Percentage of People Going to Colleges for the Arts
When the economic system is growing, people are by and large more willing to take risks. That'southward true for college students too. In the mail-state of war boom of the 1950s, college 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 we have a puzzle.
Following the Great Recession of 2008, college students turned away from the humanities, as expected. After a few years, the economy not just revived but thrived. Unemployment dropped below 5 pct and the stock market soared, posting 1 of the best decades in history. Merely this time, college students didn't come up dorsum to English language, history and other liberal arts disciplines. Instead, more and more students turned away from the humanities and opted to major in engineering, health and other career-oriented fields.
Now, the number of college students graduating with a humanities major has fallen for the eighth straight yr to under 200,000 degrees in 2020, according to federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Depending upon which fields yous include in the humanities saucepan, the drop in graduates is somewhere between 16 percent and 29 per centum since 2012. The last time colleges produced this few humanities graduates was in 2002.
If you think about academic departments competing for market share amidst students, it's even bleaker. Fewer than one in 10 college graduates obtained humanities degrees in 2020, downwards 25 percent since 2012. That'south using a broad definition of humanities that includes "communications," a pop 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 4 pct of higher graduates in 2020 majored in one of these disciplines.
"These humanities fields are down to unprecedented levels," said Rob Townsend, managing director of humanities, arts and culture programs at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. "Information technology's worrisome."
Pure sciences like physics and chemical science are included in the liberal arts and sciences but not the humanities. Social sciences, such as psychology, are also considered part of the liberal arts but not included in the humanities data here. The broader humanities category that includes communications also encompasses religious, ethnic and gender studies. Regardless of what is and what isn't a "humanities" bailiwick, and whether the term "liberal arts" tin can be used interchangeably, the trends are all heading downward and showing no signs of bottoming out or stabilizing.
English language and literature — a major that used to business relationship for a third of all humanities degrees — has been specially hard hit. In 2020, there were only about 37,000 college graduates who had majored in English, down a 3rd from 55,000 in 2009. History is seeing a similar plummet, down 35 percent.
By contrast, students are increasingly gravitating toward majors in concern, engineering and wellness-related fields. More than than 430,000 college students graduated with business majors in 2020, upwardly 60 percent over the past 20 years. Engineering majors have more than doubled during this period; 195,000 students graduated in engineering in 2020, nigh 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 practical career-oriented fields of study. "Equally before long equally yous finish that caste, you've got to offset paying off student debts," Townsend said. "And it takes humanities majors a year or two longer to work their way into the job that'due south going to be their long-term career."
Yet, when tuition and educatee debt soared in the 1990s, students defied predictions and flocked to the humanities. "Humanities majors kept going upwardly, up, up, up, up into the 2000s," said Townsend.
Electric current economical anxieties that erupted with the pandemic in 2020 are certainly non helping the humanities now. "Information technology'south but harder in economic hard times to feel comfortable taking that run a risk," said Townsend.
A survey published in November 2021 shows that 90 pct 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 40 percent of humanities majors afterward go to graduate school, such as law school, for avant-garde degrees. Their earnings, of course, are much higher. However, this same report noted that forty pct of humanities graduates said they would not choose the same major once more.
1 overlooked factor working against the humanities is the function of early on higher credits from AP courses and dual enrollment programs. More and more students are placing out of humanities requirements when they arrive at college. "It'southward becoming harder to draw students into that first grade where you can try to concenter them as major," said Townsend.
Townsend also wonders if the rise in technology use and the decline 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 equally many tenure track professors and rely more on adjunct faculty. Weak faculties, in turn, discourage more students from the major and accelerate the downward spiral. "I think we're reaching a kind of an existential tipping signal for a lot of a lot of departments that potentially could lead to their emptying," said Townsend.
The stakes for students and club as a whole are less clear. Today, we accept every bit many college students graduating with humanities majors equally nosotros did in 2002, and it wasn't considered alarming at the time. (See graph higher up.)
Yet, the signs alee don't look proficient. There are almost 9 percent fewer college students majoring in the liberal arts and humanities now in autumn 2021, compared with two years earlier in 2019, according to the most recent enrollment information from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. English majors seem to be sliding faster still. They were down 10 percent in the spring of 2021 compared to 2020. As low every bit things are at present, we should expect even fewer humanities degrees in the years to come up.
This story almost liberal arts degrees was written by Jill Barshay and produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in didactics. Sign upwardly 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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