Humanities Degrees Hit Lowest Level Since 1991

Colleges and universities in the United States awarded 164,847 bachelor's degrees in the humanities in 2025, the lowest number since 1991. This figure, from a report published Tuesday by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, represents a 30.4 percent decline from the field's peak in 2012.

Robert Townsend, director of humanities, arts and culture programs at the AAA&S and the report's author, told Inside Higher Ed that rising tuition costs pressure students to choose majors with clear career paths. "A lot of students can't even imagine what kind of job they could get with a humanities major outside of teaching," he said.

A Slowing Decline

The pace of the decline has recently slowed. 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 cautioned that this leveling-off does not signal relief for departments facing budget cuts and public skepticism about the value of their degrees.

He noted a more troubling indicator: the number of students enrolled as humanities majors. "For enrolled majors, the humanities have actually started to decline faster than they were before the pandemic," Townsend said. Data shows the number of students pursuing a humanities bachelor's degree as a first major fell 28 percent between 2015 and 2025.

Enrollment Trends and Competitor Fields

Enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows a 17 percent decline in humanities and general liberal arts majors between 2020 and 2025. While most fields saw pandemic-era declines, many have since rebounded to pre-2020 levels. Some, like business and engineering, recorded their highest enrollments in a decade in 2025.

The report highlights specific humanities fields that have seen the sharpest drops in degrees awarded between 2012 and 2025.

The Reading Challenge and a Bright Spot

Townsend identified student discomfort with extensive reading as a major headwind for these text-heavy disciplines. "Many students just don't feel comfortable with long-form reading that they'd do in an English or history class," he said, attributing this partly to the distractions of short-form social media.

One humanities area is growing. Enrollment in the humanistic study of the arts, including art history and film studies, 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 observed. He suggested that preventing further declines may require colleges to explicitly teach reading skills in introductory courses.

The Value Argument and Institutional Pressure

The report argues that the critical reading and writing skills honed in humanities programs will be increasingly valuable as artificial intelligence transforms the workforce. "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 stated. The challenge, he said, is convincing students and institutions of this long-term value.

He expressed concern that immediate financial pressures could lead universities to cut struggling programs. "Once a program's cut, it's very hard to bring it back again," Townsend said. He worries that current trends might push faculty and administrators to eliminate programs that seem underperforming today, potentially forfeiting future opportunities.