The National Center for Education Statistics has released their data on bachelor's degree completions in the U.S. through the 2019-2020 academic year, and it's mostly good news for the philosophy major.
Back in 2017, I noticed that the number of students completing philosophy degrees in the U.S. had plummeted sharply between 2010 and 2016, from 9297 in 2009-2010 to 7507 in 2015-2016, a decline of 19% in just six years. The other large humanities majors (history, English, and foreign languages and literatures) saw similar declines in the period.
A couple of years ago, the trend had started to modestly reverse itself -- and furthermore the philosophy major appeared to be attracting a higher percentage of women and non-White students than previously. The newest data show those trends continuing.
Methodology: The numbers below are all from the NCES IPEDS database, U.S. only, using CIP classification 38.01 for philosophy majors, including both first and second majors, using the NCES gender and race/ethnicity categories. Each year ends at spring term (thus "2010" refers to the 2009-2010 academic year).
Trend since 2010, total number of philosophy bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S.:
2010: 9274 2011: 9298 2012: 9369 2013: 9427 2014: 8823 2015: 8186 2016: 7491 2017: 7575 2018: 7669 2019: 8075 2020: 8195
As you can see, numbers are up about 9% since their nadir in 2016, though still well below their peak in 2011. (The numbers are slightly different from those in my earlier post, presumably to small post-hoc adjustments in the IPEDS dataset.)
One consequence of the decline, I suspect, was on the job market for philosophy professors, which has been weak since the early 2010s. This has been hard especially on newly graduated PhD students in the field. With the major declining so sharply in the period, it's understandable that administrators wouldn't prioritize the hiring of new philosophy professors. If numbers continue to rise, the job market might correspondingly recover.
Total degrees awarded across all majors has also continued to rise, and thus in percentage terms, philosophy remains well below its peak of almost 0.5% in the late 2000s and early 2010s -- only 0.31% of students, a tiny percentage. Philosophy won't be overtaking psychology or biology in popularity any time soon. Philosophy majors, you are special!
Back in 2017, I also noticed that, going back to the 1980s, the percentage of philosophy majors who were women had remained entirely within the narrow band of 30-34%, despite an increase in women in the undergraduate population overall. However, in the most recent four years, this percentage rose to 39.4%. [ETA 1:48 p.m.: Since 2001, the overall percentage of women among bachelor's recipients across all majors has stayed fairly constant at around 57%.] That might not seem like a big change, but given the consistency of the earlier numbers, it's actually quite remarkable to me. Here's a zoomed-in graph to give you a sense of it:
The philosophy major is also increasingly racially or ethnically diverse. The percentage of non-Hispanic White students has been falling steadily since NCES began collecting data in 1995, from 81% then to 58% now. Overall, across all majors, 61% percent of bachelor's degree recipients are non-Hispanic White, so the philosophy major is actually now slightly less non-Hispanic White than average. (All the race/ethnicity figures below exclude "nonresident aliens" and "race/ethnicity unknown".)
The particular patterns differ by race/ethnic group.
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders constitute a tiny percentage: about 0.2% of degree recipients both in philosophy and overall since the category was introduced in 2011.
American Indian or Alaskan Native is also a tiny percentage, but unfortunately that percentage has been steadily declining since the mid-2000s, and the group is especially underrepresented in philosophy. According to the U.S. Census, about 0.9% of the U.S. population in that age group identifies as non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaskan Native.
The following chart displays trends for the other four racial categories used by the NCES. In 2011, "two or more races" was introduced as a category. Also before 2011, the Asian category included "Pacific Islander".
As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Hispanic students graduating with philosophy degrees has surged, from 4.3% in 1995 to 14.4% in 2020. This is approximately representative of a similar surge among Hispanic students across all majors, from 4.8% in 1995 to 15.7% in 2020. Multiracial students have also surged, though it's unclear how much of that surge has to do with changing methodology versus the composition of the student population.
The percentage of philosophy majors identifying as Asian or Black has also increased during the period, but only slowly: From 5.4% and 3.3% respectively in 1995 to 6.8% and 5.6% in 2020. For comparison, across all majors, the numbers rose from 5.4% to 8.1% Asian and 7.6% to 10.2% Black. So, in 2020, Asian and especially Black students are disproportionately underrepresented in the philosophy major. Interestingly, some data from the Higher Education Research Institute suggests that there has been a very recent surge of interest in the philosophy major among Black students just entering college. We'll see if that plays out among Bachelor's degree recipients in a few years.
4 comments:
On the effects on the job market. 1) Is it possible that causation is in the other direction -- fewer philosophy professors, so fewer courses taught, so fewer people becoming majors? I think that would be a crazy hypothesis if we were talking about English and History, but not so crazy for Philosophy. 2) I think the answer to this is no, but do we have any national data on # of credits taken and how that has changed over time? For most disciplines most of the credits taught are not to majors -- indeed in my dept the # taken by majors and students who will become majors is a v. low percentage of credits taught. I do know that within our institution # of credits taught fell precipitously after 2008 in most of the Humanities, but not in Philosophy and that, much more than # of majors, is what influenced Deans' decisions about hiring priorities. (The decline in # of credits taught for the Humanities coincided with the financial crisis, but also with more generous rules around transferring in AP credits, for which History and English took a big hit).
Finally. Do we have data on changes in socioeconomic demographics of majors? (Again, I'd bet the answer is no, but what about first gen, which is a rough proxy for something? My institution has that data internally).
Tricky questions! On 1: The number of professors changes slowly (esp since philosophy perhaps surprisingly appears to have a lower than typical rate of contingent faculty), so change in number of faculty seems unlikely to explain such a sharp decline in the early 2010s. On 2: Those data are a bit harder to get. The big sources tend to aggregate philosophy with other majors (esp religion) when presenting those data. But I do agree that number of filled seats is probably more important to funding and lots of our seats come from nonmajors. So that would be interesting to look at. On SES: Again, the big data sources tend to aggregate philosophy with other majors when presenting those data. A few years back though I was able to pull out SES data for philosophy students and they weren’t especially high SES. If I recall a bit higher than average but not as much as I would have guessed.
Do philosophy majors have a fundamental cause/disposition in 'Agricultural philosophy'...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_philosophy#:~:text=Agricultural%20philosophy%20(or%20philosophy%20of,foundation%20for%20decisions%20regarding%20agriculture.
The West dose not seem to graduate philosophers towards self knowledge anymore...
...but to the 'analyses' of knowledge...
Our environment, land air water, should be promoted, as the almost only career, for humanity on this planet, for at least the next thousand years...thanks for the great reads...
Does making philosophy in to an income generating activity affect how philosophy is practiced? What conflicts, if any, exist between the business agendas and the thinking/writing experience? A topic for another day perhaps?
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