The complicated state of the humanities at Ohio State

Maxwell Knauer
Wed, 16 Apr 2025 04:44:35 +0000
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The number of English majors at Ohio State has dropped by more than half over the past 25 years — falling from over 1,000 in 2000 to around 430 in 2024, according to university enrollment records obtained by The Lantern. Credit: Kathleen Jones | Lantern File Photo

As the fields of science, technology, engineering and math gain popularity at Ohio State and universities across the country, the long-studied humanities disciplines may be left behind.

For example, the number of English majors at Ohio State alone has dropped by more than half over the past 25 years — falling from over 1,000 in 2000 to around 430 in 2024, according to university enrollment records obtained by The Lantern.?

Elizabeth Hewitt, a professor and chair in the Department of English, said the enrollment decline in her department and the humanities overall has been a consistent trend at Ohio State and within higher education nationwide.?

“We could lose as much as 44% of our tenured faculty within the next eight years, just by retirement,” Hewitt said. “And if we don’t rehire, then we’re potentially losing entire categories of English and American literature.”

Beyond English, the number of all undergraduate humanities majors at Ohio State dropped from 1,858 in 2015 to 1,265 in 2024 — a 31.9% decrease over nine years, according to a Lantern analysis of enrollment data spanning from August 2015 to August 2024.?

The Lantern’s analysis defines humanities as including African American and African studies, classics, comparative studies, East Asian languages and literatures, English, French and Italian, Germanic languages and literatures, history, linguistics, Near Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures, philosophy, Slavic and East European languages and cultures, Spanish and Portuguese, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies.

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The decline in majors and the question of value?

Humanities majors experienced the steepest enrollment drop. Not a single department saw its major grow in enrollment from 2015-24, according to data obtained by The Lantern.?

This drop isn’t unique to Ohio State — it reflects a broader, nationwide shift in how students choose their academic paths.?

At West Virginia University, that shift has led to sweeping structural changes. In 2023, the university announced plans to eliminate 28 majors — including all foreign language programs — and lay off 143 faculty members to address a $45 million budget shortfall, according to the Associated Press. The decision drew national attention and sparked protests, underscoring the scale of institutional change humanities programs now face.

“I think a lot of it just has to do with economics,” Hewitt said. “College is expensive, and I think there’s a sense now that if you’re committing all of these funds to something, it needs to easily translate into a particular job and career.”

Hewitt said in previous decades, students may have approached college with an open mind for intellectual exploration. But in the wake of the 2008 recession and rising tuition costs, she said “freedom of inquiry is just foreclosed” for many prospective students.

Smaller majors at Ohio State like East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Studies saw sharp declines, dropping 48.1% and 51.9% since 2015, respectively. These majors were home to just under 125 students combined in autumn 2024.

Some Ohio State departments, though, haven’t seen the same sharp drop. The Department of Philosophy has maintained steady major enrollment, dropping by just three students over nine years.

“We haven’t actually seen a decline in majors in the course of that 10 years,” said Lisa Shabel, an Ohio State professor in the Department of Philosophy. “They fluctuate some, but it’s mostly a steady line.”?

That steadiness remains a rare exception in a field marked by contraction.?

Minor bright spots

Minor enrollment data tells a more complicated story.?

Between 2015 and 2024, the number of philosophy minors more than tripled, going from 40 to 122 and marking a 205% increase. History minors grew by a similarly striking 162%.

Shabel said she attributes part of this growth to students’ tendency to combine fields.?

“Now, students typically either have two majors or a major and a minor,” Shabel said. “And philosophy has benefited from that because a lot of people can see the value of pairing philosophy with other disciplines.”

Justin D’Arms, professor and chair in the Department of Philosophy, said the subject’s continued permanence may be more personal than professional.

“Most people tend to grapple with some of these [philosophical] kinds of questions,” D’Arms said. “And so having tools for thinking about them, having some understanding of how smart people in the past have thought about them, those seem like valuable things to me.”

Other departments — including the Department of Classics and the Department of African American and African Studies — saw smaller but still notable increases in minors over the same period. The minors grew by 11.5% and 9.4%, respectively.?

As for the humanities more generally, the total number of minors decreased slightly from 2,000 to 1,946 over the past decade, a drop of 54 students, or 2.7%.

The GE shift

In Autumn 2022, Ohio State implemented a new general education curriculum, replacing the legacy GE system that had structured undergraduate education for over 30 years, per prior Lantern reporting.?

Under the previous model, all Bachelor of Arts students were required to complete foreign language coursework through the 1103 level, which typically equated to three semesters of study, according to Ohio State University’s Legacy General Education Requirements for the Bachelor of Arts Degree.

The new GE curriculum no longer includes a university-wide foreign language requirement, instead allowing individual colleges and programs to choose whether or not to maintain the requirement.

As a result, many STEM degrees no longer mandate language courses. The College of Engineering does not include a foreign language in its GE requirements, according to its official advising guidelines. The College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences also dropped its language requirement in Autumn 2022, according to its advising FAQ.?

Since the new GE curriculum was introduced in 2022, credit hour enrollment has declined across most language departments. Slavic and Eastern European languages saw the steepest decline, dropping 27.7% between Autumn 2022 and Autumn 2024. East Asian languages fell 11.7%, while French and Italian declined 9.3%.?

Yet not all trends were negative — Germanic Languages increased by 9.1% in the same period.?

Altogether, the five core language departments — French and Italian, Germanic Languages, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Slavic and East European Languages and Spanish and Portuguese — saw a combined decrease of 2,610 credit hours.?

Ohio State is not alone in this finding. According to the Modern Language Association’s 2023 report, total enrollments in languages other than English at U.S. colleges and universities dropped by 16.6% between fall 2016 and fall 2021— the largest decline recorded since the census began in 1958.

The drop was more pronounced at public institutions, which saw a 17.5% decrease, compared to a 7.8% decline at private institutions over the same period, according to the report.

New additions: academic and infrastructure

Despite declining enrollments in many traditional majors, the humanities departments at Ohio State continued working to expand. More specifically, several departments are developing new programs that aim to respond to students’ interests and evolving career paths.?

In autumn 2025, the university will launch three new undergraduate certificates focused on artificial intelligence: the Department of Philosophy’s AI, Ethics and Society; the Department of Linguistics’ AI, Language and Mind; and the Department of Art’s AI and the Arts, Dana Renga, dean of arts and humanities, said in an email.?

Renga said she expects strong student interest in the new programs.?

“We have heard from large corporate employers that they would like to hire a humanities major with some coding background,” Renga said.?

Other changes include the Department of Philosophy’s addition of the philosophy, politics and economics — or PPE — major, added in 2019, which blends fields across disciplinary lines, according to the major’s website.?

However, Shabel said the department’s role isn’t fully reflected in the major count alone.?

“The fact that our majors have held steady during those ten years doesn’t totally tell the whole picture,” Shabel said.?

That picture includes the department’s integration into interdisciplinary programs like PPE, in which philosophy remains a core component even when students aren’t formally enrolled as philosophy majors.

Beyond curriculum changes, Ohio State has also made infrastructure investments in its humanities offerings.?

The Timashev Family Music Building, the newly constructed facility for the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts, opened as part of the university’s $165 million Arts District project, which also includes a new facility for the School of Music, according to the school’s website.?

“We have done so by infrastructure investments,” Renga said in an email. “One [building is] for the School of Music and [one is for] the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts, the latter houses our popular Film Studies major.”

These investments, while promising, come at a time when humanities departments are still navigating uncertainty and the concern of shrinking enrollment.?

Still, Hewitt said she has hope that people will assign more value to the humanities in the future, recognizing the contributions these fields make to society on a wider scale.

“Maybe there’s an increasing sense that something might be lost,” said Hewitt. “And it’s going to come back.”