The Quiet Crisis: Humanities Bachelor’s Degrees Hit Record Lows in 2025 as Students Flock to STEM and Business

By Higher Ed Dive Staff
Published September 8, 2026

Main Facts

American higher education is undergoing a historic and profound structural shift. According to a sweeping new analysis released Tuesday by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities dropped to its lowest level in decades during the 2025 academic year. U.S. colleges and universities conferred just 164,847 undergraduate humanities degrees in 2025—a figure not seen since 1991.

This latest nadir represents a nearly one-third (33%) collapse from the most recent peak achieved in 2012. For core traditional disciplines such as history, English, and philosophy, the long-term historical view is even starker. Data stretching back to 1949 indicates that these foundational fields hit their lowest point on record, accounting for a meager 3.4% of all degrees conferred in 2025. This stands in staggering contrast to 1967, when those same disciplines made up 17.2% of all undergraduate degrees awarded nationwide.

The bleeding is not isolated to a single discipline; nearly every branch of the humanities has experienced sustained losses over the past decade and a half. Religious studies suffered the most severe contraction, plummeting 56.3% over a 13-year period. World languages and literature followed closely with a 50.8% reduction, while English degrees fell by 43.8% and history degrees dropped by 40.6%.

Compounding the problem is a parallel slump in active student enrollment. Analysis of National Student Clearinghouse data reveals that fewer than 400,000 college students (398,589) were enrolled as humanities majors in the fall of 2025. By comparison, business remains the undisputed titan of American higher education, commanding roughly 1.6 million majors, while engineering programs account for approximately 1.2 million.

Chronology of a Collapse: How the Humanities Lost Ground

To understand how the modern humanities crisis unfolded, analysts look back at decades of shifting cultural, economic, and institutional priorities.

The Post-War Boom (1940s–1960s)

In the decades immediately following World War II, fueled in part by the G.I. Bill and a booming post-war economy, American higher education experienced an unprecedented expansion. The humanities occupied a central, prestigious pillar of the undergraduate experience. A liberal arts education was viewed not merely as vocational training, but as an essential rite of passage for developing critical thinking, civic responsibility, and cultural literacy. In 1967, history, English, and philosophy alone captured more than 17% of all degrees conferred.

The Turn Toward Pragmatism (1980s–2000s)

As the global economy shifted and the cost of higher education began its steady, aggressive climb, the cultural calculus surrounding college began to change. Students and parents increasingly evaluated higher education through the lens of a direct return on investment (ROI). While the humanities enjoyed occasional plateaus and minor revivals, fields associated with corporate advancement, technology, and applied sciences began capturing a larger share of the undergraduate market. By 1991, degree numbers had dipped to levels that would, until recently, mark a historical floor.

The 2012 Peak and the Post-Recession Slide

Following the 2008 Great Recession, a brief surge in college enrollments saw a minor renaissance for certain liberal arts pathways, leading to a localized peak in humanities degree conferrals in 2012. However, that peak proved to be a final hurrah rather than a new beginning. Between 2012 and 2019, a slow, persistent bleed affected almost every humanities department in the country.

The COVID-19 Pandemic Inflection Point

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the pandemic acted as a powerful accelerant to an already troubling trend. Between fall 2020 and fall 2025, humanities enrollments declined at an accelerated average annual rate of 3.8%. While programs in business, engineering, natural sciences, and health sciences rebounded sharply from early pandemic disruptions to reach new highs between 2015 and 2025, the humanities experienced no such recovery. Instead, the downward spiral steepened, culminating in the historic lows recorded in the 2025 data.

Supporting Data: By the Numbers

A closer examination of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports, drawing from U.S. Department of Education records and National Student Clearinghouse enrollment data, highlights the depth of the crisis:

• -12.7%: The "particularly sharp drop" in humanities degrees conferred nationwide between the 2021 and 2023 academic years.
• 8.1%: The humanities’ overall share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2025, marking the smallest proportion recorded since the Department of Education began tracking comprehensive data in 1987.
• 1.6 million vs. 400,000: The stark enrollment gap in 2025 between business majors (the nation’s most popular program) and humanities programs, which failed to clear the 400,000-student threshold.
• -56.3%: The staggering 13-year drop in religious studies degrees—the steepest decline among individual humanities fields.
• -50.8%: The reduction in world languages and literature degrees over the same 13-year window.

Crucially, the academy emphasizes that degree conferrals are a "lagging indicator." Because it typically takes four to five years for a freshman to complete a bachelor’s degree, current graduation data reflects enrollment choices made prior to and during the early stages of the pandemic. Because incoming enrollment numbers continue to shrink, researchers warn that further declines in degrees awarded are virtually guaranteed for the remainder of the decade.

Official Responses and Expert Analysis

Higher education leaders, academic associations, and institutional researchers have responded to the data with a mixture of alarm, pragmatism, and calls for self-reflection.

Dr. Robert Townsend, codirector of the American Academy’s Humanities Indicators project, noted that the data signals a structural vulnerability that universities can no longer ignore. "We are seeing a systemic withdrawal from the foundational disciplines that teach students how to parse complex texts, understand historical context, and communicate with nuance," Townsend said. "When enrollment drops consistently for over a decade, it ceases to be a cyclical fluctuation and becomes an institutional crisis."

University administrators across the country have offered various explanations for why students are turning away from the liberal arts. Chief among them is intense economic anxiety. With tuition rates and student loan debt remaining at historic highs, undergraduates are increasingly risk-averse, opting for majors they perceive as offering immediate job placement and higher starting salaries, such as computer science, finance, and nursing.

Furthermore, the American Academy’s research points to secondary education trends as a contributing factor. The growing emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing in K–12 schools has often marginalized open-ended, essay-based humanities subjects in favor of STEM-focused metrics. Compounded by a severe, well-documented teacher shortage and plummeting interest among young people in pursuing careers in education, the pipeline feeding undergraduate humanities programs has steadily constricted.

Implications for Higher Education and Society

The rapid contraction of the humanities carries profound implications that extend far beyond campus quads, threatening the long-term health of academic institutions and the broader fabric of society.

Academic Restructuring and Faculty Cuts

Financially strapped colleges and universities are already responding to the enrollment slump by cutting costs. Across the country, regional public universities and private liberal arts colleges have begun downsizing or entirely eliminating humanities departments. Tenured faculty lines in history, philosophy, and foreign languages are being phased out in favor of part-time adjunct instructors or redirected resources toward high-demand STEM and professional programs. This downsizing risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: as departments shrink, course offerings become sparse, making it even harder for remaining students to major in those fields.

The Erosion of Critical Thinking and Civic Discourse

Many educators and cultural critics argue that the decline of the humanities poses a societal threat. In an era dominated by rapid technological advancement, artificial intelligence, misinformation, and deep political polarization, the skills traditionally cultivated by the humanities—ethical reasoning, historical perspective, cultural empathy, and rigorous analytical writing—are arguably more critical than ever. A workforce heavily skewed toward technical execution without a corresponding grounding in ethics and human context risks building solutions to problems without understanding their human consequences.

The Future of the Liberal Arts Model

To survive, many humanities departments are attempting to reinvent themselves. Institutions are increasingly promoting "interdisciplinary" degrees, digital humanities initiatives, and professional certificates paired with liberal arts majors—such as "ethics in artificial intelligence" or "business communication." Proponents argue that by demonstrating the practical, transferable value of a humanities education in a modern tech-driven economy, universities can halt the decline.

However, as the numbers for 2025 clearly demonstrate, those reform efforts have yet to reverse the tide. Unless a concerted cultural and economic shift occurs to revalue the study of human history, language, and thought, the American academy faces a future where a traditional humanities education becomes the exclusive purview of an elite few—or vanishes from the undergraduate landscape altogether.