Why Are Students Ditching the History Major?

If the decline of the humanities already keeps you up at night, a new article, published by the American Historical Association, won’t help much.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, writes Benjamin M. Schmidt in Perspectives on History, undergraduate majors have been shifting away from the humanities. And of all the disciplines, history has fared the worst, even as college and university enrollments have grown.

Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, looked at the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually, as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In 2008 there were 34,642 degrees awarded to history majors. In 2017 that number was 24,255, a 30-percent drop. And there’s been about a 33-percent decline in history majors since 2011, the first year in which students who watched the financial crisis unfold could easily change their majors, Schmidt found.

Because the drop has been so intense, it’s no longer possible that the history major and other humanities majors are just weathering a low point in a long-term average. No, this is a certifiable crisis. Schmidt spoke on Monday with The Chronicle about what exactly that means. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What do you think caused this sizable drop?

A. Students and their parents seem to be thinking a lot more that they need to major in something practical, [something that is] likely to get them a job at the back end. Students think that history, humanities, English, and philosophy are not those practical majors.

When I look at the actual earnings of majors, the differences don’t seem to be nearly as great as students are acting like they are. We have seen this big move away from history majors. We have not seen this big move away from psychology majors, who do no better on the job market than history majors do. But students have some idea that psychology is a practical major and English is not, which is not really grounded in anything. It is the case that if you can get a degree in petroleum engineering, you’ll do great. But for a lot of students, those are not the choices that they seem to be making.

This sense of impracticality appears to have been hurting humanities majors a lot in the last decade. Although there is some reason to be hopeful that maybe things are beginning to even out a little bit.

Q. Any idea why history is faring worse than other humanities majors?

A. It’s a few things. One is that it did pretty well. It rose through a lot of the 2000s, so it had a little bit more slack in the line when 2008 came around, whereas English degrees have been falling since the mid-1990s.

Another thing is that nationally a lot of the fields that seem to be doing better in terms of majors are newer and smaller fields. African-American studies has barely fallen at all in the last 10 years. Women’s and gender studies is also doing relatively well. History is this big, old major that’s been around for 100 years at a lot of these universities.

By virtue of having so much different stuff going on, there’s often more energy behind those smaller majors. It may be that they’re able to give more individualized attention to students, although a lot of history majors are at such low numbers [at some colleges that] it’s a great major if you want to spend a lot of free time in your professor’s office hours.

These more-traditional majors are just becoming less and less central to higher education as time goes on and as newer, cross-disciplinary programs become more accessible at a wider variety of schools.

Q. We’ve heard humanities are in “crisis” or it’s a “catastrophe.” So how bad is it?

A. One thing that’s really important to remember is that majors are not courses. We can be losing majors, but students may still be taking history courses. One of the things that I cite in the article is a study by the American Historical Association. What it looks like to me from those numbers is that probably overall enrollment is not falling as much as students who are actually majoring, or having a secondary major, in history.

The falls in majors are large enough that it’s going to change what kinds of courses are taught in history departments and what history in American universities looks like. There’s already a real shift underway from more-advanced courses in [the history of] particular countries to just having introductory-level courses that students take once to fulfill some distribution requirement or some curiosity about a part of the world, and then move on to another major.

Which means that students are coming out of universities most likely not having had a chance to combine any language expertise that they have with historical research. They’re taking only one or two history courses. That probably means that we’re getting students out of American universities who are less knowledgeable about the rest of the world.

Q. In the article you tease out several trends. Which one was the most interesting to you?

A. The declines that we’ve seen in the history major are, in some ways, the strongest at the sorts of schools where the history major used to really be important. So we’ve seen stronger declines in private universities of all sorts than in public universities. We’ve seen stronger declines in research universities than in regional comprehensive universities. A state’s flagship university is probably, on average, seeing relatively higher percentage declines than the state’s agricultural and mechanical school.

I was also interested to see there are real differences in the race and gender of students who are majoring in history. It’s Asian-American students — not foreign nationals coming to the United States but students who are probably American citizens, certainly green-card holders at least — who’ve seen the strongest decline. Asian-American women are down by half, while other demographics have not declined nearly as much. Black men are down by about a quarter. They’re the group that’s stayed in history at the highest rates.

Q. Any hypothesis as to why that’s the case?

A. One possibility is that it’s about who the actual contents of history courses are speaking to nowadays. I teach American-history survey courses, and we have a lot more about the African-American experience in those classes right now than we have about Asian-Americans in the United States. So that’s one possibility. Students aren’t seeing themselves reflected as strongly.

Q. You’ve written previously that the humanities are in crisis. Is that true for the history major itself?

A. Yeah. When I say we’re in crisis, I don’t mean that history is going to go away. I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve seen one instance of a history major being closed in the last six months that I remember, at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. I really don’t think that history is going to vanish.

After the financial crisis, in 2008, that didn’t mean we didn’t have a banking sector anymore. What it meant was that the nature of the banking sector in the United States really changed. You had new regulation. You had a new sense of risks and fears about what was going to happen.

That’s where I think we have come to be with history in the last 10 years. Our sense of what a history major is is going to really shift because there are fewer of them, they’re learning in a different environment, and they’re doing it in a university that often has less of a sense of how they fit into the core mission.

We really have to adapt and change what we’re doing and how we teach. And that’s going to come naturally. It can’t not happen. But exactly the way that it shakes out is very much up in the air.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.