When the economy is growing, people are generally more willing to take risks. That’s true for college students too. In the post-war boom of the 1950s, college students were confident of their economic futures and many studied liberal arts subjects such as English, history and philosophy. In the stagflation of the 1970s, interest in these disciplines plummeted. As the economy recovered, so did the humanities.

But now we have a puzzle.

Following the Great Recession of 2008, college students turned away from the humanities, as expected. After a few years, the economy not only revived but thrived. Unemployment dropped below 5 percent and the stock market soared, posting one of the best decades in history. But this time, college students didn’t come back to English, history and other liberal arts disciplines. Instead, more and more students turned away from the humanities and opted to major in engineering, health and other career-oriented fields.

Now, the number of college students graduating with a humanities major has fallen for the eighth straight year to under 200,000 degrees in 2020, according to federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Depending upon which fields you include in the humanities bucket, the drop in graduates is somewhere between 16 percent and 29 percent since 2012. The last time colleges produced this few humanities graduates was in 2002.

If you think about academic departments competing for market share among students, it’s even bleaker. Fewer than one in 10 college graduates obtained humanities degrees in 2020, down 25 percent since 2012. That’s using a broad definition of humanities that includes “communications,” a popular major that now makes up more than a quarter of all humanities graduates. If you prefer a narrower, historical definition of humanities — restricted to English, history, philosophy and foreign languages and literature — only 4 percent of college graduates in 2020 majored in one of these disciplines. 

“These humanities fields are down to unprecedented levels,” said Rob Townsend, director of humanities, arts and culture programs at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. “It’s worrisome.”