Students

• Total enrollment in undergraduate anthropology courses was 442,640 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 1,036.6 per department).1
• On average, anthropology departments awarded 27.2 bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year. Students also completed an average of 14.9 minors per department.
• Total enrollment in graduate-level anthropology courses was 36,210 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 84.8 per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in anthropology was 81.5 per department that granted such degrees.

Faculty

• Anthropology departments employed 5,090 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of 11.9 faculty members per department. Just over three quarters of these faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track, and 18% were employed part-time.
• Thirty-six percent of anthropology departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year, and 49% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years.
• Women constituted 53% of the faculty members in anthropology departments in fall 2017. Approximately half of tenured faculty members were women, compared to 62% of faculty members on the tenure track and 53% of those off the tenure track.
• While 90% of anthropology departments provided research support for their full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 70% offered such support for full-time nontenured or non-tenure-track faculty, only 29% offered such support for part-time faculty.

Supporting Student Careers

• Fifty-seven percent of anthropology departments rated the career services at their college or university “good” or “very good” for their students, while only 8% rated the services “poor” or “very poor.”

Engaging the Digital

• A quarter of anthropology departments had formal guidelines for evaluating digital publications for tenure and promotion. A same size share offered a seminar focusing on digital methods for research and training.
• In the 2016–17 academic year, 35% of anthropology departments offered fully online courses, while 14% offered hybrid courses. Departments offered an average of 3.7 fully online courses and 1.3 hybrid courses (each average was calculated over the number of departments offering a course of that kind).

Endnotes

• 1Students who enrolled in more than one course in the discipline are counted in each course in which they enrolled. The same is true for the graduate course enrollment values given below. Medians for all “per department” quantities mentioned in this section are available in the corresponding data tables (please see the Appendix, Part B).