Decline, what decline? - by Joseph Heath - In Due Course

There has been a great deal of handwringing in recent years over the trend of declining enrollments in the humanities. Most of the discussion has focused on U.S. universities, with commentators assuming that whatever is happening in the U.S. must be happening in Canada as well. In this case, however, it happens to be true (although I am not certain that it is happening for the same reasons in Canada as in the U.S.). Here is what Statscan shows, when you pull up the data on university subject graduation rates from 2001-2021, and look at different majors as a percentage of the total:

An important point to observe is that the number of students graduating has approximately doubled over the past two decades (from 178,215 to 351,513), so the disciplines with constant enrollment shares shown here (social sciences/law and business/commerce/management) have approximately doubled the number of students they are graduating. Humanities departments, by contrast, have been graduating the same number of students, and so their share of the total has been declining. The long-term trend is pretty unmistakable. (I threw in computer science as well, to show what most of us have been seeing from the inside, which is that they had a big bump during the dotcom era, followed by a very long period of flat enrollments, followed by a major boom in the past few years.)

Given these overall trends, many of us have been surprised by the numbers we’re seeing in our own department. The next graph shows the number of program enrollments for the downtown campus, Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto (and therefore does not include the two suburban campuses, in Scarborough and Mississauga). People sometimes have difficulty believing these numbers, because they don’t realize quite how big the University of Toronto is. With over 97,000 students, 76,000 of them undergraduates, we are a pretty serious operation. (I haven’t checked recently, but I would imagine that our philosophy department is still the largest in the English-speaking world.)

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