Nate Silver Crunches the Humanities

By Mark Bauerlein. In the debates over the humanities that have unfolded at The Chronicle and elsewhere, the statistician Nate Silver has emerged an authority on the numerical facts. Late last month, Silver wrote a post on his FiveThirtyEight blog at The New York Times titled “As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused.” He cited figures from the Digest of Education Statistics demonstrating that allegations of grave decline are unjustified. In fact, looked at in the proper way, the number of students choosing English and other humanities fields is stable or only slightly falling. Read more...