20 years ago, nearly 15% of the undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States were in the humanities.
As of 2025, that percentage is down to 8.1%.
These figures are from a recent report by Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Here are the numbers:
In 2025, the nation’s colleges and universities awarded 164,847 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities—the smallest number of degrees awarded since 1991 and 30.4% below the recent high-water mark in 2012… That decline includes a particularly sharp drop of 12.7% from 2021 to 2023, followed by a more modest drop of 2.1% from 2023 to 2024, and a further decline of just 0.4% from 2024 to 2025—the smallest year-on-year decline since 2012.
And most disciplines within the humanities have shown a decline:
Within the humanities, almost every discipline awarded fewer degrees in 2025 than 13 years earlier… The largest proportional drops in degrees awarded occurred in religious studies (down 56.3%), area studies (53.2%), languages and literatures other than English (50.8%), English (43.8%), history (40.6%), classical studies (39.4%), and comparative literature (31%). Only three disciplines showed increases—folklore (where the small number of degrees awarded makes the numbers highly volatile), the study of the arts (with a modest 2.1% increase since 2012), and interdisciplinary humanities disciplines (where the increase was largely due to the addition of a substantial number of new programs, such as digital humanities, in the Department of Education’s 2020 revision of its Classification of Instructional Programs).
How’s philosophy doing? Well, after a slight decrease last year, there has been a slight increase:
In 2024, 5,763 students earned philosophy BAs. In 2025, that number was 5,918.
The full report from Humanities Indicators is here.
I wonder how much of this is driven by shifts in double-majoring? Many of our philosophy majors have been double-majors, often picking one “practical” major to keep parents happy, along with Philosophy to satisfy students’ own interests and/or to foster an appearance of thoughtfulness and well-roundedness. At least at my university, this drop in humanities majors has coincided with a strong drive to streamline students’ graduating in 4 years, which has had the effect of relaxing gen-ed requirements that had been gateway courses into humanities, and reducing the number of double-majors we have, which disproportionately hurts fields, like Philosophy and likely other humanities, that are often chosen as a “second” major.
Not much a surprise. If universities are considered degree factories with the sole purpose of getting you a job, I also wouldn’t study philosophy, certainly not as a single major. Not because with a philosophy degree one couldn’t do most jobs on offer, but because of the prejudice in society and hence among my future employers. Frankly, the future of philosophy and pretty much any humanities degree lies in returning to a different model of university (Humboldtian, say). Since this won’t happen while capitalism dominates our economics, there is little hope for humanities degrees.