The HDS is a survey of degree-granting departments at four-year colleges and universities. A department was considered degree-granting if it reported at least five degree awards to the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) during the five years leading up to the survey (2017–21). Data from the DoE provide a useful starting point for assessing current challenges in the humanities (Figure 1).
In many humanities disciplines, the number of institutions awarding degrees increased from the first (2007–08) to the third (2017–18) round of the survey, then fell in almost every year since. For instance, 1,273 institutions awarded degrees in English in 2007, and that number had risen to 1,311 by 2017. However, as of 2022 (when the sample for this round of the survey was pulled), just 1,259 colleges and universities were awarding degrees in the subject—a decline of 4% from 2017. The disciplines of American studies and religion saw the largest declines in the number of institutions awarding degrees in these disciplines over that time period (17% and 16%), but classical studies and languages and literatures other than English also had substantial declines (9% and 10%). However, several disciplines, primarily those in social science–adjacent subjects, experienced increases from 2017 to 2022. Musicology saw an increase of 22%, albeit from an unusual—and brief—trough in the mid-2010s, and the number of communication departments offering degrees grew slightly (.5%). Two other social science–adjacent disciplines experienced an increase in the number of institutions conferring degrees from 2017 to 2022 (not shown in Figure 1). Anthropology saw a 2% increase, while the number of institutions offering degrees in race/ethnic studies grew by 7%.
The DoE data on which Figure 1 is based served as the sampling frame for the survey. All of the findings presented below are based on a nationally representative sample of departments at those institutions. (For more on the survey methodology, see the technical report for the study.) The survey found that the number of departments in the 14 disciplines covered by the study ranged from 1,357 departments for English to 65 for musicology (Figure 2). The estimated number of departments was slightly higher than the total number of institutions awarding degrees in the DoE data due to a small number of colleges and universities with more than one department awarding degrees in the disciplinary category (e.g., a history department and a history of science department, or separate departments for discrete languages or families of languages). With the exception of languages, duplications or disciplinary overlap of this sort are relatively rare and typically limited to research universities.
As shown in Figure 2, the number of departments awarding graduate degrees in each discipline was generally less than half of that discipline’s total number of departments. The only outlier was linguistics, where 68% of departments awarded graduate degrees. In most of the other disciplines, approximately 30% to 40% of departments awarded graduate degrees.
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