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Indicator II-10
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Advanced Degrees in the Humanities
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NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data from this page:
"American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".
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Updated (3/25/2011) with data for academic years 2007–2008 and 2008–2009.
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See the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
and the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees.
As was the case at the bachelor’s degree level (see Indicator
II-1, Undergraduate
Degrees in the Humanities), the last four decades have seen dramatic growth,
marked decline, and then recovery of the academic humanities with respect to the
completion of advanced degrees. As Figures II-10a and II-10b illustrate,
while the period from the late 1960s to the early 1970s was one of increasing numbers
of master’s and doctoral degree completions in the humanities, this trend reversed
as the 1970s progressed, so that by the mid-1980s the humanities were awarding approximately
50% as many advanced degrees. By the late 1980s, however, degree completions were
again on the rise. By 1994 the number of master’s degrees had reached 69% of its
1971 high. Then, after a decline in completions in the late 1990s, master’s degree
completions picked up again in 2002 and increased almost every year through 2009.
In 2009, the number of master’s completions was approximately 70% of the 1971 zenith.
Doctorate completions reached the height of their recovery from the 1980s slump
in 2000, when the number reached 84% of its 1973 peak. Doctorate completions then
declined through 2005. But completions picked up in subsequent years, with the 2009
total of 3,984 constituting 82% of 1973’s historic high (when standardized National
Science Foundation disciplinary categories are used to count humanities degrees—when
the National Center for Education Statistics’ Classification of Instructional Programs
is used, the counts for both master’s and doctoral degrees are considerably higher;
for an explanation of the differences between the two classification systems, see
the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators).
Graduate humanities programs, like their undergraduate counterparts, experienced
a substantial loss of share over the 1970s and 1980s—that is, a reduction in the
number of all advanced degrees awarded in the humanities relative to the number
awarded in other fields. While the absolute numbers of advanced degrees conferred
in the humanities rose well above the mid-1980s low, the even more substantial growth
in the numbers of advanced degrees awarded in other fields served to keep the humanities’
share of all master’s and doctoral degrees well below the record levels observed
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between the mid-1980s and 2009 the humanities’
share of all master’s and first professional degrees ranged from 23% to 37% of the
1967 peak level. While the 1990s saw fairly steady increases in the humanities’
share of all doctoral degrees, the proportion shrank again during the first half
of the next decade. Even with a subsequent uptick in completions, in 2009 the humanities’
share was less than half of its 1973 high.
Over the last two decades, humanities master’s degrees have constituted less than
5% of all degrees awarded at the master’s and first professional degree level (Figure
II-10c; see the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees). At the doctoral
level, the percentage of degrees awarded in the humanities has been somewhat greater,
ranging from 7% to 11% of all degrees over this time period (Figure II-10d).
In contrast, science degrees represented 43%–49% of all doctorates during the same
period.
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES)
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Glossary, master’s degrees are “awards that require
the successful completion of a program of study of at least the full-time equivalent
of 1 academic year, but not more than 2 academic years of work beyond the bachelor’s
degree.”
The NCES, which collects the degree completion data presented as part of the Humanities
Indicators, defines first professional degrees as those awards that require completion
of a program that meets all the following criteria: (1) completion of the academic
requirements to begin practice in a profession; (2) at least two years of college
work prior to entering the program; and (3) a total of at least six academic years
of college work to complete the degree program, including prior required college
work plus the length of the professional program itself. According to NCES, the
following ten fields award first professional degrees:
Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.)
Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.)
Law (LL.B., or J.D.)
Medicine (M.D.)
Optometry (O.D.)
Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.)
Pharmacy (Pharm.D.)
Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.)
Theology (M.Div., M.H.L., B.D., or Ordination)
Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M. or V.M.D.)
Although some fields (e.g., library science, hospital administration, and social
work) require specialized degrees for employment at the professional level, NCES
does not count degrees in these fields as first professional degrees; instead, they
are treated as master’s degrees.
Whereas all doctorates had previously been included in a single category, for academic
years 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 NCES gave schools the option of employing a new classification
system that distinguishes between three types of doctorate degrees:
Research/Scholarship—A Ph.D. or other doctoral degree that requires advanced
work beyond the master’s level, including the preparation and defense of a dissertation
based on original research, or the planning and execution of an original project
demonstrating scholarly achievement;
Professional Practice—A doctoral degree conferred upon completion of a program
providing the knowledge and skills for the recognition, credentialing, or licensing
required for professional practice; or
Other—A doctoral degree that does not meet the definition of the research/scholarship
or professional practice doctorate.
Schools could classify certain degrees that had historically been treated as first
professional degrees as either “Professional Practice” doctoral degrees (as in the
case of medical degrees, for example) or master’s degrees (as in the case of advanced,
nondoctoral degrees in theology).
To ensure comparability with previous years, for 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 the Humanities
Indicators counted as doctorates all of those degrees classified by postsecondary
institutions as “Doctorate Degree,” “Doctorate Degree—Research/Scholarship,” or
“Doctorate Degree—Other.” The HI treated as “master’s and professional degrees”
those degrees classified by schools as “Doctorate Degree—Professional Practice,”
“First Professional Degree,” or “Master’s Degree.”
For more information about NCES’s new system for classifying advanced and other
degrees, which is required for the purposes of IPEDS reporting for academic year
2009–2010 and eliminates the first professional degree category, please see
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/submit_data/changes0809.asp.
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Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
The data that form the basis of these indicators are drawn from the U.S. Department
of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics’s (NCES) Higher Education
General Information System (HEGIS) and its successor, the Integrated Postsecondary
Educational Data System (IPEDS), through which institutions of higher learning report
on the numbers and characteristics of students completing degree programs (as well
as a variety of other topics; for more on this major data collection program, see
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/). The HEGIS/IPEDS
degree-completion data going back to 1966 have been made easily accessible to decision-makers,
researchers, and the general public by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via
its online data analysis tool
WebCASPAR. The NSF has traditionally
used the NCES data to tabulate science and engineering degree awards as part of
its
Science and Engineering Indicators Program, which since 1973 has issued a biennial report
designed to provide public and private policymakers with a broad base of quantitative
information about the U.S. science, engineering, and technology enterprise.
The NSF has developed a set of standardized disciplinary categories that can be
used across the various data sources it relies upon to construct its indicators.
Because the NSF focuses on trends in science and engineering education, its disciplinary
classification is most detailed in these areas. The utility of the NSF system for
the purposes of the Humanities Indicators (HI) is limited. For example, the NSF
scheme does not distinguish between the academic study of the arts, considered by
the HI to be part of the humanities, and art performance. This makes it impossible
for the HI to include in its tally those degrees conferred in the areas of musicology,
art history, film studies, and drama history/criticism. Moreover, while the HI considers
such disciplines as archeology, women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, and Holocaust
studies to be part of the humanities field, NSF categorizes them as social sciences.
Additionally, NSF places interdisciplinary degrees in areas such as general humanities
and liberal studies in a broad “Other” category that includes degrees for many disciplines
that are clearly not within the purview of the humanities as conceptualized by the
HI. Consequently, such interdisciplinary degrees, along with those mentioned above,
cannot be captured in humanities degree counts from 1966 to 1986.
For 1987 and later years (1995 and later for data on the race/ethnicity of degree
recipients), however, NSF also categorizes earned degrees according to the more
detailed Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), which permits a more precise
count of humanities degrees; that is, a count that includes degrees in all those
programs that are part of academic disciplines included within the scope of the
humanities for the purposes of the HI. (For an inventory of the disciplines and
activities treated as part of the humanities by the HI, see the Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities”
for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.) The CIP was first developed
by NCES in 1980 as a way to account for the tremendous variety of degree programs
offered by American institutions of higher learning and has been revised three times
since its introduction, most recently in 2009 (this version is referred to as “CIP
2010”). The CIP has also been adopted by Statistics Canada as its standard disciplinary
classification system.
For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators the CIP has several advantages over
the NSF classification system. For example, because the NSF system groups degrees
in the nonsectarian study of religion with those awarded in programs designed to
prepare students for religious vocations and since the latter type of degree is
much more common, the HI cannot include what the NSF considers to be degrees in
religion in the humanities degree counts for years prior to 1987. With CIP-coded
data, however, academic disciplines such as comparative religion can be separated
from vocational programs such as theology and thus can be included in the humanities
degree tally. Additionally, when using CIP-coded data, the HI can include degrees
in all the excluded disciplines mentioned above, from art history to Holocaust studies,
in its counts of humanities degrees from 1987 onward. For an inventory of the NSF
and CIP disciplinary categories included by the HI under the broad field headings
(“humanities,” “natural sciences,” etc.) used throughout Part II of the HI, see
the
NSF and CIP Discipline Code Catalog. This catalog also indicates which degree
programs are included by the HI within specific humanities disciplines (e.g., for
the purposes of the HI, English degrees include those classified under CIP as being
in “English Language and Literature,” “American Literature,” and “Creative Writing,”
among others).
In constructing indicators that use IPEDS data to track historical trends
in the academic humanities, the HI has employed completion data that were classified
using both the NSF and CIP systems. In these cases, either a note accompanying the
chart or a break in the trend line indicates where estimates based on the NSF classification
system leave off and those based on CIP begin. For those indicators reporting degree
data gathered in 1987 or more recently (1995 or more recently for the charts and
tables describing the proportions of all degrees received by members of racial/ethnic
minority groups), CIP-coded data are used.
In the case of several of the degree-related indicators, the humanities are compared
to certain other fields such as the sciences and engineering. The nature of these
fields is specified in the
Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.
These broad fields do not encompass all postsecondary programs. Therefore, where
fields are being compared in terms of their respective shares of all degrees, the
percentages will not add up to 100%. Also, none of the graphs showing change over
time includes a data point for the academic year 1999, because the NCES did not
release data for that year.
The degree counts presented as part of the HI do not include so-called double major
degrees. When degrees are earned concurrently in this way, only the first degree
is counted. Although second degrees are not common (in the 2006–2007 academic year,
they accounted for 5.2% of all degree completions), anecdotal evidence suggests
that a preponderance of such degrees are in the humanities. Second-degree data first
became available via WebCASPAR in November 2010. If resources permit, an analysis
of these data will be conducted in 2011.
Data on the number of students completing minors are not collected as part of IPEDS,
but such information was compiled for selected humanities disciplines as part of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences-sponsored Humanities Departmental Survey
(HDS; see the HDS final report, page 8, Table 12).
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