Note on the Data Used to Calculate Undergraduate Humanities Degree Counts and Shares
The bulk of the data that form the basis of this indicator is drawn from the U.S.
Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Higher
Education General Information System (HEGIS; 1966–1986) and its successor, the Integrated
Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS; 1987–present), through which institutions
of higher learning report on the numbers and characteristics of students completing
degree programs (as well as a variety of other topics; for more on IPEDS, see
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/). The HEGIS/IPEDS
degree-completion data have been made accessible to decision-makers, researchers,
and the general public by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via its online data
analysis tool
WebCASPAR.
Degree-completion data for years 1948 through 1965 were derived from the Survey
of Earned Degrees, which was first administered by the Office of Education (the
Department of Education’s predecessor) and later by NCES. The Survey of Earned Degrees
data were culled from printed publications, because the information is not included
in WebCASPAR. For the trend lines extending back to 1948, data are presented only
for a limited portfolio of humanities disciplines, because the academic discipline
classification systems employed by NCES in its reporting on the Survey of Earned
Degrees and HEGIS are not fine-grained enough to capture the full complement of
disciplines considered by the Humanities Indicators (HI) to be within the scope
of the humanities. (For an inventory of the disciplines and activities treated as
part of the humanities by the HI, see the
Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.)
For 1987 and later years (1995 and later for data on the race/ethnicity of degree
recipients), however, WebCASPAR categorizes earned degrees according to the more
detailed Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). The CIP was first developed
by NCES in 1980 as a way of accounting for the tremendous variety of degree programs
offered by American institutions of higher learning and has been revised three times
since its introduction, most recently in 2009 (this version is referred to as “CIP
2010”). The CIP has also been adopted by Statistics Canada as its standard disciplinary
classification system. An analysis of completions using CIP permits the HI to include
earned degrees in a substantially greater number of the disciplines considered by
the HI to be part of the humanities field.
With CIP-coded data academic disciplines such as comparative
religion can be separated from vocational programs such as theology and thus can
be included in the humanities degree tally. Additionally, when using CIP-coded data,
the HI can include degrees in such disciplines as archeology, women’s studies, gay
and lesbian studies, and Holocaust studies in its counts of humanities degrees from
1987 onward.1
For an inventory of the CIP disciplinary categories included by the HI under the
field heading of “humanities” (as well as those categories of the NSF-developed
taxonomy of academic disciplines that are the basis of the HI’s tabulations of 1)
degrees in nonhumanities fields and 2) certain tabulations of humanities degrees
for years 1966–1986), see the
NSF and CIP Discipline Code Catalog. This catalog also indicates which degree
programs the HI includes within specific humanities disciplines (e.g., for the purposes
of the HI, English degrees include those classified under CIP as being in “English
Language and Literature,” “American Literature,” and “Creative Writing,” among others).
In the case of several of the degree-related indicators, the humanities are compared
to certain other fields such as the sciences and engineering. The nature of these
fields is specified in the
Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.
These broad fields do not encompass all postsecondary programs. Therefore, where
fields are being compared in terms of their respective shares of all degrees, the
percentages will not add up to 100%. Also, none of the graphs showing change over
time in the share of degrees awarded to members of traditionally underrepresented
ethnic/minority groups includes a data point for the academic year 1999, because
the NCES did not release such data for that year.
The bachelor’s degree counts presented in Figures II-1a and II-1b do not include
“second majors,” because NCES began collecting data about these degrees only in
2001. The HI deals separately with the issue of second majors in
Figure II-1c
(“Humanities Bachelor’s Degrees Earned as ‘Second Majors,’ 2001–2010”).
Data on the number of students completing minors are not collected as part of IPEDS,
but such information was compiled for selected humanities disciplines as part of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences–sponsored Humanities Departmental Survey
(HDS; see the HDS final report, page 8, Table 12).
Note
1 For those
indicators reporting only degree data for years 1987 and onward (1995 and onward
for the charts and tables describing the proportions of all degrees received by
members of traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups), CIP-coded
data are always the basis of the humanities degree counts presented.
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