the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report

Thank you, my friend LTC (Join to see) for sharing. When I first read the title I wondered what BA stood for in context.

I am not surprised that there has been a decrease in BAs awarded in history disciplines.

I received a BS in general Engineering from USMA, West Point in 1980. I have always enjoyed history and studied it since the late 1960's.

"Since the economic crisis of 2008, the pattern of undergraduate majors has been shifting across American higher education. Of all the major disciplines, history has seen the steepest declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded. In 2008, the National Center for Education Statistics reported 34,642 majors in history; in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, the number was 24,266. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of history majors fell by over 1,500. Even as university enrollments have grown, history has seen its raw numbers erode heavily. The drops have been especially heavy since 2011–12, the first years for which students who saw the financial crisis in action could easily change their majors; of all the fields I’ve looked at (Fig. 1), history has fallen more than any other in the last six years.
Image: Fig1-1 Change in numbers of BAs awarded from 2011 to 2017.
This represents a long-term low for the history major. National data on the numbers of degrees awarded in different disciplines generally start around 1966, but years ago, while working for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, I collected data on a number of humanities majors going back to the 1950s. While the 66 percent drop in history’s share from 1969 to 1985 remains the most bruising period in the discipline’s history, that drop followed a period of rapid expansion in share connected to the boom in higher education of the 1960s. The drop in the last decade has put us below the discipline’s previous low point in the 1980s (Fig. 2).

Share can be a misleading metric. Higher education as a whole has drawn in new groups of students in the past half century, so historians sometimes assume that we must not be losing after taking these statistics into account. But even considering history degrees as a percentage of all college-age adults in the United States, the current level of 5.3 degrees per 1,000 23-year-olds sits well below the peaks in 1971 (11.8 per 1,000) and 1993 (7.6 per 1,000), though above the mid-80s trough. Since older students and international students have become more common, this probably underestimates our slide within the core college-going population. Setting ratios aside altogether, the raw number of BAs in history awarded in 2017 was smaller than in any year since 1991, and lower than each year between 1965 and 1977.

Figure: Fig2-1 History's share of all U.S. Bachelors degrees since 1950

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS
The decline in history has struck all demographic groups, but some patterns do emerge (Fig. 3). The most pronounced losses have been among Asian American students, who were already underrepresented in history departments relative to their share of all students. The drop among white students, who make up 71 percent of history degrees and 58 percent of all BAs, is a bit lower. Hispanic students, who are represented among history majors at the same rate they attend college, mirror the overall trend. African American and American Indian/Alaska Native students—two other groups that are underrepresented in history relative to other majors—have seen the smallest declines.

The drop in history’s share of undergraduate majors in the last decade has put us below the discipline’s previous low point in the 1980s.

Part of the long-term pattern for history has come from the relatively steep decline in women’s interest. As Heidi Tworek explored in a 2013 Atlantic article, this trend emerged in the 1970s: pre-professional majors became more welcoming of women, so they were less inclined to major in liberal arts disciplines. Except among white and multi-racial students, the rate of decline has been notably greater among women than among men; Asian American women were less than half as likely to major in history in 2017 as in 2011. One result of this shift seems to be that women are now slightly more underrepresented among history majors (40.5 percent vs. 42.5 percent of all degrees, as opposed to about 57 percent of BAs in all fields) than they were in the mid-2000s. (A note on categories: unlike some other statistical series, the Department of Education considers gender to be strictly binary and “Hispanic” to be a race akin to “Asian” or “White”; it removes race from foreign alien status for reporting purposes.)"

COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC (Join to see) Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. 'Bill' Price Maj Marty Hogan SCPO Morris Ramsey SGT Mark Halmrast Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Gregory Lawritson CPL Dave Hoover SPC Margaret Higgins SSgt Brian Brakke 1stSgt Eugene Harless CPT Scott Sharon SSG William Jones

Fortunately or unfortunately we have pushed students to pick a marketable degree and history is not seen as anything but leading to a teaching certificate.

I admit that I focus on imperialistic history.