Report: Humanities Majors Disappearing

Humanities majors are an increasingly rare breed, new data shows.

According to a report that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published Tuesday, colleges and universities in the United States awarded 164,847 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities in 2025—the lowest number since 1991. That total represents a 30.4 percent decline since 2012, when humanities degrees were at the height of their popularity.

“A lot of students can’t even imagine what kind of job they could get with a humanities major outside of teaching,” Robert Townsend, director of humanities, arts and culture programs at AAA&S and author of the report, told Inside Higher Ed. “And as tuition keeps rising, it puts a premium on choosing a major [with a clear career path].”

However, the decline is slowing; the number of humanities degrees awarded dropped 12.7 percent between 2021 and 2023, but just 2.1 percent from 2023 to 2024 and 0.4 percent between 2024 and 2025.

Townsend said that recent leveling-off isn’t necessarily a sign that relief is coming for humanities departments, which are grappling with shrinking budgets and mounting public skepticism of the value of the degrees they offer.

While the number of humanities degree earners may have stabilized, “in terms of enrolled majors, the humanities have actually started to decline faster than they were before the pandemic,” he said. “And that’s the number that’s particularly troubling.”

The number of students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in the humanities as their first major declined 28 percent between 2015 and 2025, according to the AAA&S report, which based its findings on federal data about conferred humanities degrees. It supplemented those findings with the latest enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse. And that dataset suggests that attracting students to humanities disciplines will only get harder in the coming years.

The number of students enrolled in humanities and general liberal arts majors declined 17 percent between 2020 and 2025. While almost every other field also saw a decline in the number of students working toward a bachelor’s degree during the pandemic, most of the others have rebounded their enrollments at least to pre-pandemic levels. Some—including business and engineering—recorded their highest enrollments in a decade in 2025.

In addition to worries about postgrad job prospects for humanities majors, the AAA&S report highlights another source of student anxiety that may be driving declining interest in the humanities: reading.

Between 2012 and 2025, the humanities fields with the biggest drops in degrees awarded included religious studies (down 56.3 percent), area studies (down 53.2 percent), languages and literatures other than English (50.8 percent), English (43.8 percent), and history (40.6 percent). Those declines also mirror enrollment trends captured by National Student Clearinghouse data.

Traditionally, the coursework for those majors require students to read high volumes of material.

“Many students just don’t feel comfortable with long-form reading that they’d do in an English or history class,” said Townsend, who attributed those attitudes in part to the constant stream of short-form social media distractions many students are challenged to overcome. “That seems one of the bigger headwinds that the field is facing right now. If students don’t feel comfortable with text, they’re more likely to be attracted by something that doesn’t require them to do that reading.”

Meanwhile, the only humanities major on an upward enrollment trajectory is the humanistic study of the arts—including art history and film studies—which grew 18 percent over the past decade. “[Visual art] is a form of text that I think young people are much more comfortable with,” Townsend said. Preventing further declines in humanities enrollment will require restoring students’ reading ability, he added, perhaps by making reading skills part of the required introductory college courses.

The critical reading and writing skills that humanities majors develop will be especially valuable as artificial intelligence reshapes the labor market. “Humanities students learn skills like fact-checking and writing good prose that fills in a lot of the gaps that come from working with AI,” Townsend said. “The hard part is figuring out how to get people to recognize that.”

He just hopes that universities faced with immediate financial headwinds also recognize the value of maintaining humanities majors even if their popularity is on the decline right now.

“Once a program’s cut, it’s very hard to bring it back again,” Townsend said. “To the extent that I see opportunity on the horizon, I worry that the immediate trends could continue to convince faculty and administrators to take the simple path and just eliminate a program that doesn’t seem to be doing that well today.”