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What the numbers reveal—and what they mean for students, families, and the future of higher education

Somewhere in the last ten years, a generation of college students quietly turned away from the humanities.

Not all at once, and not with any great fanfare. There was no single policy change, no viral moment, no referendum on the value of reading Shakespeare or parsing the causes of the French Revolution. But when you lay the federal data side by side—1,636 four-year institutions, ten consecutive academic years, nearly 400,000 degrees annually—the trend is unmistakable and unrelenting. The humanities are shrinking, and the pace hasn’t slowed.

This piece examines what that decline actually looks like in the numbers, what’s driving it, and what it means for the students and families making major decisions right now.

The Big Picture: A Gap That Keeps Widening

The broadest way to see the shift is to compare the humanities against the fields that have been absorbing their lost market share—principally STEM disciplines like computer science, engineering, biology, and mathematics.

In 2015, humanities fields—English, history, philosophy, foreign languages, visual and performing arts, and area/ethnic/gender studies—accounted for 10.9% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded at four-year institutions. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 8.5%. Over the same period, STEM’s share rose from 17.4% to 21.9%.

Figure 1: STEM vs. Humanities share of all bachelor’s degrees, 2015–2024

That 2.4-percentage-point drop in humanities share may sound modest in the abstract. In practice, it means about 35,000 fewer humanities graduates walking across a stage each year—a decline that accumulates, year after year, into a fundamentally different pipeline of talent entering the workforce, graduate schools, and civic life.

The STEM line, meanwhile, tells its own story. It rose steadily through the decade, driven overwhelmingly by the explosion in computer science (which nearly tripled) and robust growth in engineering and biomedical sciences. The two lines haven’t just diverged—they’ve diverged at a pace that shows no sign of converging again.

Field by Field: Nobody Was Spared

The aggregate numbers mask a field-by-field picture that’s even more striking. Of the six core humanities disciplines tracked in the data, five posted double-digit declines between 2015 and 2024. Only visual and performing arts held essentially flat.

Foreign languages suffered the steepest fall, losing 37.4% of its degree completions over the decade—from 19,566 to 12,242. That’s more than 7,300 fewer graduates per year studying Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic, and other languages at the bachelor’s level. In a globalizing economy, at a moment when AI translation tools are both democratizing access to other languages and raising questions about the depth of cross-cultural understanding, the implications are worth sitting with.

English followed close behind, dropping 33.1%—from 45,508 completions to 30,432. English has long been one of the largest humanities majors in absolute terms, which means its decline represents the single largest loss in raw numbers: more than 15,000 fewer English graduates per year.

Philosophy and religious studies fell 30.9%. History declined 25.5%. Area, ethnic, and gender studies dropped 24.7%. Even communications and journalism, a field that straddles the humanities and professional studies, lost 15.6% of its graduates.

Figure 2: Percent change in bachelor’s degrees awarded by field, 2015 vs. 2024

Taken together, the data paints a picture not of isolated struggles in one or two departments but of a broad, structural retreat from an entire mode of education.

The Trajectories: Steady Erosion, Not a Sudden Cliff

One of the most important things the year-by-year data reveals is that this decline isn’t the result of a single shock. There was no year in which completions suddenly cratered; instead, the lines slope steadily downward, with each year posting modestly fewer graduates than the year before.

English lost about 1,500 completions per year on average—roughly the output of 15 to 20 mid-size university English departments, vanishing annually. History’s decline was somewhat gentler—roughly 700 fewer per year—but equally persistent. Foreign languages saw acceleration after 2021, suggesting that pandemic-era disruptions to study-abroad programs and language immersion may have compounded a trend that was already underway.

Figure 3: Annual bachelor’s degree completions by humanities field, 2015–2024

This steady-state erosion matters because it suggests the decline is being driven by durable structural forces—not temporary shocks that might reverse on their own. Students are making different choices, and they’ve been making them consistently for a decade.

It’s worth noting what didn’t happen during the pandemic. Some observers expected COVID-19 to prompt a wave of existential reflection that might revive interest in the humanities—a return to big questions about meaning, mortality, and social responsibility. The data shows no such effect. Humanities completions continued to fall through 2020 and 2021, while fields like computer science, psychology, and public health surged. If anything, the pandemic reinforced the vocational turn, as students watched the economy fracture and reached for majors that seemed to promise stability.

What’s Driving the Shift?

No single factor explains the humanities decline, but several forces are clearly at work.

The return-on-investment narrative. In an era of rising tuition and growing student debt consciousness, students and families increasingly evaluate majors through a vocational lens. Our IPEDS panel data shows that average institutional grant aid grew from roughly $10,800 in 2015 to $15,600 in 2024—a meaningful increase, but one that hasn’t fully offset the perception that college is expensive and that major choice is a financial decision as much as an intellectual one. When students hear that computer science graduates command starting salaries nearly double those of English majors, the signal is hard to ignore, even if the long-term earnings picture is more nuanced than the entry-level numbers suggest.

The tech economy’s gravitational pull. Computer science completions grew from 15,588 to 44,364 over the same period—a 185% increase. Data science, which didn’t exist as a recognized degree in 2015, produced 2,020 graduates in 2024. Students aren’t simply leaving the humanities; they’re being pulled toward a specific set of fields that dominate the cultural conversation about opportunity. When Instagram influencers, career coaches, and even well-meaning parents all echo the same message—study something practical—the aggregate effect shows up in registration systems across the country.

Demographic and generational shifts. Today’s college students are more racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation. Hispanic and Latino enrollment grew from 12% to nearly 17% of undergraduates over the decade. Research has consistently shown that first-generation and underrepresented students—precisely the growing populations—face greater pressure to choose majors with clear career pathways. The humanities’ traditional strength among affluent, white, liberal-arts-college students means its base has been narrowing even as the overall student body has been broadening.

Institutional signaling. When universities freeze hiring in humanities departments, consolidate language programs, or loudly launch new schools of data science and cybersecurity, they send a message to prospective students about where the institution sees its future. These decisions are often framed as responses to declining enrollment, but they can also accelerate it. A prospective student browsing a university’s website will notice which programs have gleaming new buildings and which are housed in aging halls with adjunct-heavy faculty listings. The signal is subtle but legible.

The test-optional ripple effect. An underappreciated factor may be the wholesale shift toward test-optional admissions. Our data shows that SAT submission rates plummeted from 49% to just 20% between 2015 and 2024, while average applications per institution surged 46%. As admissions processes shift away from standardized tests—which historically correlated with the kind of broad intellectual curiosity that drew students to the humanities—and toward more résumé-driven, activity-based evaluation, students may feel even greater pressure to signal career focus in their intended major from the moment they apply.

What Gets Lost

The utilitarian case for STEM is powerful and, in many individual circumstances, correct. But the wholesale erosion of the humanities raises questions that extend well beyond any one student’s career prospects.

Humanities graduates disproportionately enter fields that democracies depend on: teaching, journalism, law, public service, cultural production, and nonprofit leadership. The journalism sub-field alone lost a third of its graduates over the decade—dropping from 13,389 to 9,004—at the very moment that local newsrooms are disappearing and media literacy has become a civic emergency. The education field, while partially recovering from its 2018 low, still produces fewer graduates than it did in 2015, even as teacher shortages intensify across the country.

There’s also the question of what kind of thinking the humanities cultivate. Close reading, argument construction, ethical reasoning, comfort with ambiguity, the ability to understand perspectives distant from one’s own in time or culture—these aren’t soft skills or luxury goods. They’re competencies that employers consistently say they value and that the complexity of modern life increasingly demands. A 2023 survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that the skills employers rated most important—critical thinking, communication, and ethical judgment—map far more naturally onto a humanities curriculum than a technical one.

The data also reveals a socioeconomic dimension to this shift. As noted above, the growing share of first-generation and lower-income students face real and reasonable pressure to pursue majors with visible career pipelines. But the result is a troubling dynamic: humanities education is becoming increasingly concentrated among students from affluent backgrounds who can afford to take the perceived risk, while the students who might benefit most from its emphasis on communication, argument, and civic reasoning are steered away from it. The democratization of higher education hasn’t translated into a democratization of the humanities—and that’s a problem that the data alone can’t solve.

The irony is that many of the fastest-growing fields—data science, artificial intelligence, public health—are themselves grappling with questions that are fundamentally humanistic. Who should AI serve? How do we communicate risk to a skeptical public? What does equity mean in algorithmic decision-making? These questions don’t yield to code alone.

What This Means for Students and Families

If you’re a student choosing a major—or a parent helping one think through the decision—the data here isn’t a mandate. It’s context.

The humanities are not disappearing. Even after a decade of decline, more than 161,000 students earned humanities bachelor’s degrees in 2024. English departments still graduate more students annually than aerospace engineering, nuclear engineering, and petroleum engineering combined—by a wide margin. These are living, functioning disciplines, not relics.

Major choice is not destiny. The relationship between undergraduate major and long-term career outcomes is far looser than the popular narrative suggests. History majors become lawyers, entrepreneurs, and executives. English majors run marketing departments and tech startups. Philosophy majors score among the highest of any discipline on the LSAT, GMAT, and GRE. The data on starting salaries is real, but starting salaries are—by definition—where the story begins, not where it ends.

Combinations are underrated. Some of the most compelling professional profiles combine humanities depth with technical fluency. A student who pairs a history degree with data analysis skills, or an English degree with UX writing expertise, isn’t choosing between worlds—they’re building a bridge that relatively few competitors have crossed. The growth of interdisciplinary studies (up 15.4% over the decade) suggests that some students are already figuring this out.

Think about the countercyclical opportunity. As humanities programs shrink, the students who do pursue them face less competition—for faculty attention, for research opportunities, for prestigious fellowships and awards. Scarcity can be an advantage when the skills themselves remain in demand.

What This Means for Educators

For those on the institutional side, the data poses harder questions. If the humanities decline is structural and durable—and ten years of unbroken decline suggests it is—then the response can’t simply be better marketing or more inspiring syllabi, though both may help.

The institutions that are holding steady or growing their humanities enrollment tend to share certain characteristics: they’ve integrated career preparation and alumni networking into humanities advising, they’ve built interdisciplinary pathways that connect humanistic inquiry to fields like public health and technology, and they’ve made the case for the humanities in the language that students and families actually use—not as an alternative to career preparation, but as a distinctive form of it.

The data won’t choose a major for anyone. But it can make the conversation more honest—and honesty, in an era of declining enrollment and rising stakes, is the first thing the humanities should be able to offer.

Data in this article is drawn from IPEDS Degree Completions for 1,636 four-year institutions, 2015–2024, supplemented by IPEDS institutional panel data on enrollment, demographics, and financial aid.