Which college majors have exploded in popularity over the past decade and which have shrunk? Over the past two posts (#1, #2) I’ve discussed my analyses of the number of degrees awarded in various fields at US “R1” universities (“very high research activity”) between 2011 and 2021. I’ve wondered how I could convey the overall trends in a succinct, visually appealing way. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
I’ve plotted the degrees awarded in various categories, summed over all the R1s, and normalized by the 2011 value. The stunning rise of computer science that I noted in the last post is evident, with the number of degrees awarded in 2021 being nearly five times larger than in 2011. The drop in humanities degrees is also evident. These trends are superimposed on an overall increase in degrees awarded at these universities:
(These include double majors, and so the number of degrees awarded is larger than the number of students graduating.)
If we plot instead the fraction of degrees in each category, again normalized by the 2011 value, the movie is similar but the contractions in yellow are more apparent and the blue fields stay put:
Some clarifications and explanations:
- These data are only from “R1” universities. This is a set of about 100 and includes large schools like UC Berkeley and UT Austin, smaller schools like CalTech, and my own University of Oregon. It is, however, just one set of U.S. universities, and it omits, by definition, schools that don’t emphasize research activity. It would be interesting to do the same analysis on different Carnegie university classifications, but I haven’t bothered to download more Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data. (It’s a bit tedious.)
- We’re looking at my own categories of majors, taking degree codes from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) — see https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/browse.aspx?y=55 — and aggregating them into bins like “computer science” or “journalism + communication.” I think my bins are intuitive, but they’re not any sort of standard. The CIP codes themselves are standard, but they are far too numerous and non-obvious to be useful here. The categories I struggled with the most are Physiology and Biochemistry, which I could have lumped into Biology and Chemistry, respectively, but which I wanted to keep separate because here at least (Univ. of Oregon), the trends are different. For a list of the CIP codes corresponding to each of my categories, see this CSV file.
- My bins don’t span all majors — hence the “Other” category. I’ve neglected some degrees such as undergraduate law, the CIP “Multidisciplinary” category (#30), and others that I doubt are very large or that I haven’t given much thought to. These might be interesting!
For more commentary, please see the earlier posts.
I’m fond of this animated plot but perhaps there’s a better way to convey the information. Perhaps you can come up with a dazzling graphic, or suggest something for me to try. Also, as in the last post, I’m open to requests for specific fields or schools to plot!
Update March 6, 2023: Of course, one doesn’t need the full movie to see the trend; the last frame suffices. Here are the final frames for the total and relative degree data — you should be able to click for larger images.
Today’s illustration
A glass bowl with an egg and a cherry tomato. Garish, but fun to paint.
— Raghuveer Parthasarathy. March 5, 2023
The Eighteenth Elephant 