take courses in law and justice studies, an emphasis that has been especially appealing to online students.
History also has added new courses with a contemporary focus. A new public history course offered in spring has been very popular, as have courses on Southern Conference history and women in leadership, Rubenzer says.
He is quick to add that creating classes with broad appeal doesn’t mean compromising academic standards. He compared it to sneaking vegetables into a child’s meal without them being aware.
“You have to try and go where the students are while maintaining your disciplinary focus, so students who take a sports history class still learn how to analyze primary source documents related to sports history,” he says. “It just happens to be an area they’re interested in and so they’re learning stuff.”
Endless possibilities
Boone-Holladay notes that humanities and social sciences have a special challenge because they don’t have clear career paths like many of the STEM fields do. “These disciplines aren’t linear,” she says. “You don’t get a history degree and become a historian. You get a history degree so you have all these skills so you can do things.”
For senior Trinity Pride, that’s one of the benefits of being a political science major, too. Since transferring to Upstate as a sophomore, she’s explored several career pathways with Rubenzer’s help, including law and the foreign service. After a study abroad trip to Chile, she decided to pursue humanitarian development work. “There were a lot of fires when I first went there, and they had a lot of volunteer work that we could help with to help people who lost their homes,” Pride recalls. “And to witness that and be at the forefront, I was like, oh, that’s something I like doing.”
Students also continue to take the more traditional routes associated with the major. Edward Jacobs, a senior political science major minoring in history, will be pursuing a master’s degree at George Washington’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Serving in the Marine Corps helped him see the world and got him interested in studying different governments and the relationships between countries.
“A hobby of mine now is reading history books,” Jacobs says. “I’ve got such a better contextual understanding of our world, why we are the way we are. And hopefully I can influence policy in the future and tackle some of the really big issues we’re going to be facing in the next few decades.”
Grant opportunities
Students who want to pursue careers in humanities fields will be getting a boost from a new $4.9 million grant that USC Upstate recently received from the Mellon Foundation. The money will fund internships at nonprofit organizations for students in select majors. “It’s giving us an opportunity to put these students out in the world so they can see that they have these skills and can hone them,” Boone-Holladay says.
It’s also an opportunity to flip the script on the notion that humanities majors have no practical value. “We have to tell our own story,” the dean says. “We have to promote for ourselves.”
And telling stories is at the heart of the humanities, says Godfrey. To anyone who thinks the humanities are dying, Godfrey counters they will endure as long as people have stories they want to share. “There’s something really beautiful and intrinsic to the humanities about that optimism,” she says. “There are stories that need to be told for us to make sense of the world around us.”
