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Indicator II-21
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Philosophy 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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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 Racial/Ethnic Groups,
the
Note on the Racial/Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Young Adult 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 “Philosophy”).
Unlike the other disciplines profiled in this section, for which basic
degree completion data are available going back to 1966, counts of philosophy degrees
are available only from 1987 onward. (Until the late 1980s, philosophy degrees were
combined by the National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], the collector
of these data, with those conferred in religious studies.)1
What data do exist for philosophy paint a picture of a discipline of modest size
but one that has experienced growth in its number of degree completions and diversification
in the type of students earning those degrees.
In 2009, 7,842, or 0.5% of the approximately 1.6 million bachelor’s
degrees conferred by U.S. institutions of higher learning, were completed in philosophy
(Figure II-21a).2
The preceding two decades saw steady increases in the number of completions, with
the exception of a plateau during the latter half of the 1990s. The 2009 count was
122% greater than that for 1987. This growth more than kept pace with the steady
increase in the total number of undergraduate degrees conferred, resulting in growth
of the share of all bachelor’s degrees that were awarded in philosophy.
Master’s degree completions in philosophy approximately doubled over the 1987–2009
time period (Figure II-21b). Growth occurred in much the same way that it
did at the bachelor’s level, with two surges separated by a period of stagnation,
one that in this case started in the early 1990s and lasted through the end of that
decade. Philosophy degrees represented 0.14%–0.20% of all master’s and first professional
degrees awarded in each year of the two-decade span examined here.
At the doctoral level, the number of degrees completed in philosophy grew incrementally
but steadily from 1987 to the turn of the century, as did the discipline’s share
of all doctorates conferred (Figure II-21c). The mid-2000s were a period
of stasis for doctorate completions, but 2009 saw a relatively substantial rise
in the number of students earning doctorates in philosophy. This jump produced an
uptick in the discipline’s share of all degree completions, which had been shrinking
since 2003.
In 2009, traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities3 received
approximately 12% of all bachelor’s degrees in philosophy (Figure II-21d).
This percentage represents an increase of three percentage points from 1995, the
first year for which data of this kind are available. The group contributing most
to this rise was Hispanics, with completions by students of this ethnicity rising
from approximately 4.5% to almost 7%. At the master’s level, traditionally underrepresented
racial/ethnic minorities earned approximately 8% of philosophy degrees awarded in
2009, up from 6.5% in 1995 (Figure II-21e). Among traditionally underrepresented
groups, Hispanics, who completed almost 5% of philosophy master’s in 2009, were
the most likely to earn this type of degree. The data also reveal a surge from 2004
to 2009 in the percentage of philosophy master’s degrees awarded to students of
unknown ethnicity or who identified themselves as being of a race or ethnicity that
is not included among the reporting categories employed by the NCES. Whether this
increase is indicative of a rise in completions among members of smaller minority
groups, an increasing unwillingness of students to report ethnicity data to their
institutions, a growing embrace by students of racial/ethnic identifications (e.g.,
biracial) that could not be accommodated by NCES’s classification scheme, or some
combination of these phenomena is not clear.
By 2006, completions of philosophy doctorates by traditionally underrepresented
minorities had reached a high point of almost 8%, a level nearly three times greater
than that observed in 1995 (Figure II-21f). After the mid-2000s, however,
these students’ share of degrees declined, and they earned fewer than 5% of philosophy
doctorates in 2009. Completing a greater share of philosophy doctorates were “temporary
residents,” students from other nations who come to study in the United States.
In 2009, approximately a fifth of all philosophy doctorates from U.S. institutions
were awarded to such students.
In 2009, approximately 30% of philosophy degree completers at all levels were women
(Figure II-21g). This represents a considerable increase in the share of
doctorate degrees earned by women, which was 19% in 1987. In contrast, the gender
distribution of bachelor’s degrees remained more or less constant over the time
period. Variability at the master’s level was greater, with a striking increase
over the late 1980s followed by a sharp decline in 1992. The mid-2000s were marked
by another decline, although in 2009 the percentage of philosophy master’s degrees
earned by women increased somewhat.
Note
1None of the graphs presented here include a data point for the academic
year 1999, because NCES did not release data for that year.
2The degree counts presented as part of the Humanities Indicators do not
include so-called double majors (second degrees). When degrees are earned concurrently
in this way, NCES collects information about both, but only one of the degrees is
included in the agency’s completion counts. Second degrees are not common (in the
2006–2007 academic year, they accounted for 5.2% of all degree completions).
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.
3 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 Racial/Ethnic Groups.
See also the
Note on the Racial/Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Young Adult Population.
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 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 NCES gave schools the option of employing a new classification
system that distinguishes among three types of doctoral 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 academic year 2010–2011, NCES eliminated the “first professional degree” category.
The agency now requires schools to use the three-category system described above
to classify all advanced degrees other than master’s degrees.
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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 Racial/Ethnic Groups
For each academic discipline or field, the share of all degrees earned by members
of traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic groups was calculated by dividing
the number of 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 that field. Not included in the count of traditionally
underrepresented minorities were (1) students of Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry,
(2) students designated by their educational institutions as being of “Other/Unknown
Ethnicity,”* and (3) 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 , the compiler of these data, does not request that institutions
of higher learning collect racial/ethnicity data for such students).
* According to the National Center for Education Statistics (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 the Racial/Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Young Adult Population (18–30 Years
Old)
Using information provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Humanities Indicators
has calculated the following estimates of the share of the total national young
adult population represented by each of the categories employed by the National
Center for Education Statistics for the purpose of reporting the percentages of
degrees awarded to students of different races/ethnicities* (estimates are for April
2010):
African American, Non-Hispanic
Asian or Pacific Islander
Hispanic
Native American or Alaska Native
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13.7%
5.6%
17.7%
0.8%
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Source: Data drawn from U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, “US-EST00INT-ALLDATA:
Intercensal Estimates of the Resident Population by Single Year of Age, Sex, Race,
and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2010” (data
file,September 2011), downloadable under the heading “Intercensal Estimates of the
Resident Population by Single Year of Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the
United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2010” at
http://www.census.gov/popest/data/intercensal/national/nat2010.html.
* The racial/ethnic categorization scheme employed for the purposes of the Integrated
Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is the basis of the Humanities
Indicators items dealing with the distribution of degree completions among racial/ethnic
groups, and the system used by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Division,
which is the source of the information provided in this note, differ in important
ways. Whereas IPEDS has traditionally used a “one-question” approach that requires
institutions to use mutually exclusive reporting categories, one of which is “Hispanic,”
the Census Bureau employs a “two-question” format that inquires separately about
race and Hispanic origin. In further contrast to IPEDS, the Census Bureau permits
respondents to select more than one race to describe themselves.
In view of these differences the Humanities Indicators could not develop size estimates
for racial/ethnic groups that provide strictly comparable points of reference for
the percentages supplied as part of Indicators II-4 and II-12. The following table
indicates which Census-defined group(s) were used as the basis for the estimates
provided in this note.
IPEDS-Defined
“African American, Non-Hispanic”
“Asian or Pacific Islander”
“Hispanic”
“Native American or Alaska Native”
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>
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Census-Defined
“Not Hispanic, Black alone”
“Not Hispanic, Asian alone” and
“Not Hispanic, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone”
“Hispanic, White alone”
“Not Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native alone”
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Beginning with the data collection for academic year 2011–2012, IPEDS required that
institutions report information on degree completers’ race and ethnicity in a way
similar to the Census Bureau and most other data collections sponsored by federal
government agencies. See
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/news_room/ana_Changes_to_10_25_2007_169.asp
for details.
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