[pattern by Nathalie du Pasquier]
Which colleges and universities in the United States have the most philosophy majors?
Penn, Boston College, University of Chicago, and maybe Columbia stand out for not only having many philosophy majors but also a high percentage of philosophy majors.
Schools in the U.S. with the Most Philosophy Majors
by Eric Schwitzgebel
Here are the 20 schools with this highest percentage of philosophy bachelor’s degrees awarded, excluding seminaries.2
Most of these schools also have prominent PhD programs in philosophy. Together, they likely also produce at least 17% of the philosophy PhDs in the country. Perhaps the presence of strong PhD programs—with graduate student role models, rich department activities, and many T.A.-led sections in large courses—contributes to the large number of undergraduate majors.
If you rank schools by the number of philosophy bachelor’s degrees completed, the top ten schools together account for 10% of all of the philosophy bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States. This is a striking skew. During the period, 2434 accredited schools awarded bachelor’s degrees. The majority of these schools, 1609 (66%), awarded no philosophy bachelor’s degrees at all. Together, just 125 schools (6% of bachelor’s degree awarding institutions) produced the majority of philosophy majors.
Just kidding! Kind of. Only 1272 were from Penn and 1123 from UCLA.
2. Excluded from this list are seminaries, some of which appear to award only philosophy degrees, one school that was operational during only part of the period, another which recently closed, and a third in which all students complete a liberal arts major classified as “philosophy” by the NCES.
There are some perhaps surprising disparities. For example, although 4.9% of Penn’s graduates majored in philosophy, other Ivy League schools had much lower percentages: Columbia 2.9%, Princeton 2.3%, Dartmouth 1.9%, Yale 1.7%, Harvard 1.5%, Brown 1.3%, and Cornell 0.6%. It would be interesting to know how much this reflects differences in entering students’ intended majors, compared to policies or experiences affecting students after they arrive on campus. (One possible explanation for Penn’s large numbers and percentage is that NCES might be counting their “Philosophy Politics and Economics” major as philosophy [category 38.01]. Similar classificiation issues might also affect other schools.)
From 2010-2011 through 2018-2019 (the most recent available year), 75,250 students received philosophy bachelor’s degrees at accredited colleges and universities in the United States, according to data I pulled from the National Center for Education Statistics.1 That’s a lot of philosophy degrees! Most of these students received their degrees from Penn or UCLA.
Altogether, these twenty schools account for 17% of the philosophy degrees awarded in the U.S. Any policy change that affected these twenty schools would have a substantial impact on philosophy education in the country.
Here are the top 20 schools by total number of philosophy bachelor’s degrees awarded, 2010-2019 (in parentheses is the % of that school’s graduates completing the philosophy major):
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Notes:
1. All numbers include students with philosophy as either their first or their second major. As usual in my analyses, I exclude University of Washington-Bothell, which lists 689 philosophy majors but does not have any major with “philosophy” in the title. This appears to be a classification problem, perhaps of their “Culture, Literature, and the Arts” major or their “Law, Economics, and Public Policy” major.
In the following guest post,* Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) tells us.
1. University of Pennsylvania, 1272 (4.9%)
2. University of California-Los Angeles, 1123 (1.6%)
3. University of California-Santa Barbara, 871 (1.8%)
4. University of California-Berkeley, 852 (1.2%)
5. Boston College, 787 (3.7%)
6. University of Washington-Seattle, 618 (0.9%)
7. University of California-Santa Cruz, 582 (1.6%)
8. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 576 (0.9%)
9. University of Arizona, 555 (0.9%)
10. University of Colorado-Boulder, 520 (1.0%)
11. University of Chicago, 517 (4.2%)
12. The University of Texas at Austin, 515 (0.6%)
13. New York University, 505 (1.0%)
14. University of Southern California, 502 (1.1%)
15. Columbia University in the City of New York, 485 (2.6%)
16. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 474 (1.1%)
17. University of California-Riverside, 461 (1.2%)
18. University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus, 460 (1.1%)
19. University of California-Davis, 449 (0.7%)
20. Florida State University, 442 (0.6%)
Six of the schools are Catholic (Franciscan, Ave Maria, Dallas, Boston, Scranton, Catholic U, and St Thomas), two are big research powerhouses (Penn and Chicago), and the rest are liberal arts colleges. Overall, 0.5% of bachelor’s degree recipients major in philosophy.
1. Franciscan University of Steubenville (6.2%)
2. University of Pennsylvania (4.9%)
3. The College of Wooster (4.6%)
4. Colgate University (4.3%)
5. University of Chicago (4.2%)
6. Ave Maria University (4.1%)
7. University of Dallas (4.0%)
8. Antioch College (3.9%)
9. Wheaton College (3.9%)
10. Boston College (3.7%)
11. University of Scranton (3.7%)
12. Whitman College (3.7%)
13. The Catholic University of America (3.7%)
14. Wabash College (3.6%)
15. Bard College at Simon’s Rock (3.5%)
16. Gettysburg College (3.5%)
17. Reed College (3.4%)
18. University of St Thomas (3.2%)
19. Cornell College (3.2%)
20. Kenyon College (3.1%)
(A version of this post first appeared at his blog, The Splintered Mind.)
