Humanities Education in Community Colleges

The humanities are a large and growing presence in community colleges, as documented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators, which monitors trends in humanities degrees awarded by these institutions and in the number of humanities faculty. In an effort to more fully capture the scale and character of humanities education at these institutions, the Humanities Indicators (with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities) surveyed the nation’s community colleges on three key topics:

1. The number and share of students taking humanities courses;

2. The number and share of faculty teaching such courses;

3. The representation among humanities coursetakers of “dually enrolled” students, that is, students who earn college credit in the humanities while still in high school.