Students

• Among linguistics departments that were granting degrees in 2007, total enrollment in undergraduate courses was 102,720 in fall 2017 (with an average of 766.6 per department).2
• On average, linguistics departments awarded 22.9 bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year. Students also completed an average of 13.2 minors per department.
• Total enrollment in graduate-level linguistics courses was 12,535 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 93.5 per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in linguistics was 55.7 per department that granted such degrees.

Faculty

• Linguistics departments employed 1,850 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of 13.8 faculty members per department (a statistically significant increase from 2012). Almost three-quarters of these faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track, and 16% were employed part-time.
• Thirty-five percent of linguistics departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year, and 44% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years.
• Women constituted 54% of the faculty members in linguistics departments in fall 2017. Forty-eight percent of tenured faculty members were women, compared to 48% of faculty members on the tenure track and 70% of those off the tenure track.
• While 97% of the linguistics departments provided research support for their full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 60% offered such support for full-time nontenured or non-tenure-track faculty, only 34% offered such support for part-time faculty.

Supporting Student Careers

• Forty-nine percent of linguistics departments rated the career services at their college or university “good” or “very good” for their students, while 9% rated the services “poor.”
• A relatively large share—approximately a third—of linguistics departments had a professional program (such as teacher credentialing).

Engaging the Digital

• Thirty-one percent of linguistics departments had one or one or more faculty members specializing in the digital humanities, and 41% offered a seminar focusing on digital methods for research and teaching.
• In the 2016–17 academic year, 22% of linguistics departments offered fully online courses, while 15% offered hybrid courses. Departments offered an average of 3.1 fully online courses and one hybrid course (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).