Peter G. Beidler, a professor of English at Lehigh University, wondered what his department's graduates were doing with their degrees and how they felt about having majored in English. So he conducted a survey to find out.

In the survey, which covered students who graduated from 1980 to 2000, he found that the major was good preparation for professional life, but not in the way he had expected. "We have tended over the years to build our English major on the assumption that our best students will someday want to go to graduate school, probably in English or secondary education," he writes, in the journal of the Association of Departments of English. But, his survey showed, the graduates were far more likely to go into law or business than to get advanced degrees in English or education.

The graduates also said they valued the writing and critical-thinking skills they developed more than anything else they had learned as English majors. "No doubt some of us in the department thought that our primary function was to give our majors an understanding of the history of literature, but almost none of our alums -- a minuscule 3 of the 218 -- mentioned that as one of the top two benefits," he writes.

Mr. Beidler includes with the survey results a copy of the cover letter and questionnaire he used, and he encourages other English departments to do similar surveys. He says he wonders if they will find, as he did, that English graduates "are doing all sorts of interesting and rewarding work out there and are certain that having majored in English helps them both get and do their jobs."

The article is not online. Information about the journal is available at http://www.ade.org/

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