Students

• Among art history departments that were granting degrees in 2007, total enrollment in undergraduate courses was 127,380 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 431.8 per department).2
• On average, art history departments awarded 12 bachelor’s degrees per department in the 2016–17 academic year (a statistically significant decrease from five years earlier). Students completed a nearly equal number of minors in the 2016–17 academic year (an average of 11.8 per department).
• Total enrollment in graduate-level art history courses was 6,920 in fall 2017 (with an average enrollment of 23.5 per department). The average number of students pursuing an advanced degree in art history was 59 per department that offered such degrees.

Faculty

• Art history departments employed 2,460 full- and part-time faculty members in fall 2017, with an average of 8.3 faculty members per department. Seventy-two percent of these faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track. Just over a fifth of faculty in the discipline were employed part-time.
• Thirty-six percent of art history departments hired a new permanent faculty member for the start of the 2017–18 academic year, and 37% of the departments had a faculty member come up for tenure in the previous two years.
• Women constituted 64% of the faculty members in art history departments in fall 2017, more than every other discipline included in the survey except women/gender studies. Fifty-seven percent of tenured faculty members were women, compared to 74% of faculty members on the tenure track (this share reflects a significant increase from 2012) and 71% of those off the tenure track.
• While 98% of art history departments provided research support for full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members and 79% offered such support for full-time nontenured or non-tenure-track faculty, only 39% offered such support for part-time faculty.

Supporting Student Careers

• Fifty-four percent of art history departments rated the career services at their college or university “good” or “very good” for their students, while 10% rated the services “poor.”

Engaging the Digital

• Twenty-four percent of art history departments had one or more faculty members specializing in the digital humanities, while 20% had formal guidelines for evaluating digital publications for tenure and promotion.
• In the 2016–17 academic year, 19% of art history departments offered fully online courses, while 11% offered hybrid courses. Departments offered an average of four fully online courses and 1.1 hybrid courses (each average was calculated over the number of departments offering a course of that kind).

Endnotes

• 2Students who enrolled in more than one course in the discipline are counted in each course in which they enrolled. The same is true for the graduate course enrollment values given below. Medians for all “per department” quantities mentioned in this section are available in the corresponding data tables (please see the Appendix, Part B).