State of the Arts

Fewer but Happier: Humanities Master’s and Ph.D. Graduates in 2020

April 29, 2022

The share of master’s and doctoral degrees awarded in the humanities in 2020 hit a record low, according to a new report released today by the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The report uses federal data to provide a data-driven look at the state of graduate education in the humanities, including graduate-degree trends, career outcomes, the state of the professoriate, and the lack of diversity in the field.

“To see the share of our degrees falling to levels I’ve never seen before,” said Robert B. Townsend, co-director of the Humanities Indicator Project, “that was really surprising.”

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The share of master’s and doctoral degrees awarded in the humanities in 2020 hit a record low, according to a new report released on Friday by the Humanities Indicators project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The report, “State of the Humanities 2022: From Graduate Education to the Workforce,” relies heavily on federal data to examine graduate education in the humanities, including graduate-degree trends, career outcomes, the state of the professoriate, and the lack of diversity in the field.

“To see the share of our degrees falling to levels I’ve never seen before,” said Robert B. Townsend, program director for humanities, arts, and culture at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “that was really surprising.”

The study’s wide-ranging findings amplify some familiar trends in disciplines like English language and literature, history, foreign languages and literature, and philosophy, among others, that have long been framed as being “in crisis.” The report also highlights the declines in humanities-faculty positions and in academic job ads for humanities Ph.D.s, long-running trends that have fueled the dismal academic job market that graduate-degree holders in the humanities face.

But a bright spot emerged in the data: Despite their median earnings being less than their counterparts in most other fields, about 90 percent of recipients of graduate degrees in the humanities were satisfied with their jobs (whether employed in academe or not) in 2019 — in line with master’s and Ph.D. holders in other fields, the report said.

The data, although helpful in identifying trends, still leaves “many questions unanswered” about the future of graduate education in the humanities, the report said. Ph.D. programs in the humanities could suffer if “the path into traditional academic occupations remains narrow.” And master’s-only graduate programs in the humanities may have to navigate a continued decline in people seeking that credential, according to the report.

“Our hope is that departments and colleges and schools will look at this data and think about how they’re preparing students for the future and what they’re preparing them for,” Townsend said.

Here’s a closer look at some of the study’s findings: