The Master?s Degree in the Modern Languages since 1966

Abstract

The story of the master's degree in English and foreign languages since 1966 is most dramatically a story about women's access to areas of study tra ditionally dominated by men and more generally a story about how eco nomic shifts influence students' degree decisions. Statistics on how many master's degrees in English and foreign languages were conferred between 1966 and 2001, disaggregating the numbers for gender, provide a somewhat misleading starting point. Figures 1 and 2 show the arc of these degree con ferrals, humped on the years 1970-71 and 1994-95. Excluding these humps, the overall number of master's degrees granted in the field of En glish has remained almost constant over the last three and a half decades, wavering around 6,000 degrees per year: 6,279 degrees in 1966 and 5,496 in 2001, a decline of 12.5%.1 In foreign languages, the decline has been more pronounced, with degree conferrals wavering around 3,000 per year: 3,402 in 1966 and 2,197 in 2001, a decline of 35.4%. To represent the decline in degree conferrals in these fields solely in terms of numbers of degrees, however, disguises the fact that these fields' percentage shares of all master's degrees granted have slipped markedly. English's share slipped to 1.18% in 2001, less than a third of its 4.46% share in 1966; foreign languages ac counted for only 0.47% in 2001, a fifth of their 2.42% share in 1966 (fig. 3). In other words, as a share of all master's degrees granted, master's degrees