Many factors figure in majors

DURHAM -- Q: How does a humanities major say "hello"?

A: Would you like fries with that?

Humanities majors are often stereotyped as unskilled and unprepared for the job market, having spent their college years getting easy A's in sham classes. Now, according to a recently released, unpublished working paper by three Duke scholars, African-Americans are also more likely to become these burger-flippers because they are academically unprepared for the rigors of a major in the hard sciences.

The paper finds that 30 percent of first-year students at Duke who switch out of these "difficult" majors do so because of a weak academic background. The assumption is that students who get admitted to Duke because of affirmative action or legacy admissions - rather than academic preparedness - are more likely to flee the hard sciences because they are not cut out for tough majors.

These students make their first foray into physics or biochemistry, get overwhelmed by an onslaught of harshly graded tests and problem-sets, and then switch to majors such as English literature or sociology. Since high grades are much easier to come by in the humanities and social sciences, the authors conclude that the academic "catching-up" of affirmative action students is actually a product of their choosing easier majors.

Grades are a terrible way to measure the value of an education in the humanities and social sciences. They are an even worse way to judge affirmative action. But they do reveal fundamental flaws in the way elite universities structure their majors, and they point to some fundamental changes that ought to be made at Duke and elsewhere.

It is not my purpose to debate the wisdom of affirmative action. I am a firm believer in the importance and pursuit of a diverse campus and equal opportunity in education, but I am not well-versed in the official use of affirmative action in admissions at Duke or elsewhere.

(Asked if Duke has affirmative action in admissions, Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, said that in creating "a talented and diverse community ... we take into account a number of factors, among them race and ethnicity. There is no 'formula' for admission to Duke, and every one of the 31,000 applicants [is] reviewed individually to select an entering class of 1,700 students that is diverse in many different ways.")

Rather, as a humanist in a social science department, I feel obligated to offer a few considerations when interpreting these results:

1) The intro-level courses in the hard sciences are designed to weed out supposedly weak students, while those of the social sciences and humanities are not. The faculty who design majors in the hard sciences want to get rid of their weak freshmen. Some students, they would likely argue, are just not cut out for a major in biology or electrical engineering. It makes plenty of sense that students who are less prepared for college are more likely to leave majors in the hard sciences because it happens by design.

That kind of weeding does not occur in the humanities and social sciences, which should be applauded for trying to help all of their students succeed rather than pushing out those who struggle.

2) Students do not select majors only on the basis of difficulty. Seventy-percent of those reporting a switch in majors in their first year did so for reasons unrelated to the difficulty of the major. In the case of students who benefit from affirmative action, courses in the social sciences and humanities may speak to the experience of disadvantage and discrimination in a way that hard sciences cannot. Moreover, students who go to elite prep-schools often benefit from diverse curricula. Serious students who have been warehoused in failing schools, on the other hand, have likely spent their lives learning "to the test" and may relish the opportunity to study something that broadens the way they learn, as only the humanities and social sciences can do.

3) The humanities and social sciences are guilty of their own academic sins. They need to rein-in grade inflation. The faculty who structure their curricula are right to encourage all comers and challenge students as members of a community, not just as repositories for information, but are wrong to award merely average work with a B+. Doing so creates a culture of inflated expectations that benefits no one.

The university's mission is to challenge students on intellectual, social and moral levels. The hard sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences, on the other, both strive to accomplish that mission, but fail to do so because of the flaws in the way they structure their majors. Grades do not only reflect on students; they reflect on instructors as well.