20 years ago, nearly 15% of the undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States were in the humanities. As of 2025, that percentage is down to 8.1%. These figures are from a recent report by Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Here are the numbers: In 2025, the nation’s colleges and universities awarded 164,847 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities—the smallest number of degrees awarded since 1991 and 30.4% below the recent high-water mark in 2012… That decline includes a particularly sharp drop of 12.7% from 2021 to 2023, followed by a more modest drop of 2.1% from 2023 to 2024, and a further decline of just 0.4% from 2024 to 2025—the smallest year-on-year decline since 2012. And most disciplines within the humanities have shown a decline: Within the humanities, almost every discipline awarded fewer degrees in 2025 than 13 years earlier… The largest proportional drops in degrees awarded occurred in religious studies (down 56.3%), area studies (53.2%), languages and literatures other than English (50.8%), English (43.8%), history (40.6%), classical studies (39.4%), and comparative literature (31%). Only three disciplines showed increases—folklore (where the small number of degrees awarded makes the numbers highly volatile), the study of the arts (with a modest 2.1% increase since 2012), and interdisciplinary humanities disciplines (where the increase was largely due to the addition of a substantial number of new programs, such as digital humanities, in the Department of Education’s 2020 revision of its Classification of Instructional Programs). How’s philosophy doing? Well, after a slight decrease last year, there has been a slight increase: In 2024, 5,763 students earned philosophy BAs. In 2025, that number was 5,918. The full report from Humanities Indicators is here.

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