Just a few years ago, the philosophy major seemed on the rise. Now, the data reveal a different picture.
As Eric Schwitzgebel shares in the following guest post, the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in philosophy (and their share of the total undergraduate degrees awarded) has declined over the past few years.
Furthermore, he notes that “relatively elite schools award disproportionately many philosophy degrees—and this tendency has increased as the percentage of students earning philosophy degrees has declined.”
(A version of this post first appeared at The Splintered Mind.)
The Plummeting Philosophy Major in the US
by Eric Schwitzgebel
Three years ago, I posted some optimistic reflections about how the philosophy major seemed to be recovering from its recent decline in the U.S. I take it back. The National Center for Education Statistics has released its numbers from the 2023-2024 academic year, and it’s bad.
First off: The humanities in general have been hemorrhaging majors since about 2008. English in particular has been hammered. In the 2000-2001 academic year, 4.5% bachelor’s degrees recipients were English majors. Now it’s 1.7%. [1]
Since philosophy started out low, its decline is not as visually evident in the above graph. Here are the raw numbers:
Year: Philosophy BAs awarded (as a % of all Bachelor’s degrees)
2001: 5836 (.49%)
2002: 6529 (.52%)
2003: 7023 (.54%)
2004: 7707 (.57%)
2005: 8283 (.60%)
2006: 8532 (.60%)
2007: 8541 (.59%)
2008: 8778 (.59%)
2009: 8996 (.59%)
2010: 9268 (.59%)
2011: 9292 (.57%)
2012: 9362 (.56%)
2013: 9427 (.54%)
2014: 8820 (.49%)
2015: 8184 (.44%)
2016: 7489 (.40%)
2017: 7572 (.39%)
2018: 7667 (.39%)
2019: 8074 (.40%)
2020: 8209 (.40%)
2021: 8328 (.40%)
2022: 7958 (.39%)
2023: 7550 (.38%)
2024: 7091 (.36%)
Bachelor’s degree completions in general have declined somewhat. They peaked at 2,068,932 in the 2020-2021 academic year and have declined slightly in every subsequent year, down to 1,959,325 for the 2023-2024 academic year—a 5% decline overall. Possible explanations of this general trend include: a hangover from the pandemic, demographic shifts, or a decline in the perceived value of a university education.
I was curious whether the decline in philosophy majors would be more pronounced at schools with fewer philosophy majors. In a post from 2021, I had found that from 2010-2019, just 20 schools accounted for 17% of philosophy degrees awarded in the U.S. Returning to those same data for the 2023-2024 academic year, I found that the top 20 schools now account for 22% of all philosophy degrees awarded.
Another way to examine the increasing concentration is to check Carnegie classifications. Carnegie classifies undergraduate institutions as “selective” if they are in the 40th-80th percentile of selectivity in undergraduate admissions based on test scores, and “more selective” if they in the 80th-100th percentile of selectivity. Fifty-two percent of philosophy degree recipients are from “more selective” schools, compared to 25% of bachelor’s degree recipients overall; and 84% of philosophy degree recipients are from either selective or more selective schools, compared to 62% overall. In 2010-2019, 45% of philosophy BAs were from more selective schools (vs. 23% overall) and 80% were from either selective or more selective schools (vs. 60% overall), confirming the increasing concentration.
Thus, relatively elite schools award disproportionately many philosophy degrees—and this tendency has increased as the percentage of students earning philosophy degrees has declined.
For those who are curious which universities awarded the most philosophy degrees in 2023-2024, according to the NCES IPEDS classifications, it is:
University of Pennsylvania: 193
University of California-Los Angeles: 117
University of California-Santa Barbara: 93
University of California-Berkeley: 91
University of Washington-Seattle Campus: 88
University of Southern California: 84
New York University: 76
University of Maryland-College Park: 75
University of Chicago: 71
Boston College: 71
University of Colorado Boulder: 69
Boston University: 67
Arizona State University Digital Immersion: 65
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 57
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 56
University of California-Davis: 55
Emory University: 55
Columbia University in the City of New York: 53
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor: 51
University of California-Santa Cruz: 48
University of Florida: 47
Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 46
University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus: 46
The University of Texas at Austin: 46
Note: Some of these numbers include interdisciplinary philosophy majors, such as Penn’s Philosophy, Politics & Economics major.
All of these universities except the two Arizona State universities are Carnegie classified as “more selective”.
Note [1] – Method: The NCES IPEDS databases, custom data files, EZ group U.S. only, completions by CIP number, including both first and second majors, CIP categories 16 for foreign language and literature, 23 for English, 54 for History, and 38.01 for Philosophy. Each year captures the academic year ending that spring. For example 2024 is the 2023-2024 academic year.
And yet. The University of London’s Birkbeck College offers a highly regarded and extremely affordable B.A. in analytic philosophy via its longstanding (1823) external degree program.
https://www.london.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/ba-philosophy
Except they now somehow have mostly managed to dismantle their philosophy department (so a lot of their students end up attending other UofLondon colleges).
With regard to Penn’s oddly high numbers, this note from a 2021 blog post on the same topic:
Some of the institutions on this list are not only selective but also just… large. It would be nice also to see schools ranked by percentage of degrees awarded that are philosophy degrees.
Or maybe I’m misinterpreting the list.
Yes, the older post linked above does have that analysis, and as you suggest, the numbers are very different! Lots of Catholic schools, plus Penn and Chicago.
On the basis of a pretty quick look, it seems that philosophy majors as a fraction of all Humanities majors have risen fairly steadily over the last decade, from ~4% to ~6%.
Right, the concerning trend is the decrease in humanities degrees in general more than philosophy per se, which is still doing a lot better than other humanities. The philosophy numbers being very small, what we are looking at may also be noise—I don’t think it’s just that, but I’m also not sure what the signal is.
I don’t think it’s (just) noise – noise should be order the square root of the number of philosophy majors, which is ~100. But there’s a steady decrease of ~1000 over 3 years.
Right, definitely not statistical chance in the ordinary sense if the years are treated as independent.
No, it’s not just noise. But the decrease might be just a little less dramatic than it seems. There does seem to be a nonrandom trend. I agree.
This is probably not an exclusively American trend, although counting degrees in this way is of course very ‘American’. I think the two trends in the future are that humanities (and partially also social science degrees) will be confined to elite institutions who – paradoxically (since they comparatively cost little) – can afford them and philosophy teaching elsewhere will largely take the shape of service teaching.
This seems to align with broar ideological changes in the world. People are told to care only about getting a job and the new populist politics doesn’t want voters (where there are voters left) to think much about what they – the politicians, the rich, you name it – do. STEM education fits this role better than humanities education.
I was curious about this, too. It looks like a similar trend is happening in the UK, but not as sharp a drop in terms of raw numbers (https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/sb271/figure-17). From 3.8% to 3.2% of all majors (for a broader category including philosophy) and a drop of only 7% between 2019/2020 and 2023/2024
The top 5 “winners” over this period in the UK (highest positive % of majors change at top):
02 Subjects allied to medicine
04 Psychology
11 Computing
16 Law
17 Business and management
The top 5 “losers” (highest negative % of majors change at top):
25 Design, and creative and performing arts
19 Language and area studies
10 Engineering and technology
20 Historical, philosophical and religious studies
22 Education and teaching
(These trends also hold if I look at the slope over the full set of years, and not just the difference between the endpoints.)
Engineering and technology is a surprise, although I don’t know exactly what it is they cover. The rest is just as expected.
I’d assume the same results can be seen everywhere where the originally American market-oriented neoliberal university model has spread. Scandinavia has now also imported this model and the results are evident in Denmark, for example. (In these societies, there is also the additional anti-intellectual climate that prefers education that produces useful vocations.)
It’d be interesting to see numbers for countries like Germany, France, or Italy where the humboldtian university system is still partially alive and humanities education has a certain social pedigree.
I don’t think young people care about getting a job just because they’re “told” to do so. The economic anxiety is real!
This is true, but look at what we’re comparing against. The high point in the data was just after the huge crash in 2008. I’m pretty sure there isn’t more economic anxiety now than there was during the Great Recession/Global Financial Crisis.
That said, I also don’t think more people are being told to care about a job now than they were 15 years ago. So it’s not like I’ve got a great theory of what’s going on. I suspect it’s all downstream of the crisis in the law schools over the last decade or so, but I don’t really know.
At least in the US, after the crash of 08, the economy shifted. Corporate jobs became increasingly technical. Computing and medical grew fast. The humanities came under increasing criticism as valueless.
That said, I also don’t think more people are being told to care about a job now than they were 15 years ago.
Sadly, at least in Australia that seems to not be so, with the biggest push, put in place by the vile Scott Morrison, but kept in place by the Labor government, coming in 2021, the “jobs ready graduate” program, which cut funding to the humanities and also, at the same time, made it more expensive for students to persue “arts” degrees. This has had predictable results.
https://honisoit.com/2025/08/the-long-shadow-of-the-job-ready-graduates-scheme/
Thinking of this recently: “AI, Shorten said, should be used to ascertain students’ level of prior knowledge, potentially shortening course lengths” and “smaller, modular credentials would help fill skill gaps more quickly, Shorten said.”
We’re not gonna make it.
And Shorten is supposedly one of the good ones on higher ed in Australia!
Yes, same in Europe. The UK, as usual, was first to adopt the American neoliberal (or call it what you wish, say, market-oriented) model, which then spread to Scandinavia. Perhaps less to the rest of Europe, although populists, for reasons of their own (see my remarks about political tendencies), love the model (since it kills off the annoying leftist university bases, as they see them).
In any case, despite its remarkable inefficiency (explosion of administrative bureaucracy, anyone?) and the fact that it was imported from a country with a social and political system largely foreign to European ‘welfare’ states, this idea, that education is basically a degree factory with preferably a vocational focus, has become a mantra of decision-makers and policy analysts.
It is one of the riddles of our day. Why do people buy this rubbish? (But then why do they vote Trump?) Here is a question for social scientists and historians to answers. If any will be left to answer…
In any case, despite its remarkable inefficiency (explosion of administrative bureaucracy, anyone?) and the fact that it was imported from a country with a social and political system largely foreign to European ‘welfare’ states, this idea, that education is basically a degree factory with preferably a vocational focus
For what it’s worth, when I moved from the US to Australia, I was literally shocked at home much more bureaucratic, suffering from administrative bloat, and focused on jobs as opposed to more basic scholarship the university I was at then (and, also, the one I’m at now) was than any place I’d ever worked in the US was. It’s possible that some places in Australia are not like that, though my impression from talking to others, and seeing what has happend at several places, doesn’t give me much optimism. It’s a big problem all over, but I think it’s a mistake to see it as originating from or out of the US, I think. I mention this because I think to think that is to misidentify that problem.
I didn’t mean the admin load of employees, but the top-down organization of university headed by a sort of separate administrative class (executive as well as lots of non-executive deans, and vice-deans and what not). I can’t testify to the admin load in the US since I’ve never worked there but there are many studies about the organizational aspect that I was – evidently: misleadingly – referring to.
Of course, the admin load increase is also part of my claim, for example, in the UK, where I did work. But it is not essential for my claim.
I didn’t mean the admin load of employees, but the top-down organization of university headed by a sort of separate administrative class
This is also what I meant! The situation like this was much worse – more common, and more of a problem – in the places I’ve worked in Australia, and what I’ve seen in Australia other places (see the current crisis at the ANU, and the near destruction of Sydney University of Technology, as well as the debacle at the Australia Catholic University for some examples) than anywhere I’d encountered in the US.
Maybe Australia is worse, but both places are just bad. I still think the US is the origins of this but I am not a historian of higher education.
My remarks were made more from a European (non-UK) perspective. Still, while people always cared about the financial value of higher education, universities used to be places where people went to study and learn, often changing their minds, staying for years, often overtime, they weren’t so laser focused on getting a degree that immediately lands one in a well-paid job. This certainly was standard in Europe. This suited the humanities very well.
In any case, that’s just one half of what I wrote. I think political tendencies also play against humanities education. Humanities students are typically more critical, more reflective, more, you name it. Despite all the anti-establishment rubbish of today’s populism, they don’t like dissent.
I agree with your take on today’s populism, but I do think it’s worth noting that the humanities are dominantly left, by a very wide margin, and so those on the right are understandably skeptical that the humanities today provide a genuinely open-minded and critical education. I do think philosophy faculty (even though left leaning) do at least try to present the opposing side, but if you look carefully at the syllabi of English/Literature/Sociology/Anthropology classes you do get the sense that there is a fair bit of ideological conformity. This is at least a part of the reason why many moderates and conservatives are less keen on university education than 20 years ago, even if you are right that there’s a lot of absurdities and exaggerations going on (which there are).
It seems to me that reflective and critical thinking has tended always to be on the left (just as progressive thinking is on the left). My point was not so much that this is good or bad, correct or incorrect, but that populism doesn’t like this because it means dissent.
There is an alternative: teaching philosophy in such a way that this helps the students get jobs. https://apablog.substack.com/p/commercializing-ontology-lucrative
Aren’t these data easily explained, in large part, by how many smaller and/or non-elite colleges have been eliminated the philosophy major in the past 5 years, along with other areas of the arts & humanities? Elite colleges are not under the same financial pressures, so they aren’t among those eliminating Philosophy. And they also reliably coach their students that philosophy is great training for a great many careers or grad programs, e.g., going to law school (and many of their students are already groomed to aim for such professions anyway).
I tend to agree. What interests me isn’t the reason why it’s happening, but what if means for the culture fof the discipline going forward.
I’d be surprised if that could work quantitatively. This is a decrease of approximately 1,000 philosophy majors. The schools that get reported here on DN as eliminating their philosophy major normally only have a handful of students per year, so several hundred programs would have to have eliminated their major to explain most or all of that effect. I don’t know any evidence of major-elimination on that scale; it would need to be vastly more programs than have been reported here.
I wonder, how much is the drop in students majoring in philosophy affected by recent eliminations of philosophy as a major, particularly at smaller/regional universities?
Philosophy departments ought to be doing more to design degree programs to serve actual-world students’ priorities and goals.
Most philosophy departments offer a degree program simply entitled “Philosophy.” But potential recruitment for a program with that specific title is always going to max out at a low level, for the straightforward reason that philosophy is widely perceived as being both difficult and disconnected from the real world. It’s not a fun-sounding major, it’s not an easy-sounding major, and it’s not a practical-sounding major, so most students are going to avoid it. Advertise all you want but that’s never going to change.
Phil departments should continue to offer programs entitled “Philosophy,” but they should also be looking for ways to create additional programs that more transparently serve a wider range of students. These should be programs that both *appear to be* and *actually are* (a) exciting and (b) practically relevant.
“Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” programs have in some places successfully attracted tons of students–these programs should provide a model. If your university has faculty who might be willing and able to put together a PPE program, you should be exploring that.
Further ideas for cross-disciplinary programs should also be explored. How about a degree program on something like “Reasoning, Logic, and Argument” that would be co-administered by the Math, English, and Philosophy departments?
I’m aware of a case where a Political Science department came up with a new major with an exciting-sounding title–it was something like “Terrorism and Espionage Studies”–that attracted a ton of students. Philosophers should be thinking about whether they can do stuff like that. I’m not saying the whole recruitment problem will be completely solved by rebranding but I think rebranding is probably going to be a necessary part of any solution.
Just to reinforce David Killoren’s point, PPE has definitely worked for us at Otago. We have not just re-divided the cake of students in favour of Philosophy , Politics and Economics – we have some evidence that we have actually ‘grown the cake’, enticing students to Otago who might otherwise have gone elsewhere. Putting on a successful PPE program is a lot of work, especially if you are doing team-taught interdisciplinary courses. But teaching into our dedicated PPE papers has been immensely stimulating and a real joy for me, and, I think, for my PPE-focused colleagues. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that I no longer think of myself as a philosopher with a sideline in PPE but rather a PPEer who specialises in Philosophy. One more thing; The program seems to attract keen and clever students. In Philosophy courses, Economics courses and Politics courses, PPE majors are often the best in class.
More reinforcement:
Last I heard, Maryland has ~250 PPE majors and ~50 philosophy majors.
And in the fall, philosophy will be the home to a new AI major. I won’t be surprised if it ends up on the same successful trajectory as our PPE major.
USC also introduced “Philosophy, Politics, and Law” at the time we were both there, and I believe that created a lot of growth, at basically no loss to the ordinary Philosophy major – and now it’s in the top ten list above.
I like the idea of an interdisciplinary approach to attract more Philosophy students with some practical applications to contemporary society and markets. Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence would be an exciting field of study and also prepare students for the increasing ubiquity of A.I. across all fields and disciplines. Philosophy could have the chance to lead here. I have an MA in Philosophy and work as a Sr. Product Manager on A.I. at Amazon. I use Philosophical tools and methods frequently at my job to solve hard problems.
FWIW Northeastern, which is not on this list, would easily be in the top 3 here. We have hundreds of philosophy/PPE/philosophy-double majors.