The massification of higher education has not only had demographic implications. It has led to a certain trivialization of university faculty’s social position in developed countries — it is no longer rare to be an academic. At the same time, it is no longer rare to be a university graduate. This trend should increase in the years to come, in spite of the stagnation of demographic growth in developed countries as enrollments among 18- to 25-year-olds, by cohort [classe d’âge], tend to plateau or even decline. But official policies in most developed countries, as we enter the third millennium, nonetheless aim to increase access to higher education. In France, the objective of the post-2007 government, like that of its predecessor, is to bring 50% of each age class to bachelor’s [license] level. The idea is to facilitate underprivileged or underrepresented populations’ access to education, to encourage the pursuit of studies through graduation, to encourage further studies and teaching all throughout the life course. One should not thus expect a decrease in the population of university teachers in the years to come; one should expect growth, aimed at accommodating students with more and more diversified profiles in terms of age, sociological composition, motivation, etc.

These developments are often described as one of the signs of contemporary societies’ transition towards “knowledge societies” [sociétés de connaissance] one of whose notable characteristics is a break with the concentration of knowledges [savoirs] within a handful of heads. University faculty, as they become more numerous and come to play a central role in this process, will be less and less able to maintain the quasi-monopoly of knowledge [connaissance] expertise that they have held in the past.

The progressive loss of social prestige should thus continue — at least for the larger part of the professoriate, who won’t be in the avant-garde of scientific production, but will rather primarily contribute to the transmission of knowledge and the training of highly qualified personnel. This evolution has already been in progress for a long time and can be measured in particular by looking at salaries. University faculty salaries have evolved less favorably than those of professionals with the same level of education working outside academia (for France, see Bouzidi, Jaaidane and Gary-Bobo [2007]). This trend goes for most of the university models concerned [here in this study], whether quasi-completely public as in Europe or partly private as in North America, whether the academics are state functionaries or have private-sector contracts.

(Musselin, Les universitaires, 2006, pp. 25-26, my translation.)

My sense is that academics’ “status loss” is somewhat more complex than this, since, if you believe what you read on academic blogs, most American college students can’t tell the difference between an adjunct with really low institutional status and salary and a tenured professor. So on the level of everyday phenomenology of professional life, Musselin’s description seems a little hasty. But there is certainly a sort of myth, at the very least, that (American) faculty used to get more respect than they do now; and it may well be the case that students, on the whole, demonstrate less exaggerated obsequiousness than they once did. And it’s hard not to agree with Musselin that this shift likely is deeply related to  the massification of higher education: as if the more people go to college, the less prestige they gain from it – and the less prestige their teachers garner from teaching them. As if there was a kind of prestige mimesis, such that the lower status of today’s less elite student populations was contagious. Some longer meditations on the relation between prestige and scarcity may be in order here: Graeber’s, for example…

A further note on this data: The last question here deals with wearing religious signs (strongest among the Greek Orthodox, as you’ll see). I’d emphasize here that our analysis of these religious artifacts ought to be somewhat different from our analysis of the rates of evil-eye-belief. A worn artifact is a sign of external identification (or verification) of one’s social identity in a way that a mental acceptance of some phenomenon (e.g. djinn) need not be. Even religious signs that are worn under the clothing, it seems to me, still have this characteristic of identity marking, even if one is thereby only signaling to oneself one’s own identity. (It’s interesting to note that among these signs of identity, only one, the headscarf, seems to have become a major public controversy. But we won’t get into the French politics of the veil just now.)

So without further ado…

Table 2: Belief in the Evil Eye by religion

Table 3: Belief in djinn (spirits) by religion

Table 4: Belief in astrology by religion

Soulié comments:

Astrology concerns first of all the Buddhists, those who belong to other religions, the Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox. Leaving aside the Catholics, we observe that within this population women (35.5%) believe in astrology more than men (20.5%), and that believers who are moderately practicing believe in it more than others. (This fits with the results of other studies of this matter by Daniel Boy and Guy Michelat.) Globally, the Protestants subscribe the least to magical or paranormal beliefs, and bear the fewest religious signs. Inversely, while Catholics tend not to be practicing, they do tend to wear religious signs more frequently (along with the Greek Orthodox and Other Christians). Muslims tend not to wear religious signs; although wearing the veil does characterize Islam, it ultimately involves only a very small minority of respondents.

Table 5: Wearing religious signs by religion

Table 6: Type of religious signs worn by the students

(Table numbers come from Soulié’s original document, available on request.)

This report looks into the ways that undergraduates [étudiants de 1er cycle] at Paris-8 relate to religion, and into their opinions and practices about their customs and politics. It is based on a questionnaire and interview study conducted in 2004-5 with a group of undergraduate sociology students at Paris-8 (Vincennes-Saint Denis). The project looks at these students’ undergraduate classmates who were present in class across a selected sample of some ten disciplines. It was initially planned as a form of research training through research practice.

The framework of inquiry

Paris-8 has the greatest fraction of foreign students of any French university. In 2003-4, grouping all levels together, they formed 34.7% of enrollments. At the same time, as a result of its location in Seine Saint-Denis [a working-class suburb just north of Paris], this establishment has a high percentage of immigrants’ children. The high proportion of migrants, and of children of migrants, thus makes the establishment a privileged observatory of the processes of religious, moral and political acculturation.

(…)

1,280 students responded to the questionnaire and around thirty interviews were conducted. 65% of respondents were first years, and 67.6% were women, the percentage of women ranging from 85.6% in psychology to 19.4% in computer science [informatique]. 80% of the students were French, 10% came from the countries of North and Central Africa [des pays du Maghreb et d’Afrique noire], 5.6% from Europe, 2.9% from Asia and 2.1% from America or elsewhere. The majority of foreign students at Paris-8, therefore, come from the countries of North and Central Africa, which are largely Islamic.

The proportion of foreigners varies by discipline. It’s highest in French literature (57.9%) and computer science (45.8%), and lowest in history (7.8%), plastic arts (9.9%) and cinema (10.2%). The particular nationalities also vary by discipline: the Europeans are most present in French literature and communication, the North Africans [maghrébins] in computer science and economics, the Central Africans in economics, and the Asians in French literature and computer science. This distribution also generally corresponds with the observable tendencies on the national scale.

We must also add that the notion of a foreign student, beneath its apparent bureaucratic simplicity (being a foreigner means having a foreign nationality), is a complex and ambiguous one. For some have lived for a very long time in France, or were even born here, while others are in positions of mobility; and this varies greatly according to nationality. 37% of North African students have a father who lives in France, against 20.8% for European students and 12.5% for those from Central Africa. These students’ family roots, and hence also their social, economic and cultural roots, thus differ strongly.

To the question about methodology, this was a survey administered in class across the disciplines. I don’t know the exact criteria for which disciplines were chosen. I do know that, in 2005, there were some 10,049 students enrolled in the first two years of the undergrad program (formerly called the DEUG), so it would seem that this survey reached more than 10% of its target population. (I might point out that Soulié, in the first paragraph above, is tacitly emphasizing that this is a survey of the fraction of the student body that actually comes to class. It doesn’t claim to represent the large absentee population.) I’d imagine that most of the students who got a survey would have filled it out, since it was administered collectively in a classroom setting.

On a more substantive level, the interesting thing here is that, again, foreign students from relatively poorer regions of the world (mainly North and Central Africa in this case) seem to tend towards more professionally, vocationally oriented fields. The case of French Literature, however, seems to be an interesting one in terms of this question of professional motivation, since it’s almost 60% foreign students but leads to no obvious professional future. I’m wondering what motivates people to come from abroad to study French literature, especially if we’re talking about undergraduate degrees. It makes more sense for graduate degrees, since France would presumably be the best place to write a dissertation on the national literature. But the professional stakes of a doctorate are quite different from an undergrad degree. All I can really imagine is that students who are becoming fluent in the French language might be drawn toward a field where they can keep immersing themselves in increasingly high-status language registers. (More “orthodox” French students of French literature, by the way, most likely don’t go to Paris-8, but more often to more traditional institutions like the Sorbonne.)

The extreme feminization of psychology and masculinization of computer science is worth noting too, in passing. I can only say it doesn’t seem too shocking.

Charles Soulié, of the Paris-8 sociology department, kindly shared with me some unpublished results of a survey project on campus religious belief that he conducted in 2004-2005. I’m going to post my translation of it in three segments: first the basic figures, then his comments on foreign students, and finally some very interesting results about campus beliefs in magical phenomena like the Evil Eye (beliefs which, moreover, aren’t as extinct as one might expect in our supposedly postmodern era).

Here’s what the figures look like, broken down by discipline. (I’ll post some details about the survey later; for now let me just note that it’s a survey of undergrads.)

* None designates no religion, atheist or no response.

Soulié’s commentary on this goes as follows:

50.1% of students are religious believers, the Muslims (19.8%) being more numerous than the Catholics (11.4%) or the other Christians (9.4%). The believers, in other words, are a majority at Paris-8, which is at the very least surprising in view of the history of this university. For it was created in 1968 by academics at odds with authority, academics who often claimed the banners of Marxism, Nietzscheanism and psychoanalysis, and who cast themselves, in some cases anyway, as the apostles of a way of life liberated from all constraints, especially sexual ones.

This said, the rate of religious believers varies strongly by discipline, seeing as it runs from 77% in economics to 28.6% in cinema. The Nietzscheans and Freudians are certainly more numerous in cinema, plastic arts, or philosophy than in economics, computer science or law, which moreover holds true for teachers as much as for students.

In addition to the historical irony that Soulié notes, I’m amazed to see that economics students are the most religious on campus. My amazement emerges, I guess, from my own American cultural prototype of economics students as the least spiritual people imaginable, as embodiments of sheer economic practicality. And conversely, it’s a general symbolic surprise to see that some of the most impractical humanities are simultaneously the least religious disciplines. The American stereotype, it seems to me, would be that religion and religious studies are more closely linked to the humanities than to any other disciplines, sharing with the humanities a common concern with moral, cosmological and existential issues. It makes me wonder if people who go into philosophy, anthropology or the arts are finding in these fields more a substitute for religious worldviews than a complement to some prior religiosity. It’s almost as if the humanities were competing with religion to offer students a symbolic relationship to the world. (I’m probably biased here by personal experience: I feel like anthropology does for me pretty much what religion does for many others, i.e., offers a meaningful way to interpret and inhabit the social universe.)

At the same time, one gets the sense that the more religious people are tending to go into practically oriented fields, as if their interest in higher education tended to be oriented more towards the economic and material than the philosophical. Of course, the figures (the disciplines are ordered from least to most religious, by the way) don’t give a completely clear picture; French Literature for instance is a relatively religious field, while something like Psychology is the third least religious while being a fairly “practical” field (in the sense that you can get jobs with a psych degree, like social work I guess). But even more importantly, it needs to be said too that religion can have a class correlate, such that an apparent correlation between being religious and choosing a more practical, job-oriented field may actually just reflect the fact that people from working-class backgrounds tend to choose practical, job-oriented fields. In particular, being Muslim (the biggest religious group) probably correlates with being working-class or at least not from the haute bourgeoisie, while some of the students who go into vocationally futile fields like, say, cinema are from wealthy Parisian backgrounds and not needing immediate economic returns from their education.

Soulié doesn’t give us figures on class background, but in the next installment we’ll look at the Paris-8 immigrant population, a social group that itself has fairly definite class trajectories.

There’s a lot to see here. You can see what sociologists call the “second massification” of the universities, a period of major growth from something like 1985-1995. Almost every discipline is rising. The largest disciplines are not, actually, the ones with the most growth. That dubious honor goes to the field called STAPS, which stands for Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives, which we could translate loosely as Athletic Sciences. STAPS grew from 10,947 enrolled students in 1979 to 41553 in 2005 — a 3.8-fold increase! The similarly tiny fields of dentistry (odontologie) and pharmacy, on the other hand, actually shrunk, though you can barely see them because they get lost in the bottom of the graph.

Let’s look more closely at the major disciplines. Letters and human sciences here are labeled lettres; they’d probably be called humanities and social sciences in the U.S. Anyway, it’s striking that they constitute the largest sector of French higher education, with around half a million enrollees. They have almost doubled in size since the 1980s, though they have also been in a steady, slow absolute decline since the mid-nineties. The sciences are smaller, but show a similar trend. The business-oriented disciplines of Eco (here short for Sciences Economiques) and Admin (Administration économique et sociale) have grown somewhat more, by a factor of 2.7, and seem to have on the whole one of the most consistent, steady rises of any field. Law (droit), which presumably leads to both private and public-sector careers but at any rate to a secure professional identity, has grown somewhat and leveled off, while its cousin medicine has on the whole slightly declined. (Law and medicine are the two most traditional professional fields in the traditional French university.)

To get a better sense of the changing demographic composition of these enrollments, it’s helpful to look at a chart that shows each discipline’s proportional share of university students:

The wider the band, the larger a discipline’s share of the university’s student body… Here you can see that medicine and pharmacy have greatly declined, leaving space for every other field to broaden. In terms of absolute numbers, mind you, medicine and pharmacy are about where they were, 140,000ish in medicine and 30,000ish in pharmacy; but as a share of the university as a whole, they are dwindling.

Something that really strikes me, looking at this diagram, is that letters and human sciences are not even in a state of proportional decline within the university system. In fact they have grown a bit. Of course, if we look further at the internal distributions within the human sciences, we’ll find that the growth is preferentially concentrated in new vocationally-oriented disciplines (educational sciences, for example). I’ll look at that in a future post. But it’s striking to see growth in these fields, which are the exact ones not considered “future-oriented” by contemporary “knowledge society” policymakers.

For another point of comparison, it’s helpful to look at the disciplinary distribution of degrees actually awarded:

The magnitude of these figures is much lower, three times lower or so; that’s unsurprising since we can assume that it takes a few years of enrollment for students to get a degree, and some drop out along the way. (This graph, unfortunately, lacks the medical fields listed on the other one.) Anyway, the basic distribution is similar, with letters and human sciences at the top, sciences above that, and then law and econ. I note that the “peak” in letters and sciences is a year or two later on this graph – 1998 instead of 1995. Needless to say, that’s what we would expect and want to see, since that indicates that, indeed, a couple of years separate the entrance of a big group of students from the time when this group gets its degrees. (I’m also struck, in passing, by the fact that law and econ/admin track each other much more closely on this graph than on the other one; I don’t have a good explanation for that right now.)

To really understand what’s going on in French higher ed, however, we have to look at the place of the university system within the broader higher educational landscape, which has a million kinds of technical schools, private schools, art and architecture schools, specialized teacher training institutes (now being demolished or integrated into the universities, depending on your point of view), and the like. The first thing to do is see how much of the total higher ed world is encompassed by the public university system we’ve been looking at:

As you can see, the public universities continue to serve the vast majority of university students. (Note that the “University Technical Institutes” mentioned here are actually part of the universities, and are included in their total size; the blue line just indicates a subsection of the population tracked by the green line.) Nonetheless, university enrollments are in what looks like a slow decline, while other higher educational institutes are slowly rising. (I actually don’t know what explains the sudden dip in “Other Higher Ed” in 2008 and the slight rise in the universities; there could be some organizational restructuring that would account for it.)

Now, to get a clearer idea of what people across the French higher ed system are studying, we can consider a graph that shows changing proportions of total enrollments across different university and non-university sectors:

The bottom segments designate the university fields we looked at earlier – letters, sciences, economics/administration, law. The top segments designate different fields from the non-university world — tech schools, teacher training, art and architecture and social services, pure management schools (I should probably have just labeled them “business schools”; they’re mostly private schools), the tiny private university sector, etc. I did make one mistake here, actually, which was to lump all health-related fields together; this means that medicine, a university field, is put together with paramedical training, which are taught elsewhere. This does help us to see that health fields as a whole are rather large, even if medicine itself isn’t growing much (as indicated above).

One thing that this chart shows us very clearly is that, looking at the system as a whole, the letters, human sciences, and sciences are in relative decline. Of course as a matter of absolute numbers, almost everything has grown, as we saw above. But the major relative growth here seems to be in tech schools, maybe in some aspects of health sciences, in engineering, in management. That doesn’t mean these fields are demographically dominant; they’re not. But their share of the students is rising.

In future posts on these demographic issues, which I’m only just beginning to really understand, I want to look at the changing class composition of university students; I want to look at the changing makeup of the disciplines within letters and human sciences; and I’d like to compare the progress of vocationally-oriented higher ed with its status in the U.S. Are business schools proportionally bigger in the U.S. than in France, for example? That would be my guess.

p.s. — if you have ideas on how to make the presentation of these necessarily abstract demographic questions any more, well, exciting, I am actively interested in that!

As you can see, Paris is still by far the biggest university town. If we look at the accompanying figures for 2007-8, it turns out that Paris proper has 156,743 university students, with 320,942 total in the Paris region (Ile-de-France). After that, we have Lyon (73,262), Lille (58,788), Toulouse (57,907), Aix/Marseille (56,590), Bordeaux (53,335), Montpellier (43,355), Strasbourg (37,299), Rennes (37,008), Grenoble (32,978), Nancy (28,078), Nantes (26,329), Nice (21,664), and from there on down… As in the last post on centralization, here too, mapping by student population size, we can see that the Parisian region remains by far the largest university site — its 320,942 of 1,225,643 total public university students comes out to 26% of the nation’s university population. (Note that universities only constitute about half–56%–of the French higher ed population, but we’ll talk about the rest of them some other time.)

But our thinking about centralization has to shift when we find out that, over time, provincial universities have grown and thus diminished Paris’s relative standing. In other words, it seems that historically, Paris used to be even more the center of the academic universe than it is now. To better understand this process let’s look at a thumbnail sketch of French university massification by a sociologist I know here, Charles Soulié:

Dit de manière extrêmement schématique et en si on se base sur l’évolution du nombre d’enseignants titulaires dans chaque faculté, discipline, on observe que la 1er massification, celle des années 1960 donc, sera à l’origine d’un développement sans précédent des disciplines de lettres et sciences humaines, tandis que la part relative des facultés de sciences, et médecine, baissera considérablement. Plus précisément en lettres et sciences humaines, la progression sera notamment le fait des nouvelles disciplines de sciences humaines sociales (psychologie, sociologie, etc.).

Put very schematically and looking at the evolution of the number of teaching appointments in each faculty and discipline, one sees that the first massification, that of the 1960s, originated an unprecedented development of letters and human sciences; while at the same time the relative fraction of the science and medicine faculties was considerably diminished. More precisely, in letters and human sciences, growth occurred primarily in the new social and human sciences (psychology, sociology, etc).

La seconde massification verra l’explosion des IUT, universités de proximité, antennes universitaires diverses, la part de Paris et de la région parisienne diminuant considérablement dans le potentiel national à la faveur d’un processus de régionalisation croissant de l’enseignement supérieur. Concernant les disciplines, elle s’accompagnera d’un développement très important de la faculté de droit sciences économiques, les lettres et sciences humaines, et surtout les sciences dures, connaissant une augmentation inférieure à la moyenne, tandis qu’en raison du numerus clausus la part relative des enseignants des disciplines médicales diminuera considérablement.

The second massification saw the explosion of IUTs (University Technical Institutes), local universities, and off-campus university branches; the relative size of Paris and of the Parisian region fell considerably in the face of a process of growing regionalization in higher education. This was accompanied by major growth in the faculty of law and economic sciences, while letters and human sciences, and especially the hard sciences, grew less than average. The medical disciplines, because of the fixed limits on their admissions, saw the relative size of their teaching faculty considerably diminished.

I’m not an expert like Soulié on what he would call changing disciplinary morphology — that is, the changes in proportional sizes of the disciplines. But the gist here, which is supported by various other publications I’ve come across, is that the “new” social sciences grew in the 60s, while now it’s the more vocational fields (business, economics, etc) which are the major growth fields. And if it’s true that, as Soulié says, the most recent university expansion goes hand in hand with university regionalization, then we might reasonably expect that Paris, the more traditional academic capital, would remain more dominant in older fields like “letters, languages and human sciences.” As is, to judge by this map of letters and human sciences enrollments, indeed the case:

It’s obvious from visual inspection that the relative size of Paris is much larger here than in the other diagram. I couldn’t easily find the exact figures for each city, but the key (which I had to crop) suggests that Paris has 120,000, while the other large dots are only a few tens of thousands. In other words, it does seem to be the case that the most traditional subjects (the humanities and social sciences) are particularly Paris-centered.

Indeed, if we look at the distribution of doctoral enrollments, we can see that Paris is, if anything, even more overwhelmingly dominant:

Here Paris is represented by a dot that means 20,000, while the other dots are probably one or two thousand and less. In other words, even if university education has been spread around the country, the reproduction of the disciplines, of the professoriate, of the academic “corps” remains almost exclusively a Parisian concern.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find data about the changing rates of Parisian (demographic) dominance narrowed down by discipline and degree level. But I think we can assume that some disciplines are less centralized than others, and that the degrees of Parisian centralization have shifted at different rates depending on the disciplines. I’ll try to track that down. In the meantime, it’s interesting to reflect on the curious interrelations we see here between ongoing Parisian dominance and growing but only relative decentralization. It’s as if there’s decentralization, but only according to a pre-existing spatial hierarchy. Ongoing centralization and gradual decentralization at once. Which should be no surprise to readers of David Harvey on contradictory spatial processes…

In demographic terms, anthropology in the United States continues to be dominated by white Americans. Consider this graph of the racial distribution of anthropology doctorates over the last twelve years (incidentally, the NSF had no data for 1999, so there should really be a gap year inserted here, but I trust you can all manage without one). The enormous top segment of this graph shows the very large fraction of new U.S. anthropology doctorates that go to white Americans. This decade, on average, 65.7% of new anthro phds were white. And yet we also observe that this dominance is falling, slowly, over the years; you can see that here visually. 75% of new anthropology doctorates went to whites in 1995 but only 63.6% in 2007. And other minority groups have grown, slightly, as demonstrated by the widening of those bands that indicate black Americans, Hispanics, and Asians (which includes Pacific Islanders in the NSF-supplied data I use). But racial equity is far from attained.

To really get a sense of these dynamics, it’s helpful to look at specific groups historically and to look at groups overall in proportion to their share of the U.S. population. Consider the following data for 2007:

What this table shows, interestingly enough, is that the proportion of white Americans declines as you look higher up the degree structure. That goes against a typical demographic principle of social hierarchy, according to which a more culturally dominant group is better represented at higher levels of the social scale. (We saw an excellent example of this in looking at gender in anthropology, earlier this fall — even though men are a minority of anthropologists, they are increasingly well represented at higher educational levels.) However, it seems in the data that the lower representation of whites at higher levels, like the doctoral level, should not necessarily be understood as a promising sign of racial equality. Rather, the dip in relative white dominance seems related to the huge number of foreign students who appear at the MA and above all at the PhD level, where they constitute the largest demographic bloc (16.57%) after American whites. Very few foreign students come here for anthropology BAs (1.36%), but they do seem to come here for, in essence, upper level professional training.

Distressingly, we can also see in this data that blacks and Hispanics (the two largest American minority groups) are radically underrepresented at all degree levels in proportion to their share of the population. And their presence in anthropology is not constant across degree levels: there is a noticeable drop between the fraction of blacks and Hispanics who get BAs and the fraction who get graduate degrees. Worth noting, on the other hand, that Asian-Americans and American Indians are quite well represented in proportion to their fairly small fraction of the American population. I tend to suspect that class is a hidden variable in the relative success of Asian-Americans, since they are (at least ostensibly) better off in the American class system, but the NSF’s national statistics are beautifully and outrageously silent on the question of students’ class origins. So that has to remain pure hypothesis for the time being.

To get a clearer image of the slow decline of general white dominance, you might consider this:

The overall pattern — where bachelors being the most white, doctorates relatively the least white, and masters are in the middle — appears to have been fairly constant throughout this data, in spite of the masters’ line fluctuating somewhat between the two. The overall spread seems fairly consistent; whatever sociological processes lead certain sets of white people to go into anthropology appears somewhat consistant. If we look at the situation for black Americans, however, we can see a strikingly different sociological picture:

This one I had to format in terms of absolute numbers instead of percentages, since at very low absolute numbers, small changes translate into large proportional changes and the graph becomes unreadable. But actually, I think it’s helpful to have the absolute numbers here. They serve to remind us that in the United States, a country with some 34 million black inhabitants, the discipline of anthropology, which ostensibly prides itself on its progressive understanding of race, is graduating barely two dozen black anthropologists per year. You can see it here with your own eyes: the PhD line in this graph is just barely halfway to the line that would mark 50. And the number of MAs is above that, but pretty similar. To depress you a little and bring the point home, if in 2004 there were 34,772,381 black Americans (per the Census data linked above), and the same year there were 26 new black anthropology PhDs, that works out to one new anthropology PhD for every 1,337,399 black Americans. By contrast there was in 2004 one new (white) anthropologist for every 551,183 white Americans — that’s more than twice as much, though of course still tiny. (Anthropology, I can’t stress enough, is still a tiny field in a large world.)

Now, it seems to me that a very interesting demographic phenomenon here, and a striking departure from the parallel lines on the graph of whites above, is the fact that black Americans are in fact growing quite substantially as a fraction of the anthropology bachelors’ population — the population has almost doubled since 1995 – and yet things seem to be changing very slowly at the doctoral level. Of course, there can be a time lag between these two lines — if more of group X suddenly get more BAs, it would still take that same group of new BAs most of a decade to get PhDs, if any of them want to — and yet I’m still struck by the extremely low numbers at the graduate level. Still talking about black anthropologists, then, one does notice a climb at the PhD level from 5-6 (total for the year) in 1995-6 to a couple of dozen on average this decade, but at the master’s level, things are about constant. As we know, affirmative action is not doing so well these days; and although we can guess that diversity fellowships play a role in the small increases we do see, it’s hard not to think that it’s radically insufficient.

(I guess this is the time to acknowledge that it’s possible that things are not as bad as they seem; the “unknown” category in this data is quite large (7-9% of all anthro degrees), far larger than the black or Hispanic category, and so I suppose it’s at least likely that there are greater numbers than get reported. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough yet to do a proper error analysis of this data.)

In lieu of a conclusion, let me just note that it would be good to look at racial statistics among American anthropologists at large, on the AAA membership, on graduate students (are there major race-related selection effects that function within graduate education? it seems quite possible)… I can’t do that now, but I would love to have thoughts on what else might be worth examining. Other disciplines? Other countries? But for the time being, I confess I find this set of data somewhat disheartening. There’s progress towards racial equity, but it’s slow, and not enough.

I want here to present some quick graphs that suggest the changing gender dynamics within American anthropology. This first graph shows the production of new doctorates since the 60s. It is commonly thought in the field that there has been something of a “feminization” of anthropology over the past few decades, and as we can see here, the number of doctorates awarded to women (in blue) has indeed been greater than the number of doctorates awarded to men (red) since 1992. We can see here that males were demographically dominant in the production of doctorates until 1984, after which there were eight years of approximate equality (where the two lines overlap) followed by divergence.

Important to note, it seems to me, is that although it’s true that the relative place of males and females has indeed been inverted, the overall picture here is that the two lines have risen together fairly regularly. Quite often, especially in the last fifteen years, we can see that little shifts correlate across genders, as in the little drops in 2001 and 2005. And the demographic expansion of the field in general is of a far greater demographic magnitude than the shift in gender balance. In 2007, we awarded more than five times the number of new doctorates as in 1966 (519 vs. 98) — a fact whose significance I will come back to later. But to get a better sense of changing gender ratios, consider a graph of women as a percentage of the total pool of doctoral recipients.

Since this is a graph of women as a percentage of all PhDs awarded, the 50% mark signifies the point of gender balance. As we can see, in the 1960s women comprised a fairly small minority of new doctorates, but grew fairly steadily through the 1970s, hovering around parity during the 1980s as I said above, and now comprising between 55%-60% of new anthropologists. This definitely constitutes a majority, but a far from overwhelming one. Women have not become as demographically dominant as men once were; if anything, the proportion of women among new anthropologsts may even be converging on some sort of rough slightly-majority equilibrium.

However, when we look not at doctorates awarded but at total graduate enrollments (many or most of which are at the Master’s level), we see that the gender gap has in fact been continuing to widen fairly steadily.

As above, there are some overall similarities in the graphs, some similar local maxima, but it is very clear that the number of men enrolled has been falling slightly since 1995, while the number of women enrolled has continued to increase. Compared with the previous graph, which you’ll recall dealt with doctorates awarded, this seems to suggest that there are a lot of women graduate students who don’t end up with PhDs. Or, put differently, there’s greater gender parity by the end of doctoral education than there is at the beginning stages of graduate programs. As we know, people who get doctorates have to pass through the earlier stages of graduate education. If there are proportionately more men at the later stages, that has to mean that women are disproportionately being screened out along the way.

Worth noticing, in passing, is that if we look slightly farther back into the 1970s, we can see that women as a fraction of total graduate enrollments passed the 50% mark in 1977:

So women attain parity in overall graduate enrollments in 1977, while as we saw in the first graph above, women first attained parity as recipients of anthropology doctorates in 1984. This seven-year difference is an interesting time gap because it is just what one would predict if one expected it to take about seven years on average to get a anthropology Ph.D from the start of one’s enrollment in grad school. In other words, we can see the likelihood that gender parity was reached around the time of the 1977 grad cohort, but that it then took seven years or so for this cohort to graduate.

I do have some further graphs of continuing gender imbalance in the discipline, alas. Take a look at the gender balance across different levels of degree recipients (based on degrees issued in a given year, not enrollments).

Again, the 50% line marks the point of gender parity. The top line (orange) indicates the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women; the middle line indicates the percentage of master’s, and the bottom line (yellow) indicates doctorates. Insofar as each curve here is rising, we see again that the fraction of women in the discipline has continued to increase at all levels for a long time. But we can learn two new things here.

First, on the down side, the basic demographic structure of our field has preserved a kind of masculine bias for decades — indeed, since the start of the data. In other words, men have always been increasingly well-represented the higher up you go in anthropological education. This shows again, and more clearly than above, that women have always been, one way or another, disproportionately weeded out of the ranks of new anthropologists.

Second, on the positive side, the curves do seem to be converging. The difference between the fraction of women who get bachelor’s degrees and the fraction of women who get doctorates is decreasing. My sense from this graph is that convergence was happening much more markedly through the 1980s, while since then there has been more of a steady state. (See how the curves are roughly parallel in the right-hand part of the graph? That’s what I have in mind.) This means that this demographic dominance is smaller than it used to be. A double conclusion suggests itself: while men are no longer demographically dominant, and are even a minority (remarkably so at the undergraduate level, where women receive nearly 70% of anthropology degrees), there are still gendered principles of selection at work in the field.

These lingering gender dynamics will not, of course, be a major surprise to anyone. But it’s good to have some statistical confirmation of what is intuitively viewed — somewhat paradoxically — as both an increasing feminization of anthropology and an ongoing masculine bias. That said, I would stand by my earlier remark that the most demographically striking thing here is still the overall population growth of anthropology, hundreds of percent over the decades. The effects of growth on disciplinary social dynamics are probably vast and worth much further exploration. This demographic expansion seems linked to a number of fairly important intellectual changes in the field: there are a lot more little subfields and subspecialties than there used to be; there are a lot more AAA sections than there were when the discipline was smaller and probably more socially homogenous; and there is currently perhaps less of a shared set of ongoing debates or even of a shared theoretical canon. Some professors say they don’t really know what makes something cultural anthropology anymore, and have no further sense of a shared disciplinary endeavor; old-timers sometimes conjure the nostalgic image of an earlier, pre-World-War-II era when the discipline was small enough for everyone to know everyone else. All of these, I would point out, are the subjective or experiential correlates of the objective fact of decades of vast disciplinary growth.

I do have some additional data on gender balance in other social science fields, but I’ll have to postpone that momentarily because I promised to start blogging about comparative university neoliberalisms…

This may be the last of my demographics posts for a bit, as I have to leave town for this coming week. But I think this may be one of the most important for anthropologists to examine — grad students in particular. Turns out there are NSF statistics on evolving financial support over time. Here I present the general picture for our field between 1972 and 2006 — the last 35 years.

Here are the major conclusions I’d draw:

• Unfunded (euphemistically “self-supported”) people comprise an enormously large fraction of the graduate student body. It used to be above half (56.6% in 1977). Now it’s down to about a third (35%), but that, of course, still means that one person in three has no financial support from their institution.
• The fraction of people with fellowships used to be very low, falling as low as 15.6% (in 1982), and is still a relatively scanty 24.7% of all graduate students. Barely 1 in 4 gets fellowship support, in other words.
• The fraction of grad students who support themselves by teaching has been rising. In 1977, it used to be as little as 17.3%; it has risen to 30.8%, the largest single form of institutional funding.
• Research assistants have formed a fairly small though very slowly growing segment, currently 9.6%, which is fairly close to their average share of 8.8% over the last 35 years.
• Overall, more people are getting some sort of funding than they used to, mostly through slow growth in teaching and fellowship support. 65.1% of all students currently get some kind of support.

It’s good to see that things are improving. But one would like to think that our field overall could manage more financial support for the more than 1 in 3 grad students who are getting nothing.

When I get a chance to come back to this, I may look at federal funding across the social sciences, or perhaps compare funding trends across disciplines….

In case you ever wondered which departments dominate my discipline — anthropology — in America, here we can get a pretty clear sense of demographic dominance, at the very least. I’ve added together the total number of PhDs awarded by each of these departments over the last two decades (1987-2007, 21 years total) and we can see that some departments have produced far more than their share of new doctorate-wielding anthropologists.

UCLA and Berkeley are tied for the greatest production of scholars, at 322 total, with Chicago next at 296, Harvard and Michigan some way behind that at 253, University of Texas-Austin just behind there at 248, University of Florida at 220, University of Arizona at 219, Columbia at 211, and then on down the line.

Not terribly surprisingly, there is a good deal of overlap between this list of the largest graduate departments and the highest ranked departments in 1994’s National Research Council rankings. The orders of the departments don’t correspond perfectly, though; for instance, UCLA was #9 in the rankings but is #1 in terms of its output of scholars.

One of the most striking things about this graph, to my mind, is how it shows that the top 20% of departments have produced a highly disproportionate share of all Ph.Ds. The top producing departments are way ahead of the ones lower down. Consider what happens when we aggregate the graph into fifths (“quintiles”):

What this shows is that the top 20% of departments produce almost half of all doctorates (45%), while the top 40% of departments together produce 67%. This of course isn’t anything like as unequal as the distribution of wealth in America. But it does indicate that the biggest departments, in terms of their production of scholars, yield a very large share of the anthropologists in our profession. The top three departments alone, Berkeley, UCLA and Chicago, produce more than one in ten of all new anthropologists (11%).

I suspect that there are some effects of large scale at work here, such that it becomes easier to maintain a large department once it is already in existence, because it will have a large network of alumni who can then help to find jobs for new students coming from that department, because it will spread its reputation wider and wider across the discipline, because this wide reputation will then in turn be helpful in attracting new students. Correspondingly, on a personal, subjective level, the anthropologists who I know or whose work I know come disproportionately from the bigger departments on this list. Demographic dominance is of course not identical with intellectual dominance in the discipline, but there does seem to be a fairly definite connection between them.

All the while, of course, the tiniest departments are very tiny, producing just a handful of Ph.Ds over the decades. Consider another graph, showing the distribution of departments that produce a given number of doctorates.

This graph has a long tail: a relatively small number of high-producing departments are out there on the right-hand side, isolated from the majority of the departments, which concentrate around the 50-130 doctorates span. (Again, this is a graph of how many departments have produced how many doctorates in total over the last two decades.) I have no idea why there’s such a spike at the 100 PhDs mark, but that’s clearly the modal point in the graph. Curiously, as we go off to the left (and see also the bottom of the first graph above), we find a bunch of departments that have produced virtually no PhDs at all: Alabama, Arkansas, Maine and Wyoming have each produced one single doctorate over this period, while Nevada has produced three, and Florida State and the California Institute for Integral Studies have each produced nine. Nine PhDs over 21 years is less than one each year, so one has to imagine that there are some departments with very tiny PhD programs (probably they have larger MA programs with just the occasional doctorate conferred).

I have the feeling looking at these graphs that demographic dominance is one of those brute facts that probably exerts its effects in silence, by dominating not so much any particular outcome but rather the space of possibilities, of ideas, of available people that constitutes the discipline’s historical trajectory. It does make a difference that right now, today, there are 322 Berkeley grads floating around out there in our field, whereas there are only 155 from CUNY and 71 from Minnesota and 36 from Utah and 14 from the University of Illinois-Chicago, six blocks from where I lived last year. Remember, this is 322 Berkeley grads over the last two decades: they don’t constitute a single social group, mostly likely, but they probably do have some commonalities that are products of their departmental and institutional origins, they do constitute a large realm of recognition as against a smaller department’s small realm of recognition.

What kind of difference this makes is not so easy to pin down. But I do recall that when I was in college and I proposed going to Santa Cruz (which has produced 38 PhDs in 1987-2007, i.e. less than two yearly), my college anthropology teachers said: I’m sure it’s great, but it’s tiny and you’d never get a job. I don’t know if that’s true in this case, but one thing seems clear: size matters, when it comes to anthropology departments today. We have, in fact, a somewhat centralized discipline when it comes to the manufacture of scholars. One might reasonably ask whether that is a good thing and what other forms of disciplinary organization might look like or whether they are even imaginable.

But things look a bit different if we turn to look not at undergraduate degrees but at the doctoral degree production that’s essential for the reproduction of the teaching and research body of the profession. (Haven’t had time to look at Master’s degrees so far; I suppose that master’s degrees would serve a joint role as both an intermediate academic credential and a semi-professional credential, and are a stepping stone to the doctorate in some cases, but this requires more research.)

At the doctoral level, anthropology is no longer at the bottom of the charts; over the past forty years it has climbed from being one of the smallest social science graduate fields to being roughly similar to sociology. In 2007, anthro graduated 519 new PhDs while sociology was at 573. Economics, nonetheless, clearly appears to be the dominant social science discipline (demographically speaking), though political science has approached it on several occasions and even surpassed it for a few years earlier this decade.

An interesting thing, in passing, is that some of the small dips and rises in these fields seem to be matched across fields — the little dip around 2002, for example — which suggests that some of these shifts may be results of larger institution-wide changes, and not always discipline-specific; there might be, for example, global reductions in student intake. It certainly sounds plausible.

We do see clearly that the two small, relatively “dominated” fields here are linguistics and ethnic/area studies. They appear not only to be small but also to have stayed relatively static in size over the last few decades — while the other disciplines have seen what looks like more of an upward swing since the 80s. We can see their relatively tiny share even more clearly if we examine a graph of comparative shares of social science doctorates produced over time.

Anthropology, shown at the bottom of the graph, has actually grown in comparative importance since the 60s – it produced 6.3% of social science doctorates in 1966, but is now up to 13.8% (in 2007). Political science and economics loom large in the center of the graph (currently producing a 58.9% majority of all of social science doctorates). It crosses my mind that economics PhDs may have more non-academic job possibilities, meaning that its comparatively larger production of scholars may indicate not a proportionately large academic job market but only that a lot of economics PhDs are getting jobs in government or the private sector. According to CIRGE, who surveyed social science PhDs five years out of grad school, about 18% of social scientists overall worked outside academia; they left economics out of their survey, though, where the percentage may be higher. At my university, 49% of economics PhDs get jobs outside academia, but that may be on the high side of things.

As you can see here as clearly as before, area/ethnic studies and linguistics are small slivers of the total production (at the top of the graph). It’s interesting, however, to compare their situations at the doctoral level with their situations at the bachelor’s level. At the bachelor’s level, linguistics is tiny while anthro and ethnic/area studies are somewhat larger, whereas at the doctoral level, linguistics and area/ethnic studies are both tiny while anthropology remains somewhat larger. In other words, area/ethnic studies is comparatively much larger at the BA level than at the PhD level. Consider the following.

This graph compares the number of BAs to the number of PhDs produced across these three fields. Basically, in comparison to anthropology, it seems that there are way more ethnic/area studies undergrads getting degrees than there are ethnic studies PhDs being produced. My guess is that ethnic/area studies are relatively popular undergraduate fields, but that many people teaching in such fields originally get their PhDs in a more traditional discipline (like anthropology, history, etc), so we see a relative disproportion between the output of scholars (PhDs) and the output of students (BAs).

(I had to plot this on a logarithmic scale because otherwise it would be impossible to show the anthro and ethnic/area studies BAs and PhDs on the same graph; since the PhDs are around an order of magnitude less, they would vanish into the bottom of the scale if it were linear.)

I thought about this last comparison some more and, just for another point of reference, put together one more curious graph, which I’m honestly not quite sure how to interpret yet.

This is a graph of the number of BAs to the number of PhDs for a given year, across fields. OK, so, lower means that fewer BAs are awarded per PhD. In essence, it’s a student:teacher production ratio. It could also, leaving aside inter-field migrations like the (probable) crossover between anthropology and area studies mentioned above, be taken as an index of how research-oriented a given field is; lower means that the field is relatively more oriented towards the production of new scholars, higher means that the field is relatively more oriented towards the production of new bachelor’s holders.

As you see, linguistics is the lowest — they have relatively few undergraduate majors compared to the number of new linguists they produce at the doctoral level. Anthropology is pretty consistently second lowest in this regard. Sociology and political science produce the most BAs per PhD; economics is sort of in the middle, and ethnic/area studies has been climbing, which suggests that their undergrad production is growing at a faster rate than their graduate production.

I will confess, it’s strange to think about these quantitative dimensions of the “production of scholars”; I don’t experience graduate school as being like an assembly line where you come out the end as a figure in a large spreadsheet. Though, of course, that sense is itself revealing of the fact that graduate students are valued for being different from each other, within given disciplinary boundaries. You could say that we’re mass-produced to have fantasies of individuality.

Now, I have to add that at an experiential or practical level, it’s not clear that these disproportions between the number of new economists and the number of new anthropologists make a huge difference. I virtually never interact with economists, so it would seem to make almost no difference how many of them there are; the disciplinary barrier between us is practically impenetrable. Disciplines’ statuses in academia is in some ways more like the US Senate than the House of Representatives: to get by in many contexts, it suffices just to have a discipline, and more power doesn’t necessarily accrue to the largest ones simply by virtue of their size. Still, it’s easy to imagine that institutional resources are distributed in some relation to the size of the disciplines. Larger disciplines = more office space, more faculty salaries, more facilities… not that these resources are always allocated in direct proportion to departmental size: on our campus, they recently announced a $100 million Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, and the very same day they also inaugurated a $0 million dollar Edward Sapir Anthropological Research Center, along with a $0 million dollar Robert Park Sociology Institute and a $0 million dollar… well, you get my drift.

There seem to be complicated, bidirectional relations between the success of a department and its treatment by its administration. Are large departments well funded because they’re large, or are they large because they’re well funded? On our campus, for example, I believe that the size of incoming graduate student classes is determined substantially by higher administrators, who allocate slots for incoming students. They consult with the departments about how to allocate resources, but they also control the money and therefore tend to have the power, in the end. So it seems worthwhile asking ourselves the Marc Bousquet question here: to what extent should we be analyzing the relative size of the disciplines not as an independent phenomenon but as a result of higher layers of administrative decision-making?

Coming up, I’m going to take a closer look at graduate funding and departmental dominance within anthropology itself.

But I didn’t follow up on that at all until I recently started reading the “socio-demographic” work of Charles Soulié, a Bourdieuian French sociologist of universities whose research interests are fairly close to mine. The premise of this research is something like this: by examining the comparative history of enrollments and teaching jobs across disciplines, one can examine what Soulié calls the “evolution of the morphology” of academic fields. This isn’t very hard-core quantitative research by statisticians’ standards, I note — he doesn’t exhibit tedious anxieties about the uncertainties in his sources, nor does he propose mathematical models or major statistical analysis of his data. The methodology seems to be, in essence, visual inspection of the evolving demographics of disciplinary enrollments. He takes these as indicators of things like the “relative position of sociology in the space of disciplines,” and comes up with findings that are like:

• Sociology produced half as many graduates in philosophy in 1973, but now things are reversed, and in 2004 sociology produced 2.6 as many graduates as philosophy. This is an indicator, for Soulié, of sociology’s rising comparative importance in the university system (and philosophy’s stability, which in context was a relative decline).
• In 1998/99, “the fraction of children of professionals and upper management rose to 28.4% in letters and human sciences, against 23.1% in sociology and 38.1% in philosophy” — which tells us something important about the comparative class basis of sociology vs. philosophy at that point in time [updated to clarify: these examples refer to French academia].

I find this kind of thing quite interesting and revealing – hence this series of posts on the demographics of my own discipline – but I wonder about its epistemological basis. What does it mean, actually, that one discipline has more students enrolled than another? Is it right to speak of a competition between disciplines for students? What makes one discipline more “attractive” or “desirable” than another at a given moment? It’s not like students pick their courses based on a completely rational response to a job market, or even an idea market. In fact, it’s not clear that “market” is a good description for these kinds of systems; as Marc Bousquet has often argued, talk about the academic “job market” (for instance) disguises the fact that university administrators actually dictate the academic job system, by deciding to opt for hiring adjuncts, grad students, etc. Likewise, shifts in degrees issued, in enrollments, etc, may not necessarily be the result of “competition” or market forces (whatever one’s stance on the empirical existence of said market forces). There can be other kinds of systematic processes at work; the “morphology” of the disciplines as revealed in their enrollments doesn’t tell you everything about processes of interdisciplinary conflict and coexistence.

But the brute fact remains that there have been major historical shifts in how many students anthropologists educate, and major shifts in how large our discipline is vis-a-vis other disciplines. And these aren’t just arbitrary. They need to be explained, if we’re to understand where our discipline actually exists in the world. When American anthropology is educating a small fraction of a percent of college students, that’s not something that just happens by chance.

I feel here the strong sense of a bias in my own discipline against quantitative analysis. It’s somewhat jarring, from the narrow confines of an anthropologist’s culturalist background, to look at these comparative figures. In cultural anthropology, I think there is a widely shared consensus view today that goes something like this: culture is inherently qualitative, folded over on itself in swathes and patches and wrinkles of rich, dense symbolic significance; it would necessarily be deformed, or at best severely limited, by any effort to reduce it to a general and/or quantitative analysis. Among cultural anthropologists, numbers and quantitative facts are apt to be taken not as means of analysis, but as objects of cultural analysis and symbolic forms in their own right. So we get studies of the cultural effects of perniciously quantifying, rationalizing, neoliberal projects; and we see arguments about how the obsession with the quantitative is itself merely another local cultural phenomenon, and not a privileged, master form of knowing about the world. Often these kinds of arguments are made casually, in passing, or are simply taken for granted, inscribed in our disciplinary habits.

In fact, in cultural anthropology as I know it today, it’s seldom necessary to argue explicitly against quantitative work; its rejection is already inscribed within the positioning of our discipline against its others, like sociology and above all economics. Our primary research method, field ethnography, is almost constitutively anti-quantitative, being oriented overwhelmingly towards the experiential dimension of social life, toward the fine detail of the symbolic, the affective, the discursive. I note that earlier ethnography sometimes involved more quantitative work – Marilyn Strathern’s first book had a lot of figures about pigs in local economies, for instance – and one might speculate that, as post-colonial anthropology lost its identity as the discipline that studied exotic “primitive” cultures, it seized in part on qualitative methods as a new basis for differentiating itself from the other social sciences. And, coming back in the present, I note that even after the fieldwork, later as we ethnographers write our analyses, when we do venture to generalize, we generally make qualitative generalizations (I’m making one right now); and when we do incorporate quantitative information, it often figures as mere background data for our more specific ethnographic arguments. There do appear to be sophisticated studies of mathematical practice, like Helen Verran’s Science and an African Logic which I’d like to read. I note, however, that I’ve seen a number of ethnographic studies of, for example, financial markets, which for all their strengths, still take for granted that their qualitative mode of knowing is drastically epistemologically superior to (and allows privileged ideological diagnosis of) their informants’ quantitative modes of knowing. My sense, in short, is that our rejection of the quantitative can go without saying because a rejection of numbers structures much of our research practice and disciplinary identity. There are, of course, plenty of books about quantitative methods in anthropology, and there are people who polemicize against cultural anthropology’s “rejection of science” and numbers — here’s a pretty loquacious example — but, in relation to the literature I read and the cultural anthropologists I know, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Now, the anthropological objection to quantitative research is correct and good up to a point. Numbers certainly are cultural forms, a fact which I have yet to see acknowledged by a quantitative researcher. Quantitative data is of course not always useful or accurate, and can be grossly misleading, can even be a vehicle for various other political and ideological projects. And any social science that effaces the lived experience of cultural life is bound to give a rather reductive analysis of the world.

But it still feels wrong and simplistic to reject and avoid numbers in cultural anthropology in the ways that we often do. Yes, numbers are potentially oversimplifying abstractions, and are sometimes used in ideologically pernicious and theoretically problematic ways. But I wonder what ways of knowing we numb ourselves to, in shrouding ourselves in qualitative, sensuous, tactile accounts of the world. Ethnographic tactility and sensitivity can become its own form of anaesthesia, can’t it?

As with the more general university situation, all fields have been growing, albeit with a major dip in the mid-seventies to late-eighties, which is again probably due to the Baby Boom ending. It’s obvious that the biggest field by far is political science — though my figures for political science also include public administration, whose more marketable vocational potential may explain the overall predominance of this discipline. Economics and sociology, in blue and green, have been somewhat similar for decades — while sociology was far more popular from the ’60s into the ’70s, economics overtook it between 1980 and 1994, and since then sociology has pulled ahead slightly but not that much. One notices a curious correlation, probably spurious I suppose, between the economics degrees issued and the political party holding the presidency: throughout the Reagan/Bush 1 era, economics is ascending; then it drops substantially under Clinton; then it rises again around when Bush 2 comes into office.

I note in passing that linguistics is absolutely tiny and barely visible (a thin brown line at the bottom of the graph). Our own discipline, anthropology, is pretty low on the charts too; and it also has a very close partner on the graph, which is area and ethnic studies. It turns out, somewhat unexpectedly, that anthropology and ethnic/area studies have been very closely linked in undergraduate enrollments since the 60s. Let’s look at this in more detail.

While larger fields like sociology and economics award tens of thousands of bachelor’s degrees yearly, anthropology and ethnic studies have been climbing up slowly to 7-8,000 degrees awarded per year. One can only speculate that the sort of undergraduates who are interested in anthropology are about equally likely to be interested in area or ethnic studies, which would fit, of course, with the fact that anthropology has long been specialized in teaching about ethnic or foreign Others, and overlaps frequently in its content with the various * Studies departments. I do note one interesting difference, though, which is that the usual dip in degrees awarded (that big local decline starting in 1975) is far more pronounced in anthropology, while ethnic studies fell less far. Might it be the case that ethnic and area studies were gaining in comparative importance in that period because of the growing institutionalization since the 70s of multiculturalist education and programs? What can we learn about the history of the disciplines from these analyses?

When we look at the production of doctorates, things look somewhat different than at the bachelor’s level, but I want to stop here for now to think about the methodological implications of this kind of analysis.

I often feel that my discipline, anthropology, doesn’t sufficiently discuss its own structural situation in the academic world. Where do we fit in the ecology of disciplines? In the national competition for student enrollments? How many anthropologists are there, exactly? And what is the structure of our academic labor system; what fraction are tenured, tenure-track, contract, part-time? How many of us work outside the academy? Which departments are dominant or central in our profession?

This thought had been rolling about in my head when all of a sudden yesterday I discovered this tremendously neat website: WebCASPAR, the NSF’s Integrated Science and Engineering Resources Data System. Strange name, I grant you. And at first sight it’s confusing for those of us with basically no statistical background. (Which, for the record, I consider an embarrassing absence from our professional training in cultural anthropology. On which more later.) It starts out with a “Table Builder”; you pick a data source; you pick an “analysis variable” (which is what the content of your table will be full of: numbers of students enrolled, for example); you pick a “classification variable” (which forms one dimension or the other of your table); you set some details about what gets displayed where. And then magically…

…or in my case, after a few hours of experimentation, we have a series of tables: the growing US student enrollments since the 60s, the changing ethnic composition of the US student body, the fraction of US students at public vs. private schools… and guess what? I’m happy to announce that we still have a predominantly public higher education system! 74% of college students are currently in public institutions, it appears. Of course, the survey doesn’t take into account that many public universities are now only precariously supported by public money, and are increasingly selective, more like semi-public, but we’ll let that go for now. Let’s mention only in passing the striking comparative fact that in France, “public” universities are, by law, open admissions and almost free of tuition, or in other words, they’re far more open to the public than their “public” U.S. counterparts (a fact which should provoke more thought than it does).

Coming back to the structural situation of anthropology, I think we have to start by putting it in the historical context of its relation to other disciplines. There are a number of ways of measuring these interdisciplinary comparisons – by enrollment, by degrees granted, by faculty jobs, by funds allotted, by publications produced – which, though they don’t begin to exhaust what might be said qualitatively about anthropology’s place in academy or the broader world, can still teach us some things that might fail to appear from purely qualitative examination or personal experience.

Take the graph we started with above. See that little yellow line almost at the bottom? Social sciences. That’s us. We’re in there somewhere. As I’ll show later in more detail, the last few years anthropology granted about 5% of all social science degrees. And social science in general is currently about tied with humanities for the least number of graduates of any major sector of higher education. As far back as this graph goes, social sciences always been toward the bottom, though it’s interesting to see that humanities (green) used to be larger than us, but fell below in the mid-70s and has closely paralleled our graduation numbers ever since.

In addition to the relative smallness of social science in general, the other major thing to learn here is the extreme predominance of vocational subjects in American higher education. So much for people who fantasize that American higher education is (currently) about liberal arts! They should look at where the students actually are. Business has been the most popular single subject in our country since 1974, surpassed here only by a miscellaneous category of professional and vocational degrees (which includes communications, law, social services, librarians, and other unspecified fields). Education and engineering are fairly large also. Sciences appear to be large, but the sciences category actually includes all the vocationally oriented health fields (nursing, medicine, etc) as well as computer science, and so the pure research sciences are probably much smaller than they appear.

Worth noting, however, that enrollments as a whole have been growing steadily almost throughout this whole period, albeit with a pronounced dip in the mid-80s that registers in the graph above in all fields besides business, engineering and sciences. Frankly I am not completely sure of the explanation for this dip in the Reagan era — there may be institutional and political factors, but the most likely thing I think is that the baby boomers were done going to college and the birth rate fell after about 1963, so there would naturally have been lower college enrollment 18 years hence.

So what does all this tell us? The number of people becoming social scientists is still rising; anthropology is a mass phenomenon, in that it produces thousands of graduates yearly; but anthropology is still only 5% of social science degrees, and social science is only about 5.6% of total degrees granted, out of about 6% of the total U.S. population enrolled in universities… you get my drift? Anthropology granted 8,086 degrees in 2006, out of 197,595 in social science, and out of 3,519,259 in all fields, which means, in other words, that we produce about a fifth of one percent of all American university graduates. So we can see that anthropology is really not attracting a terribly high fraction of American university students, especially when compared to the vocational fields.

This probably means that anyone who tells you about how flexible an anthropology degree is, how much it prepares you for a whole range of careers, is probably indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, because surely if this were the case, all the professional school people would jump ship? And who are these people, this fraction of a percent of students, who enter our discipline? Where do they come from and what kinds of incentives, cultural contexts, social norms guide their disciplinary choice? It would be good to find some figures on the class backgrounds of people getting degrees in anthropology… I’ll keep my eyes open. In the near term, look out for more of these graphs of anthropology’s place in the world.

So in other words, the justification for philosophy is partly “fun” and intrinsic interest (the metaphysics of the Matrix figure in a photograph), but largely and perhaps predominantly economic necessity and marketable skills. Insofar as philosophy is, well, sold this way, it’s suggestive of Bonnie Urciuoli‘s work on the empty terms of liberal arts marketing rhetoric, of what Don Brenneis calls “the consequentiality of the semantically vacuous.” Certainly in this article, it’s unclear that philosophy really teaches skills; and if it does, it’s also unclear that they are particularly vocationally useful.

Careerism in philosophy, incidentally, has been condemned at least since Francis Bacon, who argued in the Advancement of Learning that the urge for “lustre and profession” was exemplary of the error of “the mistaking or misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge.” This article, as far as one can judge from the journalist’s choice of quotes and interview topics, takes precisely the opposite position. Here, philosophy is all about its instrumental value for individual advancement. The journalist emphasizes, with an eye to her reader’s probable doubts about the discipline, that philosophy needn’t be “luxury,” be “frou-frou,” be “people sitting under trees and talking about stupid stuff” (said Onejame about her preconceptions of her major).

Unsurprisingly, the one person who does take a more traditional view of philosophy, as the master discipline that founds all others, is not a student but rather the Chancellor of CUNY, Matthew Goldstein. Goldstein comments that philosophy “is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”

Luckily, the journalist manages to discover a less academic function for philosophy: that of reproducing heteronormative sexuality.

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.

“That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

So even existential torment turns out to be yet another skill, ready to be put to use on the dating market. And the student in question seems quite aware of the fact: content with her instrumentalism.