Posted on 09/05/2023 9:48:58 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
In an era of soaring tuition fees and mounting student debt, choosing which undergraduate degree to pursue has become a crucial decision for any aspiring college student. And it always helps to see which way the winds are blowing.
As Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao shares below, this visualization by Kashish Rastogi, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), examines the changing landscape of undergraduate degrees awarded between the 2010–2011 and 2020–2021 academic years.
The NCES classifies all four-year bachelor degrees into 38 fields of study. Of these fields, 21 saw an increase in graduates in 2020–2021 compared to 2010–2011.
While only those with more than 30,000 graduates have been shown in the graphic (to prevent overrepresentation of large changes in small pools of graduates), the full list is available below.
| Rank | Field of Study | 2010–2011 | 2020–2021 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Business | 363,919 | 390,781 | +7% |
| 2 | Health Professions | 143,463 | 268,018 | +87% |
| 3 | Biomedical Sciences | 89,984 | 131,499 | +46% |
| 4 | Psychology | 100,906 | 126,944 | +26% |
| 5 | Engineering | 76,356 | 126,037 | +65% |
| 6 | Computer Sciences | 43,066 | 104,874 | +144% |
| 7 | Communication | 83,231 | 90,775 | +9% |
| 8 | Security & Law Enforcement | 47,600 | 58,009 | +22% |
| 9 | Interdisciplinary Studies | 42,473 | 54,584 | +29% |
| 10 | Leisure & Fitness Studies | 35,934 | 54,294 | +51% |
| 11 | Public Administration | 26,799 | 34,817 | +30% |
| 12 | Physical Sciences | 24,338 | 28,706 | +18% |
| 13 | Mathematics | 17,182 | 27,092 | +58% |
| 14 | Agriculture Sciences | 15,851 | 21,418 | +35% |
| 15 | Natural Resources & Conservation | 12,779 | 20,507 | +61% |
| 16 | Engineering Technologies | 16,187 | 18,562 | +15% |
| 17 | Transportation | 4,941 | 5,993 | +21% |
| 18 | Legal | 4,429 | 4,589 | +4% |
| 19 | Military Technologies | 64 | 1,524 | +2,281% |
| 20 | Science Technologies | 367 | 532 | +45% |
| 21 | Library Science | 96 | 119 | +24% |
Note: Field of study names have been edited slightly from their NCES labels for better readability.
Let’s take a look at the areas of study that were most popular, as well as some of the fastest growing fields:
Bachelor’s degrees in this discipline have grown by 144% since 2010–2011, with over 100,000 graduates in 2020–2021. The allure of the tech sector’s explosive growth likely contributed to its popularity among students.
Undergraduate degrees in health professions saw an 87% increase, attracting nearly 260,000 graduates in 2020–2021. This field accounted for 13% of the total graduating class, reflecting the growing appeal of the healthcare sector.
There were 50,000 more engineering graduates in the U.S. in 2021, up 65% from 2011. With a median income over $100,000 per year, engineering graduates can usually rely on good wages as well as versatility in future careers, capable of finding jobs in tech, design, and communication fields, and of course, becoming future entrepreneurs.
University graduates in this field, which focuses on the integration of the study of biology with health and medicine, grew by 46%. A subset of this category—epidemiology—has been in the limelight recently thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While this category recorded a modest 7% growth in graduates, its popularity has been indisputable in the last decade, representing the largest proportion of the graduating class in both 2011 and 2021.
Meanwhile, 17 areas of study experienced declines in the number of completed university degrees. We explore some of the notable ones below:
| Rank | Field of Study | 2010–2011 | 2020–2021 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Social Sciences | 142,161 | 1,37,908 | -3% |
| 2 | Visual & Performing Arts | 93,939 | 90,022 | -4% |
| 3 | Education | 104,008 | 89,398 | -14% |
| 4 | Liberal Arts | 46,717 | 41,909 | -10% |
| 5 | English | 52,754 | 35,762 | -32% |
| 6 | History | 35,008 | 22,919 | -35% |
| 7 | Human Sciences | 22,438 | 22,319 | -1% |
| 8 | Foreign Languages | 21,705 | 15,518 | -29% |
| 9 | Philosophy & Religion | 12,830 | 11,988 | -7% |
| 10 | Architecture | 9,831 | 9,296 | -5% |
| 11 | Ethnic, Cultural & Gender Studies | 8,955 | 7,374 | -18% |
| 12 | Theology | 9,073 | 6,737 | -26% |
| 13 | Communications Tech | 4,858 | 4,557 | -6% |
| 14 | Personal & Culinary Services | 1,214 | 594 | -51% |
| 15 | Construction Trades | 328 | 221 | -33% |
| 16 | Mechanic & Repair | 226 | 221 | -2% |
| 17 | Precision Production | 43 | 28 | -35% |
Popular in the 1970s, the English undergraduate degree has gone through peaks (80s and 90s) and troughs (2000s and 10s) of popularity in the last 50 years. Between 2010–2011 and 2020–2021, the number of students with an English degree has fallen by a third.
The state of English’s woes are even making its way to pop culture, like in Netflix’s The Chair, which follows the head of a struggling English department at a major university.
The existing teacher shortage in the United States does not seem to be getting fixed by a burgeoning supply of new grads. In fact, the number of university graduates in Education fell 14% between 2011 and 2021. With concerns around stagnant wages, burnout, and little to no support for supplies, many teachers are seeing an already demanding job becoming harder.
In the classic era, the liberal arts covered seven fields of study: rhetoric, grammar, logic, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music. Now, liberal art degrees include several other subjects: history, political science, and even philosophy—but students are meant to primarily walk away with critical thinking skills.
The modern world rewards specialization however, and a wider-scope liberal arts degree is seeing fewer takers, with a 10% drop in graduating students.
IOW people are running, not walking, to degrees with actual job prospects.
Oldest graduated with a BA in PoliSci. Working to break into a political campaign, PAC, or Advocacy Group.
Middle child going for a BS in Microbiology. Looking at micology or medical scientist for Masters.
Youngest child plans to go for BS in technical writing/computer science.
No underwater basket weaving or lesbian dance theory for my crew.
I think that “health sciences” is misleading; its not people with actual practice in medicine, but “health care policy” and such other nonsense.
Wrong. NOW, They are meant to primarily to be programmed into and NPC democrap party lefist.
Sad to see English and History decline so precipitously but their faculties are now over run with critical and gender theorists (so not really all that surprised).
Yale English majors need not take a Shakespeare class (and Yale Law grads need not take a class in Constitutional Law). What a world!
A bachelors in nursing will help you get an RN You’ll need a masters to be an NP
I'm sure that that would prove most enlightening!
Regards,
Not nearly enough engineers. We’re importing close to 50% of staff from everywhere overseas. Send your sons to engineering schools.
54,000 degrees a year in “parks, recreation, leisure and fitness.” Damn, I wish that I had thought to major in “leisure.” This country is so screwed.
What’s “social science”
Maybe students are moving away from a liberal arts degree, history, English, philosophy, etc. because they know they will have to put up with woke culture crap, whereas in other more objective subject fields they won’t have to deal with PC bull.
That’s too bad, as many of these liberal arts fields are so important to our societal well being. You have to be able to communicate and speak correctly, as well as be well read with a knowledge of great literature to have a living sense of our culture, past and present.
Same with history, so we can avoid some of the pitfalls of it, and what mistakes not to make, as well as to see how those in our past coped and dealt with the world they were born into. It is legacy, ancestry, our past that continually built upon itself to achieve all that led us to our present. Without knowledge of history we have no foundation to build upon.
We have got to get the “woke” and cultural pollution out of our colleges. Conservatives too often are concentrating on their businesses and nest building to the detriment of keeping an eye on how our culture has been developing, and it has been going downhill rapidly. We weren’t paying attention to the University indoctrination centers, to the adverse effects of social and mass media, and allowed too many of our institutions to be taken over by the radical left.
It started in our Universities and Colleges, and has permeated down through K-12 as well now. While conservatives worked for a living, the socialist/commie/nazi/pinko/Dem libs were busy organizing, building a welfare system of non-workers who could go out at the drop of a hat to protest on the streets and generating College campus protests and riots, changing our culture to the point that now it is almost not recognizable.
We did not have a closely watched pot, and now it has come back to bite us. If we don’t take action now as if our very way of life is at stake, and it is; that way of life will be destroyed. We are at war folks, and if we don’t wake up (not “woke” up) we can kiss our cultural norms goodbye as we morph into an authoritarian dictatorship, a tyranny of the minority, and we truly become a third world banana republic.
Why else do you think the radical left is making sure our country is flooded with third world illegal aliens with no vested interest in our culture or way of life. The radicals will tear down our social mores by massive cultural infiltration in order to rebuild our country into their vision of a cultural Utopia, and thus destroy us and turn us into a third world country. with the cultural and financial elite masters ruling over the financially and socially dependent peasants living on the dole and/or totally subservient to the State.
The time to react was yesterday and is now, the time is short, the civil war has begun whether we know it or not. And we better know it real fast. Our survival as a Republic depends on it.
Encourage the younger. The shortage of competent technical writers is critical.
Technical writers creed; No motherhood and apples to pie.:
Encourage the younger. The shortage of competent technical writers is critical.
Technical writers creed; No motherhood and apple pie.
I was a history major in the era before the PC Revisionists had really taken over. You could still get a balanced perspective on history and they weren’t averse to teaching us about Western Civilization. This was the early 90s. Since then the 60’s Leftists completed their long march through the institutions and have taken over the history faculty everywhere.
So now they’re taught the all about slavery myth, they’re taught that America’s foundation was racist, all Westerners/White people are uniquely bad and evil presumably except for Marx and Engels, and everybody who came before them is bad.
Of course the only thing the history degree was good for was getting me into grad school where I learned things that could actually get me employed. If I had it to do over again, I’d have been a business or accounting major.
Nice comment. Thank you for all that effort!
Great post. I only have one addition. The STEM fields have also unfortunately also been infltrated by DEI and wokeness.
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