Dive Brief:
- A survey of 636 universities by the Council of Graduate Schools found overall growth in graduate school enrollment from 2013 to 2014 but not across all program types.
- The Chronicle of Higher Education reports 3.5% combined growth across master's and doctoral programs includes a .5% drop in enrollment for arts and humanities programs.
- Experts say the downward trend of about 1% per year since 2009 reflects programs that have shrunk intentionally to better serve students and prospective students who have made decisions based on a tough job market in their field.
Dive Insight:
Downsizing — which is "not an across-the-board phenomenon," said Suzanne T. Ortega, the council’s president — is not necessarily the reason for the decline.
The number of humanities Ph.D.s was not the only one to shrink from 2013 to 2014 and the drop was not even the largest. According to the Council of Graduate Schools report, the number of graduate students in business dropped 1.3% and the number in physical and earth sciences dropped 1.9%. Both of those fields have seen steady annual declines since 2009, just like the humanities.