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In recent years, the Humanities Indicators staff has received numerous questions about whether college students who start a humanities degree are more or less likely to finish it than those who start other majors, and how the movement into and out of humanities majors compares to those of other fields of study. To answer these questions, the American Çï¿ûÊÓƵ of Arts and Sciences commissioned an analysis by National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), the source of the most comprehensive data available on the pathways taken by students through higher education. For this analysis, NSC examined entering students’ choice of major in fall 2017—upon the start of a program of studies toward a bachelor’s degree—and then their status as of June 2024. Except where noted below, this cohort is the unit of analysis for all that follows. While the study focuses on only one group of students, it offers a useful starting point for further consideration of the humanities major, with three suggestive findings:

1. Students who start their studies in a humanities discipline are slightly more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree within seven years than college students generally (and even more likely to do so if they completed an associate’s degree before starting at a four-year institution).
    
2. Among students who completed a degree in a humanities discipline, more than half had started their studies in another major—either a nonhumanities field or a general liberal arts major.
    
3. Among students who completed a degree with a second major, the share who had humanities as a second major was twice the size of the share who graduated with a primary major in the humanities. This was primarily due to a disproportionately large share of humanities majors completing a second major in another humanities discipline.

The study also examined the recent trend in enrolled humanities majors and found a steady decline from fall 2017 to 2023, which indicates that the decline in students earning humanities degrees is likely to continue for at least a few more years.

Prior to this research, most of what we knew about college majors came from annual data on degree completions reported by colleges and universities to the U.S. Department of Education. The degree completions data provide invaluable information about the numbers of students completing degrees in particular fields and their demographics.1 But that data set provides only counts of degree completions and basic demographic information about graduates. It tells us nothing about changes of major, relationships between double majors, or how the fields compare in completion rates. This study attempts to fill in some of those gaps, albeit for only one cohort of students.