Humanities departments across American colleges graduated their lowest number of majors in 2025 since 1991, according to a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
At Stanford, the popularity crisis is nothing new.
The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by the University in the humanities and arts has fallen 56% since 2003. This decline, from 324 in 2003-2004 to 143 in 2025-2026, has continued even as the overall number of undergraduate degrees granted has increased.
The reasons for this decline vary. According to nationwide research conducted by the Academy, students are driven by “concerns about employability, the effects of high-stakes standardized testing in humanities subjects and decreasing interest among young people in teaching as a career.”
Assistant Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences Jeff Schwegman has worked on “demystifying” the humanities at Stanford since 2014.
Stanford students in particular, he said, are wary of the absence of a clear career “escalator” in the humanities — a predictable, linear pathway to employment. In the process of reaching the top of the college escalator, high-achieving students have their comfort zone and identity shaped by an experience where their goal is clear: get in.
Students naturally look for another path to drive their college and post-college trajectory, Schwegman said. For students who are undecided on their degree, a clearer career path with a well-trodden recruiting or internship trajectory, like computer science or engineering, provides a more secure default.
“These liberal arts fields and what you would do with them [are] not like that. It’s definitely uncomfortable and can feel risky,” Schwegman said.
Schwegman has developed on-ramp courses with the hope of simplifying access to the humanities for curious students. “HUMSCI 1: Navigating the Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford” helps students explore each department through guest lectures.
To help students envision possible humanities-driven career options, he introduced survey courses like URBANST 190A: “Public Service and Social Impact Pathways to Purposeful Careers” and ENGLISH 119: “Pitching and Publishing in Popular Media.”
Departmental structures pose another problem. In an op-ed in “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” Director of Introductory Studies and French professor Dan Edelstein wrote that students exploring the humanities for the first time don’t know where to start.
“We have carved up humanistic learning according to research specializations of which our students are wholly ignorant,” Edelstein wrote.
To solve this, Edelstein proposed making humanities courses more accessible to nonmajors. Instead of creating humanities courses with the goal of leading students into niche fields, he proposed having courses teach more generalized topics and integrate skills everyone needs, like composition and rhetoric.
Similar strategies have worked before: he cited an example of when Purdue University saw enrollment in humanities classes skyrocket when they began offering courses on “transformative texts” that focus on classic works.
Schwegman noted that another driver of disinterest in the humanities is a communication issue. Other areas of study have clearer paths towards public-facing products, like new technologies or policy proposals.
“The humanities sometimes can do that, but often what they do is not really solve challenges,” Schwegman said. “They instead pose new questions or pose new perspectives or put things in conversation with each other that make you recontextualize something.”
According to Rowan Dorin, history professor and director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, humanists need to change the language they use when communicating their work to the public.
“We historians discover lots of things, but we very rarely frame our discipline in the language of discovery,” he said. “I think we could do a better job of capturing the excitement of what we do in the language that we use to describe it.”
Stanford’s Public Humanities Initiative was founded in 2020 with the attempt to address this issue by ensuring “academic research and knowledge production can meet a public audience,” according to its website. The initiative supports scholars’ publications and funds public humanities projects for students and faculty.
Not everyone agrees that the humanities are becoming less popular at Stanford. Some professors cautioned not to use declining interest as a definitive measure of engagement with Stanford humanities.
In fact, many see the Stanford humanities as flourishing. According to Dorin, award-winning student publications, active undergraduate organizations and popular minors programs – like the surging creative writing program – demonstrate Stanford undergraduates’ deep engagement with the humanities beyond majors.
Decreased enrollment in humanities classes may actually result in higher quality teaching, Edelstein wrote in his op-ed, observing that humanities teaching excels most in small discussion seminars. Increasing engagement in the humanities “need not mean coaxing hundreds of apathetic students into attending your lectures on Dante or the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote.
“It does mean that, if done well, there will in fact be a need to hire more faculty to lead small-group seminar discussions,” Edelstein continued.
Changes in humanities education pose challenges and opportunities. To Dorin and Edelstein, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), for instance, is cause for optimism.
“This is a great moment for the humanities, but more broadly, liberal education to really make its case for its relevance, not just for students’ souls, but for their futures and their careers,” Edelstein said.