See the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
and the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees.
Whereas Section A deals with trends in the character and outcomes of undergraduate
education in the humanities, the indicators presented here take up these issues
with respect to graduate education. Data are provided on the number of master’s
and doctoral degrees awarded in the field over the last several decades, as well
as on the progress made in the areas of gender equality and racial/ethnic diversity.
As has been the case for undergraduate degrees, the absolute number of graduate
degrees awarded in the humanities has rebounded since the mid-1980s, when degree
numbers troughed after a roughly 15-year tumble from the historic highs of the early
1970s. At the same time, however, because of a large concurrent increase in the
number of advanced degrees awarded in other fields, the percentage of all graduate
degrees awarded in humanities disciplines in the early 21st century was much smaller
than it was four decades earlier. A graduate degree in humanities was more likely
to be awarded to a woman than a man in 2010, but minority students were still underrepresented
relative to their proportion of the total U.S. population. When placed in an international
context, the United States emerges as a strong producer of humanities-trained postsecondary
graduates.
Within the academic humanities, the quality of life for students in doctorate programs
and the job prospects of newly minted Ph.D.’s have been areas of concern in the
last decade. Given a paucity of data, many observers have had to rely on incomplete
or anecdotal evidence in their consideration of these issues. This section brings
together such data on doctorate education as do exist in an effort to supply at
least partial answers to such questions as:
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What are the costs (both temporal and monetary) of obtaining a Ph.D. in the humanities?
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What is the “survival rate” of Ph.D. students in the humanities—that is, how many
students who begin doctorate programs actually finish?
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Although data on the latter subject have traditionally been scarce, three relatively
new bodies of data (described in greater detail in Indicator II-17, Attrition in Doctorate Programs)
shed much-needed light on the dropout rates in graduate humanities programs and
how these compare to the rates of other disciplines.
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Indicator II-10
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Advanced Degrees in the Humanities
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Updated (12/11/2012) with data for academic year 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010).
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See the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
and the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees.
As was the case at the bachelor’s degree level (see Indicator II-1, Undergraduate Degrees in the Humanities),
the last four decades have seen dramatic growth, marked decline, and then recovery
of the academic humanities with respect to the completion of advanced degrees. As
Figures II-10a and II-10b illustrate, while the period from the late
1960s to the early 1970s was one of increasing numbers of master’s and doctoral
degree completions in the humanities, this trend reversed as the 1970s progressed,
so that by the mid-1980s the humanities were awarding less than 50% as many advanced
degrees as in the early 1970s.
By the late 1980s, however, degree completions were again on the rise. By 1994 the
number of master’s degrees had reached 69% of its 1971 high. Then, after a decline
in the late 1990s, master’s degree completions picked up again in 2002 and increased
almost every year through 2010. In 2010, the number of master’s completions was
approximately 72% of the 1971 zenith. Doctorate completions reached the height of
their recovery from the 1980s slump in 2000, when the number reached 84% of the
1973 peak. Doctorate completions then declined through 2005. But completions picked
up in subsequent years, with the 2010 total of 3,985 constituting 82% of 1973’s
historic high (when standardized National Science Foundation disciplinary categories
are used to count humanities degrees; when the National Center for Education Statistics’
Classification of Instructional Programs is used, the counts for both master’s and
doctoral degrees are considerably higher; for an explanation of the differences
between the two classification systems, see the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators).
Graduate humanities programs, like their undergraduate counterparts, experienced
a substantial loss of share over the 1970s and 1980s—that is, a reduction in the
number of all advanced degrees awarded in the humanities relative to the number
awarded in other fields. While the absolute numbers of advanced degrees conferred
in the humanities rose well above the mid-1980s low, even more substantial growth
in the numbers of advanced degrees awarded in other fields served to keep the humanities’
share of all master’s and doctoral degrees well below the record levels observed
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the mid-1980s through 2010 the humanities’
share of all master’s and professional degrees ranged from 23% to 37% of the 1967
peak share. While the 1990s saw fairly steady increases in the humanities’ share
of all doctoral degrees, the proportion shrank again during the first half of the
next decade. Even with a subsequent uptick in completions, in 2010 the humanities’
share was less than half of its 1973 high.
Since the late 1980s, humanities master’s degrees have constituted less than 5%
of all degrees awarded at the master’s and professional degree level. This is a
small proportion relative to the shares awarded by such fields as education and
the social service professions, which together awarded 27% of degrees at this level
in 2010, and business, which bestowed 22% of such degrees (Figure II-10c;
see the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees). At the doctoral
level, the percentage of degrees awarded in the humanities has been somewhat greater,
ranging from 7% to 11% of all degrees over this time period (Figure II-10d1). In contrast,
science degrees represented 43%–49% of all doctorates during the same period.
Note
1 The appearance of a dramatic shrinkage in 2010 in the share of doctoral
degrees awarded in health science is attributable to a recent change made by the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the way it asks institutions
to classify doctorates (please see the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees
for a detailed description of this shift and the steps that the Humanities Indicators
has taken to help ensure comparability of the advanced degree counts it provides
for different years).
Through 2009, many advanced degrees in the health sciences were classified by awarding
institutions not as “first professional” degrees (the way in which NCES requires
M.D.’s be classified) but as doctorates. With the elimination by NCES of the generic
doctoral degree category in 2010, institutions began classifying such degrees as
“professional practice” doctoral degrees, which the Humanities Indicators includes
in its master’s degree and professional degree counts. This change in the classification
of health service doctorates, in combination with the relatively small number of
doctoral degrees completed each year, creates the false impression that there was
a profound loss of doctorate “market share” by the health sciences field.
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Indicator II-11
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Disciplinary Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities
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Updated (12/12/2012) with data for academic year 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010).
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See the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
and the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees.
In 2010, at both the master’s and doctoral degree levels, English was the most common
area in which advanced degrees in the humanities were completed. Approximately a
third of all humanities master’s degrees and 28% of all doctoral degrees were awarded
by English departments (Figures II-11a and II-11b; data are provided
only for 2010, the most current year for which information is available, because
the disciplinary distribution of graduate degrees has changed little since 1987,
the first year for which such data are available; see the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators).
At the master’s level, general humanities degrees represented approximately 15%
of all humanities degrees, making them—along with history, which granted a similar
number of degrees—the second most common type of humanities degree awarded. At the
doctoral level, the percentage of general degrees was far smaller. History and languages
and literatures other than English awarded larger shares of degrees at the doctoral
level than at the master’s level, and these disciplines, together with English,
constituted the majority of Ph.D. completions. Another notable difference between
the two degree levels was in the percentage of degrees awarded in philosophy. In
2010, such degrees were only 4% of the master’s degrees awarded but constituted
9% of all doctorates.
The smallest share of degrees at the master’s level, less than 0.1%, was awarded
in folklore. At the doctoral level, there were no folklore degrees awarded. Among
those disciplines in which doctoral degrees were earned, archeology, at 0.2% of
all humanities Ph.D. completions, granted the fewest. As was the case at the bachelor’s
level (see Indicator II-2,
Disciplinary Distribution of Undergraduate Degrees), even though scholarship
concerning race and gender has grown considerably over the last several decades,1 only a
small share of all advanced humanities degrees, approximately 2%, was awarded in
ethnic/gender/cultural studies.
Note
1 Barbara J. Risman, “Gender as Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with
Activism,” Gender and Society, vol. 18, no. 4 (August 2004): 429–450; and
Patricia H. Collins and John Solomos, “Introduction: Situating Race and Ethnic Studies,”
in Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies, ed. Patricia H. Collins and John
Solomos (London: Sage, 2010), 1–16.
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Indicator II-12
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Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities
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Updated (3/6/2013) with data for academic year 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010).
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See the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators,
the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees,
the
Note on the Calculation of Shares of Degrees Awarded to Members of Traditionally
Underrepresented Racial/Ethnic Groups,
and the
Note on the Racial/Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Young Adult Population.
The percentage of advanced degrees in the humanities awarded to students from traditionally
underrepresented racial/ethnic groups increased from 1995 to 2010 (Figure II-12a;
for an explanation of how these percentages were determined, see the
Note on the Calculation of Shares of Degrees Awarded to Members of Traditionally
Underrepresented Racial/Ethnic Groups;
for a point of comparison, see the
Note on the Racial/Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Young Adult Population.) In 2010, the
share of humanities master’s degrees awarded to these students was 12.1%, up from
7.9% in the mid-1990s. In 2010, the share of humanities doctorates completed by
these students was 10.0%, approximately four percentage points higher than in 1995,
but down slightly from 2007’s historic high of 10.7% (Figure II-12b).
At the master’s level, the share of humanities degrees going to members of traditionally
underrepresented racial/ethnic groups tended to fall somewhat short of that for
all fields during this period, with the gap growing over time. In the case of doctoral
degrees, the percentage of humanities awards to these students was consistently
close to the percentage in all fields combined.
Figure II-12c depicts the racial/ethnic composition of the master’s and professional
degree recipient population for selected fields in 2010. In that year, while the
humanities awarded a small percentage of master’s degrees to African American students
(4.9%) relative to several other fields, the humanities had one of the higher rates
of receipt by Hispanics (6.6%). African Americans completed 4.0% of all doctorates
in the humanities, a markedly lower share than in the education and social service
fields but well above the rates for the natural sciences, engineering, and fine
arts (Figure II-12d). The proportion of humanities doctorates awarded to
Hispanic students was 5.4%.
In 2010, the humanities field awarded 3.7% of its master’s degrees to students of
Asian descent. This was a smaller share than for any field except education and
the social service professions. The situation for students of Asian descent was
similar at the doctoral level. At 0.7%, the share of humanities master’s degrees
completed by American Indian and Native Alaskan students was greater than the proportion
in every field other than the social service professions. A similar proportion of
humanities doctorates was awarded to these students. No field other than fine and
performing arts awarded a greater share of its doctoral degrees to students of native
origin.
One of the most striking features of the 2010 data is the share of advanced humanities
degree awards to temporary residents. The attraction of U.S. graduate programs in
science and engineering to international students has been widely acknowledged.
Less well appreciated is the fact that U.S. humanities departments also bestowed
a nonnegligible share of their degrees (8.2% at the master’s level, 17.0% at the
doctoral) on these international students.
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Indicator II-13
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Gender Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities
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Updated (3/11/2013) with data for academic year 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010).
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See the
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
and the
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees.
Although master’s degrees in the humanities were awarded somewhat more often to
men than women in the mid-1960s, by 1970 gender parity had been achieved. Women
subsequently went on to become the majority of humanities master’s recipients, garnering
60% of all degrees awarded in 2010 (a slight decline from 2004’s record high of
62%; Figure II-13a). In 2010, only education/social service professions and
the health sciences awarded a substantially greater percentage of master’s degrees
to women than did the humanities. Business, engineering, law, and physical sciences
awarded considerably smaller shares. At the master’s level, as at the bachelor's, the percentage
of humanities degrees awarded to women has traditionally been higher than that for
all fields combined, although the gap narrowed steadily over time, almost disappearing
in the early years of the new century.
In the mid-1960s, the humanities, like all other academic disciplines, awarded only
a small minority of doctoral degrees to women. Though they fared better in the humanities
than in nearly all other fields, women still received only 19% of humanities doctorates
at that time (Figure II-13b). Throughout the 1970s, however, this percentage
increased steadily, and by the mid-1980s women represented approximately 45% of
all new humanities doctoral degree recipients.
As the 1980s continued, growth of women’s share of humanities degrees slowed, and
gender parity was not reached until the mid-1990s. Thereafter, doctoral degrees
continued to be distributed quite evenly between men and women, in contrast to the
lower degree levels where the share of female degree recipients continued to grow.
Nonetheless, the percentage of humanities doctorates awarded to women has traditionally
been greater than that for all fields combined. By the mid-2000s, however, the situation
was similar to that at the master’s level: the share of humanities doctorates awarded
to women was approximately the same as that for all fields considered together.
(For information regarding the gender distribution of advanced degree completions
in particular humanities disciplines, please see Part II, Section C, Undergraduate
and Graduate Degree Information for Specific Humanities Disciplines).
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Indicator II-14
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Humanities Degree Completions: An International Comparison
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Updated (8/23/2012) with data for 2009.
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The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gathers a wealth
of data on the education-related investments and outcomes of its member nations.
In order to arrive at meaningful comparisons among countries that have substantially
different educational systems, the OECD uses the
International Standard Classification of Education, which was created
by the United Nations (UN) Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
in the early 1970s to facilitate the efforts of the UN and other organizations to
aggregate and present international education statistics. (For a roster of the disciplines
that UNESCO includes within the humanities, see
Humanities as Defined by the International Standard Classification of Education.)
Figure II-14 compares the percentages of all tertiary degrees (U.S. bachelor’s,
master’s, and doctoral degrees are all considered tertiary degrees) OECD countries
awarded in the humanities in 2009. The United States ranked fifth among the 24 OECD
countries for which data were available. The U.S. percentage was similar to those
of Korea and Hungary, and approximately seven percentage points lower than the humanities
degree leader, Germany, which bestows 17.5% of its tertiary degrees in humanities
disciplines.
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Indicator II-15
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Years to Attainment of a Humanities Doctorate
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Updated (1/18/2012) with data from 2009.
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Obtaining a doctoral degree in any field involves a significant investment of time,
energy, and monetary resources (both tuition and foregone earnings). But as data
from the
Survey of Earned Doctorates
(SED) shows, the road to the humanities Ph.D. has traditionally been an especially
long one: from 1979 to 2009, the median number of years from the start of graduate
school to a doctorate award was consistently greater in the humanities than in the
sciences and engineering (Figure II-15).
What the humanities do share with most other fields is a retreat from the particularly
lengthy completion times recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1989, the
median number of years to completion of a humanities doctorate was 10.7. However
by 2009, after several years of incremental decline, the time to completion was
down to 9.5 years.
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Indicator II-16
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Paying for Graduate School
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Updated (3/22/2012) with data from 2009 and 2010.
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Data from the SED indicate that since 1998, doctoral recipients in the humanities have
largely relied on grants (including fellowships), teaching assistantships, or their
own resources to subsidize their graduate education, with few supporting themselves
through research assistantships or employer subsidies1
(Figure II-16a; data concerning how terminal master’s degree recipients pay
for graduate school are not currently collected by any public or private entity).
However, while the proportion of humanities doctorate recipients who cited teaching
as their primary source of financial support remained relatively constant from 1998
to 2008, the share relying on their own resources steadily declined, and reliance
on grants correspondingly increased. In 2006, for the first time, as large a percentage
of new Ph.D.’s cited grants as their primary source of support as cited teaching.
By 2008, the share of doctorate recipients relying primarily on grants exceeded
the percentage whose primary support was teaching. At 38%, the 2008 share of humanities
doctorate recipients who had subsidized their graduate education primarily through
grants was the largest recorded during the 1998–2010 period.
The years 2009 and 2010 brought slight declines in the percentage of humanities
doctorate recipients reporting grants as their primary source of support—and increases
of comparable magnitude in the share of doctorate recipients teaching to support
themselves. The period 2008–2010 also saw a halt to the precipitous decline in the
proportion of doctorate recipients who relied primarily on their own funds to pay
for their graduate education.
In 2010, doctorate recipients in the humanities relied more heavily on teaching
as their primary source of income than did doctorate recipients in any other field
(Figure II-16b). And only life science doctorate recipients were more likely
than those in the humanities to report grants as their primary form of support.
Humanities doctorate recipients were more likely to draw on their own resources
than were doctorate recipients in the natural sciences and engineering, though the
proportion of humanities doctorate recipients who cited personal income or savings
as their primary source of support was less than half the percentage of doctorate
recipients in education who did so.
While the importance of their own resources decreased relative to other forms of
financial support from 2003 through 2010, humanities doctorate recipients’ average
debt level rose (after adjusting for inflation) and was one of the highest in the
U.S. academy (Figure II-16c). In 2010, new humanities Ph.D.’s reported an
average graduate educational debt load of slightly more than $20,000, compared to
average indebtedness of approximately $6,300 among doctorate recipients in engineering
and the physical sciences. The level of humanities doctorate recipient indebtedness
in 2010 represents a 51% increase over the 2003 figure. Humanities indebtedness
grew much less than that among education Ph.D.’s (85%), but the increase was far
greater than that experienced by doctorate recipients in the physical sciences (2%),
engineering (6%), or life sciences (25%).
The average indebtedness figure for the humanities masks a “feast or famine” situation
with respect to the ability of doctorate recipients to secure graduate funding.
As Figure II-16d reveals, more than half of all humanities doctorate recipients
awarded degrees in 2010 emerged from their graduate programs with no educational
debt. But approximately 26% of humanities doctorate recipients incurred more than
$30,000 in debt, and almost 18% carried debt loads in excess of $50,000.
Note
1 Students’ subsidization—via teaching and research assistantships, employer
subsidies, and their own financial resources—of the portion of their education not
covered by grants from their universities or other philanthropic organizations is
a substantial and largely unacknowledged form of funding for the humanities enterprise
in the contemporary United States. For other indicators dealing with the character
and extent of funding for humanities education and other activities, see Part IV
of the Humanities Indicators,
Humanities Funding and Research.
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Indicator II-17
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Attrition in Doctorate Programs
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Attrition in humanities doctorate programs is a topic of considerable interest to
higher education researchers and administrators, but data that could be used to
systematically assess the extent of attrition have been scarce. Information compiled
by individual universities and programs suggests that attrition rates are substantial,
but just how many people begin work toward a humanities Ph.D. and then drop out—and,
more important, why they drop out—are significant questions that have long gone
unanswered.
Fortunately, three recent studies enhance our understanding of graduate attrition.
Findings from the first of these, the Council of Graduate Schools'
Ph.D. Completion Project, were published in
the autumn of 2007. Supported by funding from the Ford Foundation and Pfizer, Inc.,
the project involved 29 U.S. and Canadian research universities in collecting data
on doctorate completion rates, as well as on interventions designed to raise these
rates.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded Graduate Education Initiative, another new
source of data on attrition, involved both the implementation of a set of interventions
designed to improve graduate education in 54 humanities departments in ten major
universities and an evaluation of the ten-year project’s outcomes. The findings
of the evaluation are described in
Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the
Humanities (Princeton
University Press, 2009).
The attrition data presented by the Humanities Indicators (HI) are from a third
recent study, a comprehensive assessment of U.S. research-doctorate programs administered
by the National Research Council (NRC) and funded by the National Institutes of
Health, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, and participating universities. The assessment involved the
collection of a variety of data on doctorate programs, including Ph.D. completion
rates. These data were then used to develop multidimensional ratings of programs
at approximately 200 institutions of higher learning (see
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/pga/Resdoc/index.htm
for more information about the project). While each of the three studies mentioned
here is a source of important insight regarding attrition in humanities doctorate
programs, the HI has used data from the NRC assessment because this study included
the largest number of programs in the greatest variety of humanities disciplines.
Doctorate completion was defined by the NRC as obtaining a degree within eight years
of entering a Ph.D. program for students of the humanities, and within six years
for students in other fields. A completion rate—essentially
the proportion of all students entering a doctorate program who completed their
Ph.D.’s within the specified number of years—was computed for every research doctorate
program at the participating institutions.1
Students who finished their doctorates but not in the specified number of years
were not counted as completers. The completion rates presented here are thus conservative
measures of doctorate completion. The figures are also for a group of doctorate
programs in a given field (or discipline), not the student population in that field.
The determination of the share of all doctoral students in a given field who ultimately
obtain their Ph.D.’s will require detailed analysis of individual programs’ responses
to the NRC survey.
Figure II-17a depicts the interquartile range (IQR) for doctorate program
completion rates in the humanities and several other fields. The IQR is widely used
as a means of describing the “typical” or “usual” values exhibited by a group of
persons or objects and involves excluding the most extreme values of a particular
variable (in this case, doctorate program completion rate). Quartiles are statistics
that divide the observations in a batch of numeric data into several groups, each
of which contains 25% of the data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed
by ordering the values for a particular variable from smallest to largest and then
finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data. The lower quartile
and the upper quartile are the two values that define the interquartile range. The
middle quartile is also known as the median.
The doctorate program assessment data reveal that the completion rate in the humanities
is similar to that in the mathematical and physical sciences field. In both fields,
the middle half of the programs graduated from slightly more than a quarter up to
55% of their students within the specified number of years (i.e., eight years for
students of the humanities, six years for science students). The median program
completion rate for both fields was 42%. The engineering and biological and health
science fields had the highest median completion rates, 50%. The field with the
lowest median completion rate, 35%, was the behavioral and social sciences. This
field also had a somewhat greater range of “typical” completion rates (IQR) than
others.
Median completion rates among the humanities disciplines showed considerable variation
(Figure II-17b). With 56% of their students completing their Ph.D.’s within
eight years, theater and performance studies programs had the highest median completion
rate. Languages, societies, and cultures programs had a median completion rate of
33%, the lowest recorded within the humanities field. Programs in two of the most
populous disciplines, history and English language and literature, had rates of
42% and 46%. The span of IQRs among the disciplines was similarly broad. While the
completion rates of German programs were clustered relatively tightly around the
median (for an IQR of 20, the lowest of all the disciplines), typical completion
rates for French programs, those with the highest IQR, ranged from 17% to 64%.
Note
1 Doctorate programs at participating institutions were asked by the NRC
to report the number of “graduate students who entered in different cohorts from
1996–1997 to 2005–2006 and the number in each cohort who completed in 3 years or
less, in their 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th years, and in 10 or more years. To compute
the completion percentage, the number of doctoral students for a given entering
cohort who completed their doctorate in 3 years or less and in their 4th, 5th, 6th
years were totaled and the total was divided by the entering students in that cohort.
This computation was made for each cohort that entered from 1996–1997 to 1998–1999
for the humanities and 1996–1997 to 2000–2001 for the other fields. Cohorts beyond
these years were not considered, since the students could complete in a year that
was after the final year 2005–2006 for which data were collected. To compute the
average completion percentage, an average was taken over 3 cohorts for the humanities
and over 5 cohorts for other fields” (National Research Council, Committee to Assess
Research-Doctorate Programs, “A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs
in the United States: Data Table in Excel (2010),”
http://www.nap.edu/rdp/, under “Guide” tab
in Excel workbook).
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES)
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Glossary, master’s degrees are “awards that require
the successful completion of a program of study of at least the full-time equivalent
of 1 academic year, but not more than 2 academic years of work beyond the bachelor’s
degree.”
The NCES, which collects the degree completion data presented as part of the Humanities
Indicators, defines first professional degrees as those awards that require completion
of a program that meets all the following criteria: (1) completion of the academic
requirements to begin practice in a profession; (2) at least two years of college
work prior to entering the program; and (3) a total of at least six academic years
of college work to complete the degree program, including prior required college
work plus the length of the professional program itself. According to NCES, the
following ten fields award first professional degrees:
Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.)
Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.)
Law (LL.B. or J.D.)
Medicine (M.D.)
Optometry (O.D.)
Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.)
Pharmacy (Pharm.D.)
Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.)
Theology (M.Div., M.H.L., B.D., or Ordination)
Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M. or V.M.D.)
Although some fields (e.g., library science, hospital administration, and social
work) require specialized degrees for employment at the professional level, NCES
does not count degrees in these fields as first professional degrees; instead, they
are treated as master’s degrees.
Whereas all doctorates had previously been included in a single category, for academic
years 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 NCES gave schools the option of employing a new classification
system that distinguishes among three types of doctoral degrees:
Research/Scholarship—A Ph.D. or other doctoral degree that requires advanced
work beyond the master’s level, including the preparation and defense of a dissertation
based on original research, or the planning and execution of an original project
demonstrating scholarly achievement;
Professional Practice—A doctoral degree conferred upon completion of a program
providing the knowledge and skills for the recognition, credentialing, or licensing
required for professional practice; or
Other—A doctoral degree that does not meet the definition of the research/scholarship
or professional practice doctorate.
Schools could classify certain degrees that had historically been treated as first
professional degrees as either “Professional Practice” doctoral degrees (as in the
case of medical degrees, for example) or master’s degrees (as in the case of advanced,
nondoctoral degrees in theology).
To ensure comparability with previous years, for 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 the Humanities
Indicators counted as doctorates all of those degrees classified by postsecondary
institutions as “Doctorate Degree,” “Doctorate Degree—Research/Scholarship,” or
“Doctorate Degree—Other.” The HI treated as “master’s and professional degrees”
those degrees classified by schools as “Doctorate Degree—Professional Practice,”
“First Professional Degree,” or “Master’s Degree.”
For academic year 2010–2011, NCES eliminated the “first professional degree” category.
The agency now requires schools to use the three-category system described above
to classify all advanced degrees other than master’s degrees.
Back to Content
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Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
The data that form the basis of these indicators are drawn from the U.S. Department
of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Higher Education
General Information System (HEGIS) and its successor, the Integrated Postsecondary
Educational Data System (IPEDS), through which institutions of higher learning report
on the numbers and characteristics of students completing degree programs (as well
as a variety of other topics; for more on this major data collection program, see
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/). The HEGIS/IPEDS
degree-completion data going back to 1966 have been made accessible to decision-makers,
researchers, and the general public by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via
its online data analysis tool
WebCASPAR. The NSF has traditionally
used the NCES data to tabulate science and engineering degree awards as part of
its
Science and Engineering Indicators Program, which since 1973 has issued a biennial report
designed to provide public and private policymakers with a broad base of quantitative
information about the U.S. science, engineering, and technology enterprise.
The NSF has developed a set of standardized disciplinary categories that can be
used across the various data sources it relies upon to construct its indicators.
Because the NSF focuses on trends in science and engineering education, its disciplinary
classification is most detailed in these areas. The utility of the NSF system for
the purposes of the Humanities Indicators (HI) is limited. For example, the NSF
scheme does not distinguish between the academic study of the arts, considered by
the HI to be part of the humanities, and art performance. The HI thus cannot include
in its tally those degrees conferred in the areas of musicology, art history, film
studies, and drama history/criticism. Moreover, while the HI considers such disciplines
as archeology, women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, and Holocaust studies to
be part of the humanities field, NSF categorizes them as social sciences. Additionally,
NSF places interdisciplinary degrees in areas such as general humanities and liberal
studies in a broad “Other” category that includes degrees for many disciplines that
are not within the purview of the humanities as conceptualized by the HI. Consequently,
such interdisciplinary degrees, along with those mentioned above, cannot be captured
in humanities degree counts from 1966 to 1986.
For 1987 and later years (1995 and later for data on the race/ethnicity of degree
recipients), however, NSF also categorizes earned degrees according to the more
detailed Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), which permits a more precise
count of humanities degrees; that is, a count that includes degrees in all those
programs that are part of academic disciplines included within the scope of the
humanities for the purposes of the HI. (For an inventory of the disciplines and
activities treated as part of the humanities by the HI, see the Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities”
for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.) The CIP was first developed
by NCES in 1980 as a way to account for the tremendous variety of degree programs
offered by American institutions of higher learning and has been revised three times
since its introduction, most recently in 2009 (this version is referred to as “CIP
2010”). The CIP has also been adopted by Statistics Canada as its standard disciplinary
classification system.
For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators the CIP has several advantages over
the NSF classification system. For example, because the NSF system groups degrees
in the nonsectarian study of religion with those awarded in programs designed to
prepare students for religious vocations and because the latter type of degree is
much more common, the HI cannot include what the NSF considers to be degrees in
religion in the humanities degree counts for years prior to 1987. With CIP-coded
data, however, academic disciplines such as comparative religion can be separated
from vocational programs such as theology and thus can be included in the humanities
degree tally. Additionally, when using CIP-coded data, the HI can include degrees
in all the excluded disciplines mentioned above, from art history to Holocaust studies,
in its counts of humanities degrees from 1987 onward. For an inventory of the NSF
and CIP disciplinary categories included by the HI under the broad academic field
headings (“humanities,” “natural sciences,” etc.) used throughout Part II of the
HI, see the
NSF and CIP Discipline Code Catalog. This catalog also indicates which degree
programs the HI includes within specific humanities disciplines (e.g., for the purposes
of the HI, English degrees include those classified under CIP as being in “English
Language and Literature,” “American Literature,” and “Creative Writing,” among others).
In constructing indicators that use IPEDS data to track historical trends in the
academic humanities, the HI has employed completion data that were classified using
both the NSF and CIP systems. In these cases, either a note accompanying the chart
or a break in the trend line indicates where estimates based on the NSF classification
system leave off and those based on CIP begin. For those indicators reporting degree
data gathered in 1987 or more recently (1995 or more recently for the charts and
tables describing the proportions of all degrees received by members of racial/ethnic
minority groups), CIP-coded data are used.
In the case of several of the degree-related indicators, the humanities are compared
to certain other fields such as the sciences and engineering. The nature of these
fields is specified in the
Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.
These broad fields do not encompass all postsecondary programs. Therefore, where
fields are being compared in terms of their respective shares of all degrees, the
percentages will not add up to 100%. Also, none of the graphs showing change over
time in the share of degrees awarded to members of traditionally underrepresented
ethnic/minority groups includes a data point for the academic year 1999, because
the NCES did not release data for that year.
The degree counts presented as part of the HI do not include “second majors” because
NCES began collecting data about these degrees only in 2001. The HI deals separately
with the issue of second majors in
Figure II-1c
(“Humanities Bachelor's Degrees Earned as ‘Second Majors,’ 2001–2010”).
Data on the number of students completing minors are not collected as part of IPEDS,
but such information was compiled for selected humanities disciplines as part of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences–sponsored Humanities Departmental Survey
(HDS; see the HDS final report, page 8, Table 12).
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Note on the Calculation of Shares of Degrees Awarded to Members of Traditionally
Underrepresented Racial/Ethnic Groups
For each academic discipline or field, the share of all degrees earned by members
of traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic groups was calculated by dividing
the number of degrees completed by students identified by their institutions as
African American (non-Hispanic), Hispanic, or American Indian/Alaska Native by the
total number of degree completions in that field. Not included in the count of traditionally
underrepresented minorities were (1) students of Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry,
(2) students designated by their educational institutions as being of “Other/Unknown
Ethnicity,”* and (3) international students—that is, temporary residents who were
in the United States for the express purpose of attending school and who were likely
to return to their home countries upon graduation (significant numbers of these
individuals may be of African or Hispanic background, but the National Center for
Education Statistics , the compiler of these data, does not request that institutions
of higher learning collect racial/ethnicity data for such students).
* According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the compiler
of these data, a student is assigned to this category only if he or she does not
select a racial/ethnic designation and his or her educational institution finds
it impossible to place the student in one of the NCES-defined racial/ethnic categories
during established enrollment procedures or in any post-enrollment identification
or verification process. Over time the percentage of students categorized as “Other/Unknown”
has grown, thereby reducing the ability of postsecondary institutions, policymakers,
and the general public to reliably track the racial/ethnic diversity of degree recipients.
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Humanities as Defined by the International Standard Classification of Education
Humanities
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Religion and theology;
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Foreign languages and cultures: living or ‘dead’ languages and their literatures,
area studies;
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Native languages: current or vernacular language and its literature;
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Other humanities: interpretation and translation, linguistics, comparative literature,
history, archaeology, philosophy, ethics.
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Source: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 1997 (UNESCO Institute
for Statistics, 2006), 42,
http://www.uis.unesco.org/TEMPLATE/pdf/isced/ISCED_A.pdf.
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Note on the Racial/Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Young Adult Population (18–30 Years
Old)
Using information provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Humanities Indicators
has calculated the following estimates of the share of the total national young
adult population represented by each of the categories employed by the National
Center for Education Statistics for the purpose of reporting the percentages of
degrees awarded to students of different races/ethnicities* (estimates are for April
2010):
African American, Non-Hispanic
Asian or Pacific Islander
Hispanic
Native American or Alaska Native
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13.7%
5.6%
17.7%
0.8%
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Source: Data drawn from U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, “US-EST00INT-ALLDATA:
Intercensal Estimates of the Resident Population by Single Year of Age, Sex, Race,
and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2010” (data
file,September 2011), downloadable under the heading “Intercensal Estimates of the
Resident Population by Single Year of Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the
United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2010” at
http://www.census.gov/popest/data/intercensal/national/nat2010.html.
* The racial/ethnic categorization scheme employed for the purposes of the Integrated
Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is the basis of the Humanities
Indicators items dealing with the distribution of degree completions among racial/ethnic
groups, and the system used by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Division,
which is the source of the information provided in this note, differ in important
ways. Whereas IPEDS has traditionally used a “one-question” approach that requires
institutions to use mutually exclusive reporting categories, one of which is “Hispanic,”
the Census Bureau employs a “two-question” format that inquires separately about
race and Hispanic origin. In further contrast to IPEDS, the Census Bureau permits
respondents to select more than one race to describe themselves.
In view of these differences the Humanities Indicators could not develop size estimates
for racial/ethnic groups that provide strictly comparable points of reference for
the percentages supplied as part of Indicators II-4 and II-12. The following table
indicates which Census-defined group(s) were used as the basis for the estimates
provided in this note.
IPEDS-Defined
“African American, Non-Hispanic”
“Asian or Pacific Islander”
“Hispanic”
“Native American or Alaska Native”
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>
>
>
>
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Census-Defined
“Not Hispanic, Black alone”
“Not Hispanic, Asian alone” and
“Not Hispanic, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone”
“Hispanic, White alone”
“Not Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native alone”
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Beginning with the data collection for academic year 2011–2012, IPEDS required that
institutions report information on degree completers’ race and ethnicity in a way
similar to the Census Bureau and most other data collections sponsored by federal
government agencies. See
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/news_room/ana_Changes_to_10_25_2007_169.asp
for details.
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