Is Liberal Arts and Humanities the Most Popular in College
When the economy is growing, people are generally more willing to have risks. That's true for higher students too. In the post-war blast of the 1950s, higher students were confident of their economical futures and many studied liberal arts subjects such as English, history and philosophy. In the stagflation of the 1970s, interest in these disciplines plummeted. Equally the economy recovered, so did the humanities.
But now nosotros have a puzzle.
Following the Great Recession of 2008, college students turned away from the humanities, equally expected. After a few years, the economic system not only revived simply thrived. Unemployment dropped beneath 5 percent and the stock market soared, posting i of the best decades in history. But this fourth dimension, college students didn't come back to English, history and other liberal arts disciplines. Instead, more and more students turned away from the humanities and opted to major in applied science, health and other career-oriented fields.
Now, the number of college students graduating with a humanities major has fallen for the eighth direct year to nether 200,000 degrees in 2020, co-ordinate to federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Organization. Depending upon which fields you include in the humanities saucepan, the drop in graduates is somewhere between sixteen percent and 29 percent since 2012. The last fourth dimension colleges produced this few humanities graduates was in 2002.
If you retrieve about academic departments competing for market share amongst students, information technology's even bleaker. Fewer than 1 in 10 college graduates obtained humanities degrees in 2020, down 25 pct since 2012. That's using a wide definition of humanities that includes "communications," a popular major that at present makes up more than a quarter of all humanities graduates. If you adopt a narrower, historical definition of humanities — restricted to English, history, philosophy and foreign languages and literature — only four per centum of college graduates in 2020 majored in i of these disciplines.
"These humanities fields are down to unprecedented levels," said Rob Townsend, managing director of humanities, arts and civilisation programs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "It'southward worrisome."
Pure sciences like physics and chemical science are included in the liberal arts and sciences but not the humanities. Social sciences, such equally psychology, are also considered part of the liberal arts only not included in the humanities data here. The broader humanities category that includes communications likewise encompasses religious, indigenous and gender studies. Regardless of what is and what isn't a "humanities" subject, and whether the term "liberal arts" can be used interchangeably, the trends are all heading downward and showing no signs of bottoming out or stabilizing.
English language language and literature — a major that used to account for a third of all humanities degrees — has been particularly difficult hitting. In 2020, there were only about 37,000 college graduates who had majored in English language, downwards a third from 55,000 in 2009. History is seeing a similar collapse, downwards 35 pct.
By contrast, students are increasingly gravitating toward majors in business, technology and health-related fields. More than than 430,000 college students graduated with business majors in 2020, up 60 percent over the past 20 years. Engineering majors accept more than doubled during this menstruum; 195,000 students graduated in engineering in 2020, almost matching the number of humanities graduates. Majors in health and medicine fields have tripled in the past 20 years to more than 260,000 graduates in 2020, far surpassing humanities majors.
Townsend at the American Academy for Arts and Sciences says that the current downturn in the humanities is "puzzling." Logically, rising tuition costs might pressure students to select more than practical career-oriented fields of study. "As before long as you finish that caste, you've got to start paying off student debts," Townsend said. "And it takes humanities majors a year or two longer to piece of work their way into the job that's going to be their long-term career."
However, when tuition and pupil debt soared in the 1990s, students defied predictions and flocked to the humanities. "Humanities majors kept going up, upwardly, up, upwards, upwardly into the 2000s," said Townsend.
Current economic anxieties that erupted with the pandemic in 2020 are certainly not helping the humanities now. "Information technology's just harder in economic hard times to experience comfortable taking that hazard," said Townsend.
A survey published in November 2021 shows that 90 percent of humanities graduates are generally satisfied with their lives and careers in 2019, even if their earnings, on average, slightly trail those of other majors ($58,000 compared to $63,000). More than xl percent of humanities majors subsequently get to graduate school, such as constabulary school, for advanced degrees. Their earnings, of course, are much higher. All the same, this same report noted that forty pct of humanities graduates said they would not choose the same major again.
One overlooked factor working against the humanities is the office of early college credits from AP courses and dual enrollment programs. More and more students are placing out of humanities requirements when they arrive at college. "Information technology's condign harder to draw students into that first form where you can try to attract them as major," said Townsend.
Townsend also wonders if the rise in technology use and the refuse in reading habits are affecting interest in the humanities, subjects that crave a lot of reading in college.
The stakes are loftier for academia. As departments become less popular, they cannot hire every bit many tenure track professors and rely more on adjunct faculty. Weak faculties, in turn, discourage more than students from the major and accelerate the downwardly spiral. "I think nosotros're reaching a kind of an existential tipping point for a lot of a lot of departments that potentially could lead to their emptying," said Townsend.
The stakes for students and society every bit a whole are less clear. Today, nosotros have every bit many college students graduating with humanities majors as we did in 2002, and it wasn't considered alarming at the time. (Encounter graph above.)
Still, the signs alee don't look adept. At that place are most 9 percentage fewer higher students majoring in the liberal arts and humanities now in fall 2021, compared with ii years earlier in 2019, according to the most recent enrollment information from the National Pupil Clearinghouse Enquiry Eye. English majors seem to be sliding faster still. They were down 10 percent in the spring of 2021 compared to 2020. As low as things are now, we should wait fifty-fifty fewer humanities degrees in the years to come.
This story about liberal arts degrees was written past Jill Barshay and produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in educational activity. Sign upward for the Hechinger newsletter.
Source: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-the-number-of-college-graduates-in-the-humanities-drops-for-the-eighth-consecutive-year/
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