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Indicator II-19
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History Degree Completions
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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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Figures depicting history degree counts and the discipline’s share of all degrees have been updated with data for academic years 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 (4/6/2011).
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See the Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators,
the
Note on the Calculation of Shares of Degrees Awarded to Members of Traditionally Underrepresented Ethnic Groups,
the
Note on Racial/Ethnic Composition of Total U.S. Population, the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees,
and the
NSF and CIP Discipline Code Catalog (for an inventory of the specific degree
programs included by the Humanities Indicators under the heading of “History”).
With approximately 45,000 bachelor’s degrees awarded, 1971
was a banner year for the nation’s undergraduate history programs (Figure II-19a),1 the
high point of a strong trend of increased enrollments during the latter half of
the 1960s. But in 1972, the number of history degrees began to drop, and the ensuing
decline, which lasted well into the 1980s, was as precipitous as the earlier rise
had been. In 1985, the nadir for history as measured by degree completions, the
nation’s history departments awarded only 16,142 bachelor’s degrees. This number
subsequently increased—markedly so in the early 1990s and again beginning in 2002—bringing
the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2009 to 77% of the early-1970s high.
With approximately 45,000 bachelor’s degrees awarded, 1971
was a banner year for the nation’s undergraduate history programs (Figure II-19a), 1 the
high point of a strong trend of increased enrollments during the latter half of
the 1960s. But in 1972, the number of history degrees began to drop, and the ensuing
decline, which lasted well into the 1980s, was as precipitous as the earlier rise
had been. In 1985, the nadir for history as measured by degree completions, the
nation’s history departments awarded only 16,142 bachelor’s degrees. This number
subsequently increased—markedly so in the early 1990s and again beginning in 2002—bringing
the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2009 to 77% of the early-1970s high.
History’s share of all undergraduate degrees experienced a similarly sharp decline
through the mid-1980s and has remained well below the record levels reached in the
late 1960s. Although history awarded 5.7% of all bachelor’s degrees in 1967, this
share had decreased to 1.6% by 1985. Thereafter, despite growth in the number of
bachelor’s completions in history, steady increases in the total number of bachelor’s
degree completions kept history’s share in the vicinity of 2% of all bachelor’s
degrees from 1986 to 2009.
Degree completions at the master’s and doctorate levels followed a similar trajectory
up through the mid-1980s (Figures II-19b and II-19c). At the master’s level, the
first wave of recovery from the 1980s slump crested at roughly the same time and
was similar in magnitude to that observed at the undergraduate level. But the second
wave did not bring master’s completions as close to their historic high. At the
crest of this wave, in 2009, the discipline’s master’s degree completions reached
only 67% of their 1969 peak.
At the doctoral level, the initial recovery reached its zenith later but was more
complete, bringing the number of Ph.D. completions to 87% of its peak value in 2000.
The following decade brought fairly consistent declines followed by marked upticks
in completions in 2008 and 2009, with the number of degrees awarded in this latter
year constituting 81% of the 1973 level.
As with bachelor’s degrees, history’s share of all master’s and doctoral degrees
during the 1985–2009 period remained near the dramatically reduced levels of the
1980s. In 2009, history degrees represented 0.5% of all master’s and first professional
degrees, down from 2.4% in 1967. At its height in 1970, history’s share of all Ph.D.’s
was 3.5%. In 2009 the discipline’s share was 1.5%.
Data describing the distribution of history degrees by ethnicity are available only
as far back as 1995. (For earlier years, such data can be disaggregated only by
broad disciplinary grouping; history is included among the social sciences.) At
the bachelor’s level, although the share of history degrees awarded to members of
traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic groups increased slightly over the
latter half of the 1990s, it subsequently leveled off and then declined, for a net
increase of only two percentage points from 1995 to 2007 (Figure II-19d). Growth
in the share of history degrees awarded to such students at the master’s and doctoral
degree levels was somewhat greater, with the percentage increasing by three and
six points (Figures II-19e and II-19f). In 2007, approximately one-tenth of all
master’s degrees and doctoral degrees were awarded to students from underrepresented
racial/ethnic groups. The same was true of doctoral degrees. (For an explanation
of how these percentages were calculated, see the Note on the Calculation of Shares of Degrees Awarded to Members of Traditionally Underrepresented Ethnic Groups. For information
regarding the racial/ethnic composition of the total U.S. population, see
Note on Racial/Ethnic Composition of Total U.S. Population.)
Between 1966 and 2007, the percentage of history degrees earned by women increased
at all levels, although most dramatically so in the case of Ph.D.’s. At that level,
women’s share grew from 12% to 40%, bringing their representation to a level on
par with that of bachelor’s recipients (Figure II-19g). The gender distribution
of degrees came closest to being equal at the master’s level. In 2007, 48% of history
master’s degrees were awarded to women.
Note
1 The degree counts presented as part of the Humanities Indicators 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 gathered as part of the
data collection program from which these degree completion counts are drawn,
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).
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 long-term 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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Note on the Calculation of Shares of Degrees Awarded to Members of Traditionally
Underrepresented Ethnic Groups
The shares of all degrees earned by members of traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic
groups were calculated by dividing the number of humanities degrees completed by
students identified by their institutions as African American (non-Hispanic), Hispanic,
or American Indian/Alaska Native by the total number of degree completions in the
humanities. Not included in the count of traditionally underrepresented
minorities were (1) students designated by their educational institutions as being
of “Other/Unknown Ethncity”* and (2) international students—that is, temporary
residents who were in the United States for the express purpose of attending school
and who were likely to return to their home countries upon graduation (significant
numbers of these individuals may be of African or Hispanic background, but the National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the compiler of these data, does not request
that institutions of higher learning collect racial/ethnicity data for such students).
* According to the NCES, the compiler of these data, a student is assigned to this
category only if he or she does not select a racial/ethnic designation and his or
her educational institution finds it impossible to place the student in one of the
NCES-defined racial/ethnic categories during established enrollment procedures or
in any post-enrollment identification or verification process. Over time the percentage
of students categorized as “Other/Unknown” has grown, thereby reducing the ability
of postsecondary institutions, policymakers, and the general public to reliably
track the racial/ethnic diversity of degree recipients.
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Note on Racial/Ethnic Composition of Total U.S. Population
Using information provided by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division,* the
Humanities Indicators has calculated the following estimates of the share of the
total national population represented by each of the categories employed by the
National Center for Education Statistics for the purpose of reporting the percentage
of degrees awarded to students of different races/ethnicities (estimates are for
July, 2008):
African American, Non-Hispanic
Asian or Pacific Islander
Hispanic
Native American or Alaska Native
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12.4%
4.6%
14.8%
0.8%
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* Data drawn from U.S. Census Bureau, “Table 3: Annual Estimates of the Resident
Population by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2000
to July 1, 2008 (NC-EST2008-03),” released May 14, 2009,
http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/NC-EST2008-srh.html.
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