Associate’s Degree Completions in Selected Fields as a Percentage of All Associate’s Degree Completions, 1987–2013

While recent years have seen a decline in the number of graduates earning humanities degrees at four-year colleges and universities, at the community-college level, the share of associate’s degrees earned in a humanities discipline or requiring a substantial amount of humanities coursework—a degree in liberal or general studies, for example—increased in 2012 and 2013 (the most current years for which data are available). In these years, the humanities’ share of all associate’s degrees was almost four times as large as the field’s share of all bachelor’s degrees, evidence that two-year institutions are a key element of the humanities higher education ecosystem.