Dr. Felicia Jean Steele is associate professor of English at The College of New Jersey and currently chairs the department.

When I started college back in 1989 as an English major, I fell in love with classical and medieval literature. I therefore find it altogether too easy to use the metaphors most frequent in those periods to understand our world, including my professional world as a college faculty member and department chair. Right now, with all of the messages about the decline of the humanities or the “End of the English Major,” I think of the siege. Like the ancient Trojans, English departments are besieged. At my own institution, we have half the English faculty now that we did in 2001. Unlike many colleges and universities, we’ve been lucky, and our numbers of liberal arts majors have held steady and been healthy until this year. For the first time ever, we enrolled single digit numbers of liberal arts majors in English. I know of institutions that have enrolled no liberal arts majors in English for many years.

I learned of those numbers in early June and chalked it up to the demographic cliff we’ve all anticipated careening over, or the steady drumbeat of negativity amplified by anxiety over large language models and AI. But I presumed that the negativity was coming from outside our house, not from within. An email that I received soon after those first yield reports brought devastating news: High school English teachers aren’t always supporting their students’ desires to major in English.

A prospective student wrote to our department saying that her English teacher had discouraged her from majoring in English because it wouldn’t lead to any career apart from teaching, and she couldn’t imagine teaching. The department program assistant, who was trained as a graphic designer and describes herself as definitely “not an English person,” forwarded the email to me with the subject line “I’m speechless.”

I responded to the student, letting her know that I was disappointed that a teacher would discourage a student from pursuing any field of study, especially the one that they themselves pursued. But I also shared evidence drawn from W. W. Norton’s report on “The English Major: A Student’s Perspective.” Not only does the report say that students are satisfied with their choice, and that alumni would pursue the path again, but it recounts the wide variety of careers that English majors go on to.

Our own alumni, even those who do originally double major in English and education, go into a wide variety of other fields. Our graduates work for publishers, marketing firms, not-for-profits, financial management companies, universities, and pharmaceutical companies. They are also lawyers, novelists, poets, physicians, psychologists, social workers, and speech pathologists. And some of them go on to advanced degrees in English and careers in academia. It would be easy to say, “They’re everywhere,” but that doesn’t particularly help a prospective student find their way from the classroom to the rest of their life.

W. W. Norton continues to be incredibly helpful to students as they visualize the range of careers that English majors pursue with their infographic, and the MLA has also begun communicating the value of an English studies background to career- and life-readiness. In their “Report on English Majors’ Career Preparation and Outcomes,” an MLA working group “overturns the persistent negative myths that surround the topic of English majors and career outcomes.” Of course, the problem is that high school students and teachers, school boards, and parents don’t read MLA reports.

Beyond assigning these texts to our own classes, or developing career-planning curricula in our programs, like those suggested in the 2023 issue of the ADE Bulletin, how can we assist students and prospective students as they make the case for English? The first thing that we can do is to be forthcoming about the relationships between the material that students are studying and career preparation. In the introduction to that issue, Jacqueline Jenkins, Gordon Tapper, and Janine Utell share results from the Center on Education and the Workforce report “Workplace Basics: The Competencies Employers Want.” Employers want employees who can communicate; can work effectively in teams; can provide sales, customer service, and leadership; and can solve problems and think effectively about complex issues. As departments reflect on their curriculum, they can add a “career competencies” section to their curriculum map or provide a map on their syllabus. The Center for Career Readiness and Life Skills at the University of Connecticut provides example syllabi that link NACE Career Competencies to course activities and learning goals.

On my own literature syllabi, I provide students with a grid that has four columns: course learning goals, class activities, cognitive and descriptive skills, and career competencies. I’m sharing sections from the grid from my “Mythology” course here as an illustration.

Course Learning Goals	Class Activities	Cognitive & Descriptive Skills	Career Competencies
#2 Critical Analysis and Reasoning: Ability to critique the arguments of others in the discipline and the construction of one’s own arguments in the discipline, using data/evidence as a focus of instruction and/or the ability to analyze linguistic and cultural patterns	-small group presentations where students will analyze and discuss critical articles related to material from the course	-recognize claims -formulate claims -recognize chains of reasoning -recognize and refute fallacies of reasoning -practice teamwork and leadership	Communication: Frame communication with respect to diversity; Leadership: motivate and inspire others; Teamwork: listen carefully to others, be accountable for individual responsibilities
#7 Interpret Language and Symbol	-reading quizzes to assess attention to detail in readings -examination of material culture and iconography	-develop and practice attention, memory, and retention of information	Professionalism: Consistently meet or exceed goals and expectations: have an attention to detail
#8 Intercultural Competence: The development of understanding of other cultures and/or subcultures (practices, perspectives, behavior patterns, etc.)	-identify and describe elements of culture as they are expressed in narrative art	-recognize that culture is reproduced through specific semiotic gestures	Equity & Inclusion: Keep an open mind to diverse ideas and new ways of thinking

In course evaluations, students didn’t go as far as saying “I saw the connection between the course material and my future,” but they did refer to concrete skills they learned and the way assessment strategies improved their ability to keep to deadlines, to become more detail-oriented, and to work better with their peers.

This syllabus helps to communicate career readiness internally, but we have also taken steps to improve external communication. At our recruitment events, we focus on career placements for our alumni. We introduce our department with a slide that features logos for selected companies and nonprofit entities where our alumni work, as well as publicity info for our creative alumni.

So to return to our classical and medieval tropes, I believe that department chairs and other college leaders (and admissions officers) need to impersonate Rumor, the force that spreads the word across the landscape in the Aeneid, and create a counterstory about studying English. We can do that by more effectively communicating the relationship between our course content and the career world, or we can do it by creating rich counternarratives that capture the imagination of others. For example:

Once upon a time, a young woman who was a first-generation college student and whose parents didn’t even graduate from high school, who couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be a college student when she filled out her application, chose to be an English major because she loved books. And as a result of that one decision, she lived a thousand lives. She grieved with Dido and flew away cackling in her chariot with Medea. She faced a dragon with Beowulf and survived World War I with Frederic Henry. She worked on her college literary magazine, and with authors and publishers, and she eventually became a professor, or perhaps a lawyer, or a project manager for a major nonprofit organization. Or perhaps she became a teacher, but she did live happily ever after.    

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