In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) began to gather data on double majoring that shed additional light on the extent to which Americans engage with the humanities as undergraduates. Unfortunately, these data are limited in two ways.

First, less than half of the colleges reporting degree completion data to NCES report second majors. As of 2022, only 1,064 colleges and universities reported the award of bachelor’s degrees as second majors, compared to 2,385 institutions reporting the award of first majors, despite a staff review that found that second majors are offered at many nonreporting colleges. As a result, the second-major counts provided below are likely undercounts. The second limitation of the data is that the information reported by colleges to NCES is for their institutions as a whole, not for individual students. As a result, we do not know on the basis of these data how likely a degree completer in a nonhumanities field is to complete a second major in the humanities. (To fill this information gap, the Humanities Indicators is conducting an analysis of transcript data that we expect to release in fall 2024. Registered users of the Humanities Indicators will be notified upon the release of the study. To register for such notifications, click here.)

Nevertheless, an analysis of the reported data indicates that the humanities’ share of second majors is more than twice as large as the field’s share of first majors. And among second majors, the number of humanities degrees fell more slowly than among primary majors.