The Value of the Humanities in Higher Education

Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her background is in English Literature, but she also holds a Master’s degree in Educational and Social Research, and has published on academic subject identity based on interviews with students. She is chiefly interested in the application of qualitative methods to understand people’s construction of learner and work values.    Flora Ka Yu Mak is a Ph.D. candidate in English (Literary Studies) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Romantic poetry and the notion of impersonality. Her previous education-related research has addressed trade and investment in higher education services in Hong Kong.  Thomas Siu-Ho Yau is a postgraduate student at the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His main research interests are in second language acquisition and cognitive linguistics. He has also pursued research on language and society, language policy, curriculum and education policy, and vocational education in Hong Kong, employing technology enhanced learning and learning analytics to do so. Yutong Hu received her M.Phil. in Sociology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017 and subsequently worked for the Department of English at the same university as a Research Assistant. She will begin her Ph.D. studies in Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong this fall. Her research interests include the sociology of education, social stratification and mobility, and quantitative methods.  Michael O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He works in the fields of comparative literature, literature and philosophy, and education studies. Recent relevant publications include The Humanities and the Irish University (MUP 2014), The Humanities inContemporary Chinese Contexts (with Evelyn Chan) (Springer 2016), Academic Barbarism, Universities, and Inequality (Palgrave 2016) and “Educational inequalities in higher education in Hong Kong” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2015) (with Michael Yat-him Tsang). Eddie Tay is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His most recent publication, Anything You Can Get Away With: Creative Practices, is a critical-creative work featuring street photography in Hong Kong and Singapore. He is also the author of four poetry collections and a book on the colonial and postcolonial literatures of Singapore and Malaysia. 

Part I: Results: graduate interviews.- 1. Individual benefits.- 2. Characteristics of career development narratives.- 3. Characteristics of humanities pedagogy.- 4. Characteristics of humanities education narratives.- 5. The essential contributions of humanities education to Hong Kong society.- Further discussion.- Part II: graduate employment survey data.- Part III: Conversations with senior humanities scholars.- Conclusion.