From 1971 to 2006, these degree-granting disciplines experienced the biggest drops in the proportion of four-year colleges that offered them.
| Field | % of colleges offering the field, 1971 | % of colleges offering the field, 2006 | Percentage-point decline |
| Core fields (offered by more than 50 percent of colleges in 1970-71) | |||
| Romance languages/literatures | 75.6% | 58.6% | 17.0 |
| History | 91.6% | 81.6% | 10.0 |
| Sociology | 77.1% | 67.7% | 9.4 |
| Mathematics and statistics | 89.5% | 80.3% | 9.3 |
| English | 94.7% | 86.0% | 8.7 |
| Chemistry | 80.3% | 72.6% | 7.7 |
| Economics | 56.0% | 49.4% | 6.6 |
| Physics | 53.2% | 47.4% | 5.8 |
| Education: teaching and curriculum | 79.6% | 75.3% | 4.3 |
| Biology/life sciences | 88.5% | 84.7% | 3.8 |
| Mass fields (offered by 20 percent to 49 percent of colleges in 1970-71) | |||
| Germanic languages/literatures | 44.2% | 26.6% | 17.6 |
| Home economics/consumer science | 28.7% | 22.2% | 6.4 |
| Classical languages/literatures | 21.5% | 16.8% | 4.7 |
| Geography | 22.3% | 19.3% | 3 |
| Geology/earth sciences | 27.7% | 27.2% | 0.5 |
| Niche fields (offered by 5 percent to 19 percent of colleges in 1970-71) | |||
| Administrative assistant/secretarial science | 16.7% | 1.2% | 15.5 |
| Zoology | 10.8% | 4.1% | 6.7 |
| Library science | 6.6% | 0.7% | 5.9 |
| Slavic languages/literatures | 14.2% | 9.3% | 4.9 |
| Botany | 7.9% | 3.2% | 4.7 |
| Agronomy/crop science | 5.1% | 3.0% | 2.0 |
| Industrial engineering | 8.9% | 7.0% | 1.9 |
| Sources: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics; Steven Brint, Kristopher Proctor, Kerry Mulligan, Matthew B. Rotondi, and Robert A. Hanneman, authors of “Declining Academic Fields in U.S. Four-Year Colleges and Universities, 1970-2006" | |||
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