Students

• Among classical studies departments that were granting degrees in 2012, total enrollment in undergraduate courses was 136,920 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 509 per department).2
• On average, classical studies departments awarded 7.6 bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year. Students also completed an average of 6.4 minors per department.
• Total enrollment in graduate-level classical studies courses was 10,155 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 37.8 per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in classical studies was 60.7 per department that granted such degrees.

Faculty

• Classical studies departments employed 2,005 full- or part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of 7.4 faculty members per department. Almost three-quarters of these faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track, and 15% were employed part-time.
• Twenty-five percent of classical studies departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year, and 33% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years.
• Women constituted 44% of the faculty members in classical studies departments in fall 2017. Thirty-eight percent of tenured faculty members were women, compared to 48% of faculty members on the tenure track and 54% of those off the tenure track.
• While 97% of the classical studies 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 (this share reflects a statistically significant increase from 2012), only 19% offered such support for part-time faculty.

Supporting Student Careers

• Forty-nine percent of classical studies departments rated the career services at their college or university “good” or “very good” for their students, while 14% rated the services “poor” or “very poor.”
• The discipline of classical studies stands out for the relatively small share of departments providing undergraduate students with occupationally oriented opportunities—such as presentations by employers or alumni, internships, or coursework. It is the only discipline in which less than half of departments offered such activities.

Engaging the Digital

• Twenty-three percent of classical studies departments had one or more faculty members specializing in the digital humanities, but only 10% had formal guidelines for evaluating digital publications for tenure and promotion. Ten percent of departments offered a seminar on digital methods for research and teaching.
• In the 2016–17 academic year, 25% of classical studies departments offered fully online courses, while 13% offered hybrid courses. Departments offered an average of 2.5 fully online courses and 0.7 hybrid courses (each average was calculated over the number of departments offering a course of that kind).

Endnotes

• 2Students 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).