Profile of Musicology Departments (HDS 3)
Findings and Trends
Students
- Among musicology departments that were granting degrees in 2012, enrollment in undergraduate courses was 49,220 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 529.2 per department).2
- On average, musicology departments awarded 21.3 bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year. Students also completed an average of 7.9 minors per department.
- Total enrollment in graduate-level musicology courses was 5,790 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 62.2 per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in musicology was 10.1 per department that granted such degrees.
Faculty
- Musicology departments employed 730 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of 7.8 faculty members per department. Sixty-eight percent of these faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track, and 22% were employed part-time.
- Twenty-nine percent of musicology departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year, and 45% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years.
- Women constituted 48% of the faculty members in musicology departments in fall 2017. Forty-one percent of tenured faculty members were women, compared to 53% of faculty members on the tenure track and 53% of those off the tenure track (this share reflects a statistically significant increase from 2012).
- While 97% of the musicology departments provided research support for their full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 70% offered such support for full-time nontenured or non-tenure-track faculty, only 19% offered such support for part-time faculty.
Supporting Student Careers
- Thirty-six percent of musicology departments rated the career services at their college or university “good” for their students, while 14% rated the services “poor.”
- A relatively large share—approximately 31%—of musicology departments had a professional program (such as teacher credentialing), and 18% (compared to 12% of departments across all disciplines) also had faculty teaching courses in a professional school at their college or university.
Engaging the Digital
- Fifteen percent of musicology departments had one or more faculty members specializing in the digital humanities—among the smallest shares found in the survey.
- In the 2016–17 academic year, 32% of musicology departments offered fully online courses, while 10% offered hybrid courses. Departments offered an average of 2.1 fully online courses and one hybrid course (each average was calculated over the number of departments offering a course of that kind).
Endnotes
- 2Students who enrolled in more than one course in the discipline are counted in each course in which they enrolled. The same is true for the graduate course enrollment values given below. Medians for all “per department” quantities mentioned in this section are available in the corresponding data tables (please see the Appendix, Part B).