Triangle Business Journal – Jason deBruyn
“After years of solid growth, enrollment in foreign-language courses in North Carolina has declined…Nationwide, enrollment declined 6.7 percent since 2009 after growing steadily for 20 years….In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA’s executive director, speculated that several factors could have played a role in the decline, including rising student interest in career-oriented subjects such as business in the wake of the recession. Those studies leave less time for language classes, Feal told the Chronicle. As the business world becomes increasingly global, several surveys have found that employers value job seekers who can speak multiple languages. The growth of the Chinese economy in particular has affected interest in the language. The number of institutions reporting enrollments in Chinese, for example, has more than doubled, from 412 in 1990 to 866 in 2013, and the enrollments in Chinese have more than tripled, from 19,427 in 1990 to 61,055 in 2013, according to MLA. Likewise, while 17 percent of reporting institutions taught Chinese in 1990, 36 percent showed enrollments in Chinese in 2013.”(more)