The number of college students graduating with degrees in philosophy continues to increase, as does the gender and racial diversity of this group. In the following guest post, Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) shares some of his recent research on diversity in philosophy. A version of this post originally appeared at his blog, The Splintered Mind. The Philosophy Major Continues to Recover and Diversify in the U.S. by Eric Schwitzgebel The National Center for Education Statistics has released their data on bachelor’s degree completions in the U.S. through the 2019-2020 academic year, and it’s mostly good news for the philosophy major. Back in 2017, I noticed that the number of students completing philosophy degrees in the U.S. had plummeted sharply between 2010 and 2016, from 9297 in 2009-2010 to 7507 in 2015-2016, a decline of 19% in just six years. The other large humanities majors (history, English, and foreign languages and literatures) saw similar declines in the period. A couple of years ago, the trend had started to modestly reverse itself — and furthermore the philosophy major appeared to be attracting a higher percentage of women and non-White students than previously. The newest data show those trends continuing. Methodology: The numbers below are all from the NCES IPEDS database, U.S. only, using CIP classification 38.01 for philosophy majors, including both first and second majors, using the NCES gender and race/ethnicity categories. Each year ends at spring term (thus “2010” refers to the 2009-2010 academic year). Trend since 2010, total number of philosophy bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S.: 2010: 9274 2011: 9298 2012: 9369 2013: 9427 2014: 8823 2015: 8186 2016: 7491 2017: 7575 2018: 7669 2019: 8075 2020: 8195 As you can see, numbers are up about 9% since their nadir in 2016, though still well below their peak in 2011. (The numbers are slightly different from those in my earlier post, presumably to small post-hoc adjustments in the IPEDS dataset.) One consequence of the decline, I suspect, was on the job market for philosophy professors, which has been weak since the early 2010s. This has been hard especially on newly graduated PhD students in the field. With the major declining so sharply in the period, it’s understandable that administrators wouldn’t prioritize the hiring of..