BYU is # 1 in the Nation for Number of Foreign Languages Offered–By Far

13 comments for “BYU is # 1 in the Nation for Number of Foreign Languages Offered–By Far”

1. The question is, why doesn’t the Idaho campus offer more languages than it does presently?

2. This isn’t quite as impressive as it looks. Of the 96 languages offered by BYU in the fall of 2021, only 49 had nonzero enrollment. In contrast, 61 of Harvard’s offerings had nonzero enrollment.

3. I have a similar question to John Taber’s, except regarding the Utah state colleges, which I suppose abound in former missionaries. And then there is BYU-Hawaii with its pan-Pacific orientation. Is there more going on with BYU-Provo than former missionaries who want to take a class in the language they used as missionaries? Some focus of service to the church to aid translation, interpretation, and preparation of missionaries and general authorities?

4. That’s a good point, Last Lemming, although I’d want to look at more than one semester, and a bit farther back than the most recent year, to account for quirks of scheduling and record keeping. (And 61 would only bump BYU down to 2nd place in any case!) The original survey data looked at enrollments, so there are non-zero enrollments for all those languages at some point within the survey window.

   As far as why other colleges don’t offer more languages, it usually comes down to how institutions express their priorities. So you see things like:

   – Eliminating foreign languages from general education requirements
   – Budget models that give all the extra funding for enrolled majors to the first declared major and ignore minors, so all those dual business/Spanish majors or minors are counted as 100% business majors when it comes to funding
   – Budget models that reward departments for keeping students enrolled in departmental courses and penalize them for students taking courses outside the major
   – Actively discouraging students from taking courses that aren’t part of their specific major requirements

   So you end up in situations where a student wants to take a language course because doing so would make them better prepared for some part of their intended career, but there are major institutional roadblocks, and eventually fewer and fewer languages are offered.

   Or where a university declares 2024 as its “Year of Culture and Internationalization” even as its languages department withers.

   Or where people who work in survey design will tell translators that the order of words is critical and must not change in translation, and also there’s one variable to store the words “I” or “you” and another variable to store the words “my” or “your,” and these variables need to be used a dozen times in the translated survey. (If you can’t figure out the problem with this, your college education has failed you.)

   Looking at the colleges and universities that offer a lot of languages, it again seems like it makes more sense to think of BYU as the flagship campus of the Deseret state university system and look at what lessons it might offer for peer institutions.

   The contrast with other Utah campuses and BYU-Idaho that John T. and John M. bring up is pretty noticeable, since they’re presumably serving a similar group of students with some similar backgrounds and interests. I think the simplest explanation is where fluency in a foreign language falls out in terms of institutional priorities, and the decision makers have come to see it as largely useless and expendable.

5. OK, I did some more digging in the database and I have concluded that the 2021 data may not be ready for prime time. I looked at every year back to 2002 (not every year is represented) and in only one instance (Harvard in 2009) did the number of languages with nonzero enrollment exceed 3. In most years, it was zero. Here is a comparison of languages with nonzero enrollment at BYU and Harvard for the years available (always fall semester–spring semesters are not reported and I ignore summers).

   BYU Harvard
   2002 45 47
   2006 35 51
   2009 38 51
   2013 46 60
   2016 54 66
   2020 58 n,a,
   2021 49 61

   Of the 47 BYU languages with zero enrollment in 2021, only three had ever had enrollment in the past.

   I didn’t look at any other schools, so I will simply stipulate that BYU is in second place. But for the title of the post to contain “By Far” and still have any meaning, the rest would have to read “BYU is # 1 in the Nation for Number of Foreign Languages Offered That Nobody Has Ever Actually Taken”.

6. Sorry, I transcribed one of my numbers incorrectly. The second to last paragraph should read as follows:

   Of the 47 BYU languages with zero enrollment in 2021, only 12 had ever had enrollment in the past. Of the languages offered by BYU for the first time in 2021, only 3 had nonzero enrollment,

7. That’s fair. There aren’t that many students taking the exotic language classes, but it’s still relevant that they could if they wanted to. They are being offered.

8. At the risk of completely undermining my credibility, I have to make one more correction.

   in only one instance (Harvard in 2009) did the number of languages with zero enrollment exceed 3.

9. A bit off topic–

   People level all kinds of criticisms at the “jello belt” but one thing’s for sure–they’re a lot more cosmopolitan then meets the eye. My guess is that–collectively–they’ve lived in more places around the globe and speak a greater number of second languages than any other demographic in the U.S.

10. LL: The database is based on enrollment data, so a language had to have some enrollment at some point. The linked file doesn’t contain complete retrospective data, if I remember correctly. There are previous MLA reports for prior time periods that cover earlier years more thoroughly (also available from the same site). I don’t know what criteria the MLA used for pruning a language from a listing. My guess is that BYU has offered a bunch of languages on an ad hoc basis, which isn’t a bad thing if you want to figure out what your needs and demands are.

    But it’s a good idea to kick on the data a bit and see what the issues are. The MLA has gotten a lot better about data collection in the last 5 years or so, but before that the situation wasn’t great. And there’s always going to be some issues with data like this where often there’s no single person responsible for all languages at a university – often they’re spread across several departments, with some stray languages housed in places like religious studies or philosophy.

11. And just as I thought I might donate to BYU to encourage them to keep their #1 ranking for foreign languages…

12. I imagine once you get past the 45 or so most common foreign languages, it becomes incredibly difficult to find someone qualified and willing to teach it. For each class, you need at least a handful of students pushing for it to be offered, and that needs to be coordinated with someone qualified to teach it, and then the potential students and the potential teacher need to convince BYU to offer it.

    As far as BYU-I goes, it’s a smaller university (especially with the current enrollment, which is well below capacity) and I don’t have the figures but I’d be willing to bet that fewer students there have served foreign-speaking missions. Plus, the teaching pool is limited to Eastern Idaho instead of the entire Wasatch Front.

13. We’re number one! Everyone else is at best a distant second! We’re number one — by far! Did I mention number 1!?!!

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