Good news for Latin in the US?

Greg Crane points out the alarming drop in Ancient Greek and Latin enrollments in US postsecondary institutions in an aptly titled post “Bad News for Latin in the US, worse for Greek.” His fuller discussion (here) compares this clear trend with declining enrollment figures in Germany, and with information about enrollments in Latin in US secondary schools.

The data on Latin in secondary schools may need more contextualization, however. Crane cites the low percentage of high-school students taking Latin courses in this Education Department study. There is no question that a far smaller percentage of students today are taking high-school Latin than did so in the samples from 1948-1965; but after the historic low of 1.1% in 1976, the proportion has hovered between 1.3-1.6% from 1990 and 2007, the last year covered. In other words, the situation today for Latin today is measurably better than in the bleakest years years of he 1970s: each year in the US, a couple of hundred thousand students continue to study high-school Latin.

To contrast the difference between the steady state of Latin in US high schools and the decline in post-secondary enrollments, we should also look at size of the respective populations. While the proportion of high-school and earlier enrollments are dropping in the US, the proportion of student enrollments at colleges continues to rise. (See this summary graph from the Census Bureau). There is probably a more dramatic difference between secondary- and post-secondary enrollments than Crane’s post suggests.

I asked my colleague and secondary-school Latin teacher Megan Whitacre (a former student) for perspective on this. She comments in an email:

The ACL [American Classical League] always has more job postings than they have teachers, National Latin Exam participation has been steadily growing (NLEgraph2014.pdf ) and the JCL/SCL are as lively as ever. The National JCL [Junior Classical League] convention this summer is so full that there is a waiting list!

She qualifies these impressions by pointing out other kinds of data I could look at (e.g., JCL membership numbers, students taking Latin AP exams, etc), but then poses the most significant question:

If secondary school numbers are indeed rising - or at least maintaining [their level] - what’s the difference between high school and college Classics?

My working hypothesis: people who have PhDs in Classics?