Burying history: does the decline in history majors suggest that the past is prologue for the humanities? From the article:

Between 2016 and 2017, the number of history majors fell by over 1,500. Even as university enrollments have grown, history has seen its raw numbers erode heavily. The drops have been especially heavy since 2011–12, the first years for which students who saw the financial crisis in action could easily change their majors; of all the fields I’ve looked at…, history has fallen more than any other in the last six years….

This represents a long-term low for the history major. National data on the numbers of degrees awarded in different disciplines generally start around 1966, but years ago, while working for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, I collected data on a number of humanities majors going back to the 1950s. While the 66 percent drop in history’s share from 1969 to 1985 remains the most bruising period in the discipline’s history, that drop followed a period of rapid expansion in share connected to the boom in higher education of the 1960s. The drop in the last decade has put us below the discipline’s previous low point in the 1980s….

While these declines have taken place at institutions of every type, the declines have been particularly strong in percentages at schools where history has been a popular major…. In the broadest terms, as the chart below shows, history has decreased the most at research universities (RI and RII in the old Carnegie classification). Both private and public universities have seen drops, but the declines have been especially steep at private, non-for-profit institutions….

That the declines have continued among students who entered college well into the economic recovery shows that the shifts are not just a temporary response to a missing job market; instead, there seems to have been a longer-term rethinking of what majors can do for students. The fields that have fallen almost as much as history since 2008 tend to share methodologies or subject areas with our discipline; they include most of the other humanities and many of the more qualitatively inclined social sciences, including political science, anthropology, and sociology….

For more general data on humanities majors, see the post here.