Communication studies students overwhelmingly start and finish college in the major 

A new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “From Matriculation to Completion: How Do Humanities Majors Compare?” reports that 71% of students who declare a major of communication on starting college also graduate in the field. In the humanities, this ties with English languages and literature, and exceeds that statistic in history (70%), arts (65%), and religion (64%). 

Communication had the lowest percentage of any of the humanities of majors transferring into another humanities major (4%) and therefore 25% of the students graduated in a non-humanities field. In other words, 87% of communication freshmen who graduated in another field graduated in a non-humanities field. 

The lowest retention/graduation rate among the humanities was area studies, with only 47% of area studies freshmen graduating in the field, 16% graduating in another humanities field, and 37% (the highest percentage) graduating in a non-humanities field. 

The report provides very little information about the communication discipline but provides evidence-backed conclusions about the humanities overall, which the AAAS defines as: area studies, arts, communication, cultural/ethnic/gender studies, English language/literature, history, languages/literature other than English, linguistics, philosophy, and religion. AAAS data showed communication to be the largest major, by total undergraduate enrollment, among all of those majors. 

The report made three main conclusions about humanities as a group of majors: 

1. “Students who start their studies in a humanities discipline are slightly more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree within seven years than college students generally (and even more likely to do so if they completed an associate’s degree before starting at a four-year institution).” 
2. “Among students who completed a degree in a humanities discipline, more than half had started their major in another major—either a non-humanities field or a general liberal arts major.” 
3. “Among students who completed a degree with a second major, the share who had humanities as a second major was twice the size of the share who graduated with a primary major in the humanities. This was primarily due to a disproportionately large share of humanities majors completing a second major in another humanities discipline.”
    

The study was based on data for 2017-23. The report states that 91,751 students started college in Fall 2017, with 4.6% selecting a humanities major. But the percentage of college graduates during the 2017-22 period with a humanities major was 7.5%. The percentage of freshman humanities majors who had dropped out or were no longer enrolled by summer 2024 was 26%. (This is lower than the 28.9% rate among all undergraduates; the highest dropout rate, 32%, was among education majors!) 

About 54% of students who started college in a humanities major also graduated in a humanities major, which compares favorably to engineering students (58%) and business students (57%). Many entering freshmen in humanities were classified as “general liberal arts,” which apparently has taken the place of the “undeclared” label, which was, as the report put it, “quite small.” 

The report notes the “success of the humanities in retaining students who started in the field…and attract[ing] students from other fields.” Five percent of humanities graduates transferred from each of four other areas, social and behavioral sciences, business and management, natural sciences, and “other.” 

 Just over 16% of humanities graduates had a second major (compared with only 9% of all college graduates), the most frequent being a field in the behavioral and social sciences. A slightly lower number of behavioral and social science graduates also had a second major, the most frequent being one of the humanities fields. 

The study agrees with statistics from other sources that the number of humanities majors steadily declined during that period (by a total of 24% from 2015 to 2023) and that the number of humanities majors had dropped below education majors by 2023, exceeding only fine and performing arts. The report concludes, perhaps over-optimistically, that the decline will continue “for at least a few more years.” 

The report cautions that “it tells us nothing about changes of major, relationships between double majors, or the fields compare in completion rates.” It states that AAAS will continue to gather data and issue reports through its Humanities Indicators project, and that other helpful statistics are available from the US Department of Education. However, since the report’s writing, the Trump Administration has essentially eliminated the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, which both gathered its own data and contracted out data collection in dozens of contracts that have been canceled.