Reply to WashPost: College is remade as tech majors surge and humanities dwindle

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[quote=Anonymous]There are 12 pages of comments on this newspaper story and, ironically, not one person on either side of the humanities v. STEMP/CS etc debate actually looked at the underlying data on this question.

The National Center for Education Statistics, a publication of the US Department of Education, publishes an annual report on Bachelor's Degrees conferred by field of study from a broad selection of schools and the data goes back fifty years.  It's not exactly majors (it's often groups of majors), but it gives you the general idea. The NCES' government data is not quite the same as the National Student Clearinghouse Research data cited in the Washington Post article for reasons that likely have to do with classification, but the big difference is that it shows the trends over a much longer period than just anecdotal information or the Wash Post story provides.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.asp

The upshot is that CS is indeed hot (although the field of study includes information sciences, which is broader and can include what used to be called library sciences), but so is Psychology and Health Professions (which doesn't include biology), both of which attract more students than CS.  Engineering, on the other hand, is slightly down or at least flat in recent years.  Other areas like Social Sciences and History are down from a decade ago, but have been pretty flat over the last 7-8 years.  Nevertheless, it's still one of the most popular fields of study.  Ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies, which is the bogeyman of some anti-education people, has always had very small enrollment and it has been flat for awhile.   All fields of study are dwarfed by Business, which has been the largest field of study since the mid-1980s, although it too has been relatively flat in recent years.[/quote]

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