The Contrarian’s Edge: How Declining Humanities Enrollment Could Work in Your Favor

Why the students everyone else is ignoring may hold the strongest admissions hand.

If you’re a high school student who lights up over Latin verb conjugations, who reads philosophy for fun, or who chose to study Mandarin when everyone else signed up for AP Computer Science, you’ve probably heard the skeptics. Why study that? What will you do with it? Is it worth the tuition?

Here’s what the skeptics don’t know: the very trends that make your interests seem unfashionable may be quietly creating one of the most significant admissions advantages in a generation. The numbers tell a story that flips the conventional wisdom on its head.

We analyzed degree completion data from 1,636 four-year institutions over the past decade, alongside IPEDS admissions and enrollment data, to understand exactly how the landscape has shifted—and what it means for students like you.

The Scissors Effect: More Applicants, Fewer Humanities Majors

Two massive trends have been moving in opposite directions for a decade, and their intersection creates an opportunity that most families haven’t noticed.

On one side, college applications have surged 51% since 2015. The average four-year institution now receives more than 9,000 applications per year, up from about 6,200 a decade ago. The admissions landscape feels more competitive than ever—and for the most popular majors at the most popular schools, it genuinely is.

On the other side, degree completions in fields like foreign languages, classics, and philosophy have fallen 32% over the same period. The number of schools still graduating classics majors dropped from 228 to just 187. Foreign language programs shrank from 892 institutions to 795. Entire departments are contracting, merging, or, in some cases, closing.

The widening gap between those two lines represents something very specific: a supply-and-demand imbalance that savvy applicants can exploit. As more students pile into computer science, business, and engineering, the humanities side of the admissions equation is getting quieter—and quieter means less competitive.

How Rare Are These Degrees? Rarer Than You Think

To appreciate the scale of the opportunity, consider how few students are earning degrees in the fields we’re discussing.

In 2024, just 748 students in the entire United States earned a bachelor’s degree in classics. To put that in perspective, computer science produced 44,364 graduates—meaning there were 59 CS graduates for every single classics graduate. That ratio was 14-to-1 just a decade ago.

Philosophy produced 5,492 graduates nationally. Foreign languages and linguistics produced 12,242. These are not mid-size fields; they are small, concentrated disciplines that increasingly exist at a select group of institutions.

This scarcity matters for admissions. When a university’s philosophy department graduates a median of just 5 students per year, or its classics program graduates a median of 3, those departments are acutely aware that they need students. A prospective applicant who demonstrates genuine passion and preparation in these fields isn’t competing against a flood of similar candidates—they’re filling a seat that the department is struggling to fill.

The Shrinking Pipeline: A Decade of Decline, Field by Field

The decline isn’t concentrated in one or two fields—it’s broad-based across the humanities, though the depth varies.

Foreign languages have suffered the steepest percentage decline, dropping 37%—from 19,566 completions in 2015 to 12,242 in 2024. That’s more than 7,300 fewer graduates per year studying Spanish, French, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and dozens of other languages at the bachelor’s level.

English lost a third of its graduates, falling from 45,508 to 30,432—a loss of more than 15,000 annual completions, the single largest raw decline among humanities fields.

Classics dropped 32%, from 1,099 to 748, and only 187 institutions in the country still graduate students in the field. Philosophy fared somewhat better in percentage terms, declining 15% from 6,437 to 5,492, though its smaller departments are increasingly vulnerable.

Each of these downward lines represents real departmental pressure: fewer teaching assistantships, fewer students in seminars, and—critically—a growing incentive for those departments to advocate strongly for admitted applicants who express interest in their fields.

Why This Creates an Admissions Advantage

Admissions at selective institutions is not a single competition. It’s a portfolio construction exercise. Admissions offices are building a class, and that class needs depth across disciplines. A university that fills its incoming class entirely with aspiring CS and business majors has failed at its educational mission—and admissions officers know it.

Several structural dynamics work in the humanities applicant’s favor:

Departmental advocacy. At many institutions, academic departments have a voice in the admissions process. Faculty in humanities departments review applications, flag promising students, and advocate for admits who will populate their courses and sustain their programs. A student whose application demonstrates genuine depth in Latin, philosophy, or literary analysis may receive the kind of focused faculty support that a student applying to an oversubscribed CS or biology track simply cannot.

Demonstrated intellectual curiosity. In a test-optional admissions landscape—where SAT submission rates have collapsed from 49% to just 20% since 2015—the personal essay, extracurriculars, and academic narrative carry more weight than ever. A student who has pursued an unusual intellectual passion—translating Ovid, writing a philosophy blog, conducting independent research on linguistic diversity—stands out in a way that another AP-laden STEM transcript may not. Admissions readers at selective institutions report reviewing thousands of applications from students with identical profiles: high GPA, standard test scores, similar clubs. A humanities applicant with genuine depth breaks that pattern in a way that is immediately memorable.

Lower internal competition. When a university receives 15,000 applications and 4,000 indicate interest in business or CS while 35 indicate interest in classics or philosophy, the competitive calculus is very different for those 35 applicants. They are not competing against 4,000 peers for a limited number of seats; they are competing against a small, often thin pool for seats that the institution actively wants to fill.

Interdisciplinary signal. Students who combine humanities depth with any secondary technical skill—coding, data analysis, quantitative research—present an especially compelling profile. The growth of interdisciplinary studies (up 15% over the decade) and data science (from zero to 2,020 graduates in five years) suggests institutions value these bridges. A student who reads Aristotle and writes Python is, from an admissions standpoint, genuinely rare.

Where the Advantage Is Strongest

Not all institutions offer the same opportunity. The admissions advantage for humanities-inclined students is most pronounced at three types of schools:

Elite liberal arts colleges and Ivy-tier universities. Our data shows that Ivy Plus and other elite institutions historically allocated 16–21% of degrees to arts and humanities. These schools are deeply committed to maintaining humanities strength and are particularly receptive to applicants who will sustain that tradition. Their admissions processes are also the most holistic, meaning a distinctive humanities narrative carries the most weight.

Selective public flagships. Many state flagships have seen their humanities departments contract even as overall enrollment holds steady or grows. A student applying to the University of Washington’s classics program or the University of Virginia’s philosophy department is entering a far less crowded admissions lane than one applying to those schools’ engineering or business programs. At these institutions, the humanities often represent the best ratio of educational quality to admissions difficulty—world-class faculty, small seminar classes, and research opportunities that would be reserved for graduate students in a larger department.

Schools with specific departmental strengths. Institutions like William & Mary (15 classics graduates in 2024), Georgetown (15), or the University of Vermont (13) have maintained robust programs in small fields. Targeting schools where the department is thriving—rather than contracting—maximizes both the admissions benefit and the quality of the educational experience.

How to Build the Strongest Application

If you’re a humanities-oriented student who wants to leverage these trends, the data suggests several concrete strategies:

Go deep, not wide. Admissions officers are looking for authentic intellectual engagement, not a laundry list of AP courses. If you love philosophy, don’t just take the AP class—start an ethics discussion group, write for a philosophy journal, or audit a college course. Depth signals genuine commitment; breadth signals box-checking.

Learn the language—literally. Foreign language proficiency is one of the most legible signals of humanities seriousness, and it’s increasingly rare. The data shows that only 12,242 students graduated with foreign language degrees in 2024, down from nearly 20,000 a decade ago. A student with demonstrated fluency or advanced study in a less common language (Arabic, Mandarin, classical Greek, or Latin) holds a credential that few peers can match.

Pair humanities with something unexpected. The most distinctive profiles bridge worlds. A student who studies classics and machine learning, or who writes about the philosophy of artificial intelligence, or who uses GIS mapping to study historical migration patterns, presents a profile that admissions committees remember. These combinations aren’t gimmicks—they reflect the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of modern intellectual work.

Target schools with invested departments. Research which institutions have active, well-supported programs in your field of interest. Look for schools with dedicated faculty (not just adjuncts), recent hires, undergraduate research opportunities, and study-abroad programs in relevant areas. A strong department will be your strongest advocate in the admissions process.

Name your major early. On the Common App and institutional supplements, clearly indicate your intended humanities major. Many students leave this blank or write “undecided.” In a landscape where humanities departments are hungry for committed students, a clear signal of intent can trigger the departmental review that gets your application a second look.

The Long View: Career Outcomes and Beyond

The admissions advantage is real, but so are the questions about what comes next. Families rightly wonder whether a classics or philosophy degree leads to a viable career.

The honest answer is that it depends on the student—but the aggregate data is far more encouraging than the popular narrative suggests. Philosophy majors consistently score among the highest of any discipline on the LSAT, GMAT, and GRE. Classics graduates enter law, medicine, education, publishing, and public service in large numbers. Foreign language proficiency is a critical hiring criterion in diplomacy, intelligence, international business, and increasingly in technology and healthcare.

It’s also worth noting that the salary gap between humanities and STEM graduates narrows significantly over time. Entry-level figures dominate the headlines, but mid-career data tells a different story. Many of the highest-paid professionals in law, consulting, finance, and executive leadership hold undergraduate humanities degrees. The skills these disciplines cultivate—rigorous argumentation, cross-cultural fluency, the ability to write clearly and persuade—compound in value over a career in ways that narrow technical skills sometimes do not.

And there is a scarcity argument here too: as the pipeline of humanities graduates shrinks—161,000 in 2024, down from 196,000 in 2015—the graduates who do emerge face less competition for graduate fellowships, research positions, and the growing number of roles in AI ethics, content strategy, cultural consulting, and UX research that explicitly seek humanistic training.

The data won’t make the decision for you. But if you’re a student whose heart is in the humanities, the numbers are unambiguous: you’re not swimming against the current. You’re finding open water. And in an admissions landscape where 14.6 million applications chased roughly the same number of seats in 2024, open water is exactly what you want.

 

Data in this article is drawn from IPEDS Degree Completions for 1,636 four-year institutions, 2015–2024, supplemented by IPEDS institutional panel data on admissions, enrollment, and demographics, and the Mobility Report Card College Level Characteristics dataset.