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• A slight majority of humanities departments were satisfied with the quality of the career services available to students at their institutions, with an estimated 54% rating the services as “good” or “very good” (Figure 5A). Approximately a third, however, considered the quality of such services only “fair.” Ten percent believed the services at their institutions to be “poor” or “very poor.”
• By a wide margin, history of science departments offered the most negative assessment of the student career services provided by their institutions, with an estimated 42% rating the services “poor” or “very poor” (Figure 5B). The discipline with the next largest share of dissatisfied departments, 16%, was race/ethnic studies. Communication departments offered the most positive assessment of the career services offered to their students, with an estimated 68% rating them “good” or “very good.”
• Communication departments were the most likely among those in the humanities to have a professional program (such as a teacher credentialing program or a journalism program; Figure 5C). An estimated 37% of departments in the discipline had such a program in fall 2017. At least 30% of English, history, LLE, linguistics, and musicology departments also offered professional programs. Such programs were substantially less common among departments in the other disciplines, however.
• Relatively few humanities departments had faculty teaching in professional schools (e.g., business school, law school, engineering, or medical/dental/nursing school; Figure 5D) at their colleges and universities. While an estimated 29% of LLE departments taught courses in a professional school, that was the only discipline in which more than 20% of the departments did so.1  While the role of ethics training is often noted in the media as important for business and medical practitioners, just 17% of philosophy departments had faculty teaching in a professional school.
• The need to expose humanities students (at the undergraduate and graduate level) to information on a range of career options has been widely discussed in recent years. A new set of questions included in the most recent HDS found that at every degree level, departments tended to offer but not require participation in career-related activities. For bachelor’s degree students, an estimated 13% of humanities departments required an internship, and 20% required participation in occupationally oriented coursework or workshops (Figure 5E). For students pursuing terminal master’s degrees, the figures were 8% and 15% (Figure 5F). For doctoral students, less than 9% of departments required participation in any of the occupationally oriented activities about which the survey inquired (Figure 5G).
• A new set of questions in the latest round of the HDS asked departments whether they tracked career outcomes for their graduate students. An estimated 40% of humanities departments tracked career outcomes for all their graduate students, and another 21% tracked only doctoral students (Figure 5H). Another 29% did no career tracking, while 10% were not sure whether the department tracked students.
• While approximately two-thirds of the departments in race/ethnic studies and American studies tracked the career progress of all their graduate students, only 25% of English and history of science departments did so. Another 20% of English departments tracked outcomes for doctoral students—slightly less than the share of English departments (23%) that were not sure whether they did such tracking.

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Endnotes

• 1Percentages were calculated across only those departments whose institutions have professional schools.