Impact

Who Takes Humanities Courses? A Lot of Social Scientists Impact
Oh, the humanities!

Who Takes Humanities Courses? A Lot of Social Scientists

August 19, 2014 2717

Oh, the humanities!

Oh, the humanities!

Besides humanities majors, who takes courses say, in philosophy, art or history, in college and university? In the United States, it’s prospective social scientists. And who doesn’t? Future engineers.

So reports the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators website, using the latest (2008) data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, which is a product of the National Center for Education Statistics.

As Humanities Indicators wrote, “Both in terms of absolute numbers and share of all courses taken, engineering students earned the fewest humanities credits (11 percent of median number earned by these students in all subjects) while social scientists earned the most (equaling 22 percent of all credits).” Close behind social science are education majors with 18 percent of all credits drawn from the humanities.

Humanities majors returned the favor: They tend to take fewer credits of STEM courses than the STEM majors take in the humanities. There’s also an imbalance in social science, where humanities major take fewer courses than their friends in the social sciences take humanities courses.

The linkage between the humanities and social science fits into some preconceived notions about the larger academic landscape. Quite often the humanities and the social sciences are referred to  as a composite category (the so-called HSS, a not always happy alliance, as the cartoon below suggests) when surveying the academic landscape, just as the physical and biological sciences, engineering and mathematics get lumped into their own bin (STEM). The shorthand nonetheless concerns many in the social science community, who argue that social science is science and would rather see themselves considered among the STEM disciplines.

Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

(Courtesy: “Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham
www.phdcomics.com )

Although not part of the Humanities Indicators report, the NCES numbers find that outside of healthcare studies, more than 95 percent of bachelor’s degree majors took at last some social science coursework. (Of course, a lot of that might have to do with general education mandates, and the NCES figures don’t break out what those might be on average.) Here’s the median number of social science credits earned by major, with engineering again taking the fewest courses: computer and information science, 11 credits; engineering, 9; biological and physical science, math and agriculture, 14; health care, 12; business, 15; social science, 48; humanities, 15; and education, 15.

The analysis is a little different from many past examinations, which focus on declared majors and not actual courses taken. “Compared with our knowledge about students who take courses in the sciences, we know very little about who takes humanities courses in college,” explained the co-principal investigator of Humanities Indicators, Norman Bradburn, the former provost of the University of Chicago. “With the sciences, most of what we know is about majors rather than courses taken because data on majors are more readily available.”

Bradburn noted that the more common metric obscured the impact of humanities overall. “Although humanities majors constitute a smaller proportion of college graduates than do science majors (12 percent vs. 15 percent), it is surprising to find that college students as a whole take a higher number of humanities courses than STEM courses (22 credits vs. 17 credits or about 17 percent vs. 14 percent of their total credit hours).”


Related Articles

Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures
Impact
September 23, 2024

Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures

Read Now
Paper to Advance Debate on Dual-Process Theories Genuinely Advanced Debate
Impact
September 18, 2024

Paper to Advance Debate on Dual-Process Theories Genuinely Advanced Debate

Read Now
The Future of Business is Interdisciplinary 
Interdisciplinarity
September 5, 2024

The Future of Business is Interdisciplinary 

Read Now
Webinar: Fundamentals of Research Impact
Event
September 4, 2024

Webinar: Fundamentals of Research Impact

Read Now
Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later

Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later

An article in the journal Psychological Science, “The New Statistics: Why and How” by La Trobe University’s Geoff Cumming, has proved remarkably popular in the years since and is the third-most cited paper published in a Sage journal in 2013.

Read Now
A Milestone Dataset on the Road to Self-Driving Cars Proves Highly Popular

A Milestone Dataset on the Road to Self-Driving Cars Proves Highly Popular

The idea of an autonomous vehicle – i.e., a self-driving car – isn’t particularly new. Leonardo da Vinci had some ideas he […]

Read Now
Why Social Science? Because It Can Help Contribute to AI That Benefits Society

Why Social Science? Because It Can Help Contribute to AI That Benefits Society

Social sciences can also inform the design and creation of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI development and for deployment into systems. Social scientists can contribute expertise: on data quality, equity, and reliability; on how bias manifests in AI algorithms and decision-making processes; on how AI technologies impact marginalized communities and exacerbate existing inequities; and on topics such as fairness, transparency, privacy, and accountability.

Read Now
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments