Students

• Among the combined English/LLE departments that were granting degrees in 2007, total enrollment in undergraduate courses was 64,980 in fall 2017 (with an average of 451.3 students per department).2
• On average, combined English/LLE departments awarded 13.2 bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year. Students also completed an average of 7.5 minors per department.
• Total enrollment in graduate level courses offered by combined departments was 5,715 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 39.7 students per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in a combined department was 26.3 per department that offered such degrees.

Faculty

• Combined English/LLE departments employed 1,020 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of 7.1 faculty members per department (this average reflects a statistically significant decline from 2012). Fifty-eight percent of these faculty members were either tenured or on the tenure track, and 22% were employed part-time.
• Twenty-seven percent of combined English/LLE departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year, and 43% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years.
• Women constituted 60% of the faculty members in combined English/LLE departments in fall 2017. Fifty-four percent of tenured faculty members were women, compared to 38% of faculty members on the tenure track and 75% of those off the tenure track.
• While 94% of the combined departments provided research support for their full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 67%1 offered such support for full-time nontenured or non-tenure-track faculty, only 14% offered such support for part-time faculty.

Supporting Student Careers

• Sixty-six percent of combined English/LLE departments rated the career services at their college or university “good” for their students, while 14% rated the services “poor.”

Engaging the Digital

• Eight percent of combined language departments had one or more faculty members specializing in the digital humanities in fall 2017, but no departments had formal guidelines for evaluating digital publications for tenure and promotion.
• In the 2016–17 academic year, 33% of combined language departments offered fully online courses, while 7% offered hybrid courses. Departments offered an average of 2.4 fully online courses and 0.2 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).
• 1Interpret with caution; the standard error is more than 25% of the estimate.