I'm preparing for an Eastern APA session on the "State of Philosophy" next Thursday, and I thought I'd share some data on philosophy major bachelor's degree completions from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database, which compiles data on virtually all students graduating from accredited colleges and universities in the U.S., as reported by administrators.
I examined all data from the 2000-2001 academic year (the first year in which they started recording data on second majors) through 2021-2022 (the most recent available year).
Total Numbers of Philosophy Majors: The Decline Has Stopped
First, the sharp decline in philosophy majors since 2013 has stopped:
2001: 58362002: 65292003: 70232004: 77072005: 82832006: 85322007: 85412008: 87782009: 89962010: 92682011: 92922012: 93622013: 94272014: 88202015: 81842016: 74892017: 75722018: 76672019: 80742020: 82092021: 83282022: 7958
In general, the humanities have declined sharply since 2010, and history, English, and foreign languages and literature continue to decline. This graph shows the trend:
[click image to enlarge and clarify]
The decline in the English major is particularly striking, from 4.5% of bachelor's degrees awarded in 2000-2001 to 1.8% in 2021-2022. Philosophy peaked at 0.60% in 2005-2006 and has held steady at 0.39%-0.40% since 2015-2016.
Philosophy Relies on Double Majors
[Expanded and edited for clarity, Jan 15] Breaking the data down by first major vs second major, we can see that over time an increasing proportion of students have philosophy as their second major. In some schools, the distinction between "first major" and "second major" is meaningful, with the first indicating the primary major. In other schools the distinction is not meaningful. In the 2021-2022 academic year, 24% of students who took a bachelor's degree in philosophy had it listed as their second major.
[click image to enlarge and clarify]
From these numbers we can estimate that philosophy students are at least moderately likely to be double majors. While it's impossible to know what percentage of students who took philosophy as their first major also carried a second major, a ballpark estimate might assume that about half of students with philosophy plus one other major list philosophy first rather than second. If so, then approximately half of all philosophy majors (48%) are double majors. Overall, across all majors, only 5% of students double majored.
The ease of double majoring is likely to influence the number of students who choose philosophy as a major.
Gender Disparity Is Decreasing
NCES classifies all students as men or women, with no nonbinary category and no unclassified students. Since the beginning of the available data in the 1980s through the mid-2010s, the percentage of women among philosophy bachelor's recipients hovered steadily between 30% and 34%, not changing even as the total percentage of women increased from 51% to 57%. However, the last several years have seen a clear decrease in gender disparity, with women now earning 41% of philosophy degrees.
[click image to enlarge and clarify]
Black Students Remain Underrepresented in Philosophy Compared to Undergraduates Overall, and Other Race/Ethnicity Data
NCES uses the following race/ethnicity categories: U.S. nonresident, race/ethnicity unknown, Hispanic or Latino (any race), and among U.S. residents who are not Hispanic or Latino: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, White, and two or more races. Before 2007-2008, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander was included with Asian, but inconsistently until 2010-2011. The two-or-more races option was also introduced in the 2007-2008 academic year, again with inconsistent reporting for several years.
I've charted these categories below. As you can see, for most categories, the percentages are similar for philosophy and for graduates overall, except that non-Hispanic White is slightly higher for philosophy and non-Hispanic Black significantly lower. In 2021-2022, non-Hispanic Black people were 14% of the U.S. population age 18-24, 10% of bachelor's degree recipients, and 6% of philosophy bachelor's recipients.
[as usual, click the figures to expand and clarify]
I interpret the sharp increase in multi-racial students as reflecting reporting issues and an increasing willingness of students to identify as multi-racial.
It's also worth noting that although philosophy majors are approximately as likely to be Hispanic/Latino as graduates overall, Hispanic/Latino students are underrepresented among bachelor's degree recipients relative to the U.S. population age 18-24 (17% vs 23%). Non-Hispanic American Indian / Alaska Native students are also underrepresented among overall graduates (0.46% vs. 0.84% of the population age 18-24), and maybe particularly so in philosophy (0.37% vs 0.46% in the most recent year).
2 comments:
Thanks for this analysis, Eric!
Given the session topic, it may be worth noting that reliance on second majors is a problem for philosophy departments at universities facing cuts. At WVU (and other institutions that used (or are currently using) the same consultant-dictated model), only two metrics were taken seriously: student credit hours (i.e., butts in seats across all courses) and primary majors. (The stated rationale is that primary majors are the ones that draw students to the university; on the basis of this (unsubstantiated) rationale, secondary majors are entirely discounted, despite the fact that there is no curricular difference between primary and secondary majors. Double-majoring students had no idea the distinction existed.) Secondary majors contribute a bit to student credit hours, of course, but while student credit hours might save a few jobs, they won't prevent a major from being eliminated. Our languages department, which had a bunch of secondary majors but almost no primary majors (and thus almost no majors who counted), is gone.
Even at schools where the primary/secondary distinction is not currently meaningful, I worry that it will be made meaningful in short order with the "help" of consultants.
Hi Eric
Your data is aggregate data- perhaps if there are schools that buck this downward trend, that success can be replicated
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