• In 2022, 37.5% of humanities bachelor’s degrees were awarded to students from minoritized racial/ethnic groups,1 more than double the share awarded in 1997 (when the proportion was 18%; Indicator II-07a). The share increased gradually, with a modest increase almost every year during this period. (The number of students from these groups earning humanities degrees also more than doubled, increasing from 30,468 in 1997 to 67,152 in 2022.)
• The humanities were similar to most other fields with respect to the share of its degree completers who were members of minoritized groups in 2022. The only field with a substantially larger share of students from these groups was behavioral and social sciences (43.1%). Education had a markedly smaller share of such completers than most fields, 30.6%.
• In 2022, Hispanic/Latino students accounted for the largest share of humanities bachelor’s degree recipients from minoritized racial/ethnic groups, earning 17.6% of all degrees completed in the field—which was similar to the share among bachelor’s degree recipients generally (Indicator II-07b). Only the behavioral and social sciences awarded an appreciably larger share of their degrees to Hispanic/Latino students (20.3%). Hispanic/Latino graduates were the best-represented minoritized group in every field except engineering, where they accounted for 12.7%.
• African American/Black students earned 9.7% of the humanities bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2022. In this respect, humanities degree recipients resembled bachelor’s degree recipients in general. The health and medical sciences awarded the largest share of degrees to African American students (12.2%), while engineering awarded the smallest (6.2%).
• In 2022, the share of humanities bachelor’s degrees completed by Asian American students was 4.8%, approximately three percentage points smaller than the share of all bachelor’s degrees earned by students from this group. The humanities also had a smaller share of graduates who were temporary residents than most fields.
• Cultural, ethnic, and gender studies awarded a much larger share of its degrees to members of minoritized racial/ethnic groups than any other humanities discipline throughout the 1997–2022 period (Indicator II-07c). Among humanities disciplines with more than 500 graduates (and thus less year-to-year volatility in the demographic mix of students receiving degrees), classical studies and religious studies recorded the lowest shares of degree recipients from minoritized racial/ethnic groups in 2022 (20.1% and 24.4% respectively).
• The share of humanities degrees earned by minoritized students increased by 75% or more from 1997 to 2022 in every humanities discipline except cultural, ethnic, and gender studies (where the share of such students increased modestly from a much higher level). Excluding the category of selected interdisciplinary studies (which was radically changed by the inclusion of several new subject areas in 2020), the largest percentage increase occurred in the humanistic study of the arts, where the share of minoritized students more than doubled, rising from 15% to 37% of the degrees conferred. The shares also more than doubled in the disciplines of archeology, communication, comparative literature, English, history, linguistics, and philosophy. (Size disparities among disciplines must be considered when comparing rates of change on this measure or any other.)
• While the share of humanities degrees earned by students from minoritized racial/ethnic groups grew over the 1997–2022 period, those degrees accounted for a diminishing share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to these students (Indicator II-07d). In 1997, the humanities accounted for almost 13% of the bachelor’s degrees earned by these students, but after rising slightly until the mid-2000s, the humanities’ share of degrees dropped steadily, reaching 8.6% by 2022. In that year, humanities degrees constituted 8–10% of the degrees awarded to students in most of the racial/ethnic groups examined here. The exception was Asian students, only 5.2% of whom earned bachelor’s degrees in the humanities.
• In 2022, students from minoritized racial and ethnic groups were most likely to receive a business or management degree, with 17.4% of degrees earned in this field (Indicator II-07e). Though still the most popular degree, business and management is a less common choice than in 2004, when almost a quarter of minoritized graduates completed a degree in this field. Conversely, the shares of degrees awarded in the fields of health/medical sciences, natural sciences, arts, and engineering all increased over the 1997–2022 time period. The most dramatic increase was in the share earned in health and medical sciences, which increased from 6.4% to 13.7% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to minoritized students.

Endnotes

• 1

  Includes students who are citizens or permanent residents and self-identify as American Indian/Alaska Native only (non-Hispanic), African American/Black only (non-Hispanic), Asian only (non-Hispanic), Hispanic or Latino (any race), Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander only (non-Hispanic), or two or more races (non-Hispanic). These—along with “White only (non-Hispanic),” “U.S. Nonresident,” and “Unknown” (for students who decline to answer)—are the categories the National Center for Education Statistics requires institutions to use when reporting students’ race/identity. For information on how institutions collect data on race/ethnicity from students and assign them to these categories, see https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-collecting-data-for-reporting-purposes.