The survey was also developed to provide information about undergraduate and graduate students that is not available from other sources, including level of enrollment in humanities courses and the number of minors awarded.
Assessing Student Enrollments
Starting with enrollments, the survey found that in fall 2023, total enrollment in undergraduate humanities courses was 5.6 million over the 14 disciplines included in the survey. Enrollment ranged from 21,470 in musicology to almost 1.6 million in English. (These are “duplicated” counts, so a student enrolled in more than one course in the subject would be counted in each course.) Notably, when measured by student enrollments, the communication discipline is not among the four largest disciplines. While English and history had more than a million enrollments in their fall 2023 courses and LOTE had slightly below a million, communication had total enrollments of only 433,660. This was below the 557,090 enrollments in philosophy courses.
Communication appears even smaller when viewed by per department average (Figure 10). Five of the disciplines in the survey averaged more than 500 undergraduate enrollments per department (English, history, LOTE, philosophy, and anthropology), and religion had an average of 450 enrollments per department. With an average of 390 enrollments per department, communication was similar to art history (which had an average of 386 enrollments). Women’s/gender studies programs had the smallest average, but still 269 enrollments per department.
Once again, a substantial gap was observed for most disciplines between the averages and the medians, indicating that a few large departments—typically at research universities—were skewing the averages upward. For instance, English departments at research universities had average undergraduate enrollments of 2,522 students, while primarily undergraduate institutions had an average of just 294. (English departments at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, fell between the two types, with average enrollments of 970 students.) None of the other disciplines had such a substantial gap between the largest and smallest institution types. For instance, among communication departments, the average enrollment per department at research universities was 657, while at the other institution types the average was around 248. Among LOTE departments, the highest average enrollments were found at departments in master’s institutions—not at research universities—though that was likely due to a tendency to cluster multiple languages in a single department at master’s institutions, while departments at research universities were more likely to focus on discrete languages.
Sorting the disciplines by median enrollment, history had the highest per department enrollment (420), followed by English (371), musicology (369), and anthropology (363). All but one of the other disciplines had median enrollments of 200 or more per department, with the lone exception of classical studies, which had a median of 184. Departments looking to benchmark their own departmental enrollments against their peers should (a) look to the medians as a better standard for assessing their own numbers and (b) consult the discipline profiles, which provide enrollment estimates disaggregated by institution type and highest degree.
Unfortunately, the survey had only mixed success asking about enrollments in the past (as a result of attempting to parse specific types of undergraduate courses), so a direct comparison to earlier surveys was not possible. But this round of the survey did ask chairs whether their enrollment numbers had increased, held steady, or decreased over the past three years. The data reveal that departments in the largest disciplines (measured by faculty size) were most likely to have experienced a decrease in undergraduate enrollment (Figure 11). A majority of LOTE and communication departments reported a decline of one or more undergraduate enrollments (54% each), and well over 40% of English and history departments saw declines. In all four of these disciplines, the departments reporting a decline were widely distributed across institution types, with one-third or more of departments in each Carnegie classification reporting at least a small decline in enrollments. However, among all four disciplines, the largest shares of departments reporting declines were at the master’s colleges and universities. This was true of most of the other disciplines in the survey, as well.
Course Enrollments by Faculty Type
The survey was also designed to yield estimates of average teaching load by faculty type, as measured by undergraduate course enrollments. The data indicate that in almost all examined disciplines, full-time tenure-line faculty had the lowest average undergraduate enrollment (Figure 12). This finding is probably to be expected given that these faculty tend to teach smaller upper-level and graduate courses, while adjunct faculty tend to teach larger general education courses. What is notable here is that even the part-time faculty in most disciplines taught larger numbers of undergraduate students on average than the tenure-line faculty.
The figure shows disciplines in descending order by the average enrollment per tenured/tenure-track faculty members, revealing that tenure-line faculty members in philosophy had the heaviest enrollment load (with an average of 55 enrollments in the fall 2023 term), while those in linguistics departments had the lightest (an average of 17 enrollments). Using those two disciplines as points of comparison, the contrast with adjunct faculty becomes apparent, as average enrollments for full-time nontenure-track faculty in philosophy were 101, while their counterparts in linguistics had an average of 75. The comparable averages for part-time faculty were 73 in philosophy and 30 for linguistics. Among the other disciplines, LOTE had the narrowest gap in undergraduate enrollments between tenured/tenure-track faculty and their full-time nontenure-track colleagues, though the latter’s average enrollments were still almost 50% larger. In only four disciplines (communication, musicology, race/ethnic studies, and religion) were average enrollments for part-time nontenure-track faculty lower than those of their tenured/tenure-track colleagues.
Majors and Minors
Shifting the perspective from student enrollments to student majors surfaces a substantial difference between these two means of gauging the number of students served by a discipline’s departments. While undergraduate enrollments in communication departments were small relative to the other large and medium-sized humanities disciplines, the discipline accounted for the largest number of humanities majors and students earning bachelor’s degrees. The survey estimates that communication departments collectively had 128,290 juniors and seniors with a declared major in the discipline in fall 2023, and that they awarded approximately 56,700 bachelor’s degrees in the 2022–23 academic year. English, which had three times as many enrollments as communication (reflecting a much larger part of the general education curriculum), had a comparatively modest 91,490 majors and 43,080 bachelor’s degrees awarded. The smallest discipline by this measure was musicology, with 260 declared majors and 140 degrees awarded.
Communication departments also had the largest median number of majors and bachelor’s degrees awarded per department (Figure 13). Among communication departments, the median number of bachelor’s degrees awarded was 19, and the number of declared majors was 36. With the exception of musicology, the medians for other disciplines ranged from 5 to 14 baccalaureate degrees awarded and from 10 to 30 majors. Musicology was the outlier, with a median of 2 undergraduate degrees awarded per department, and 2 majors.
The median number of juniors and seniors with declared majors ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 times the number of bachelor’s degrees being awarded (except in musicology, where there appeared to be slightly less than one major per graduate). However as the comparison in majors is to two classes of students (juniors and seniors), a greater than 2 to 1 ratio would seem preferable as a positive indicator of future growth, particularly at a time when most of the disciplines have seen degrees decline substantially in recent years. Six of the 14 disciplines had medians with two or more majors for every one bachelor’s degree awarded: art history, history, classical studies, English, anthropology, and religion.
The HDS is the only source of information on the number of minors, certificates, and other microcredentials awarded nationally in humanities disciplines. In the 2022–23 academic year, LOTE awarded the largest number of minors per department in the humanities, with a median of 15 (Figure 14). With the exception of musicology, the other disciplines were fairly similar in the number of minors awarded. The social science–adjacent disciplines (anthropology, race/ethnic studies, and women’s/gender studies) were at the high end, awarding 10 per department, while art history and religion were at the lower end, awarding 6 per department. Musicology departments were the outlier, awarding a median of just 1 minor per department.
Despite considerable talk in recent years about the potential value of certificates and other microcredentials for the field, they remain relatively rare in almost every surveyed discipline. English, communication, and LOTE departments awarded the largest numbers of certificates and other microcredentials (ranging from 5,000 to 6,000 in the 2022–23 academic year). Aside from history (where almost 3,000 were awarded), all the other disciplines awarded considerably smaller numbers. However, some of that difference appears largely a function of the smaller numbers of departments in those other disciplines, as on a per department basis the numbers appear much more similar. With the exception of communication (where the median number of certificate and other microcredential awards was 18), all the other disciplines had medians ranging from 3 to 8 per department.
While the awarding of minors appeared fairly ubiquitous across all humanities disciplines—and generally followed patterns seen in the relative numbers of bachelor’s degrees awarded—the awards of certificates and other microcredentials varied widely across and within disciplines. In English and history, for instance, these awards were largely limited to colleges and universities with graduate programs. However, in disciplines such as philosophy and religion, certificates and other microcredentials were more likely to be awarded by departments that did not award graduate degrees. Given those variations, the nature and purpose of these awards in the humanities merits further study.
Next: Graduate Students >>
