Enrollment in School of Humanities and Sciences decreases

The total number of students enrolled in the Ithaca College School of Humanities and Sciences has decreased continuously between the 2022-23 academic year and the 2024-25 academic year, following a national trend of fewer degrees in the humanities being completed since the early 2010s.

According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the number of bachelor’s degrees completed in the humanities has gone down, with 179,272 degrees completed in 2022 compared to the 236,826 degrees completed in 2012. 

Overall enrollment at the college has continuously declined from Fall 2020 to Fall 2024 after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rakin “Rock” Hall, vice president for Enrollment Management and Student Success, said while schools like the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance have continued to receive more applications than they can accommodate, enrollment in H&S has declined. Application data for specific programs at the college is not publicly available.

“This isn’t singular to IC,” Hall said. “If you look at film, television, dance, screenwriting, business, sports agency, those programs tend to do very well, broadly speaking. … English, psychology, sociology, mathematics, those programs are having a trickier time attracting students.”

From the 2021-22 academic year to the 2022-23 academic year, the headcount in H&S went from 1,620 to 1,307 total students. Part of the drop in headcount can be attributed to the formation of MTD, which removed theater programs from H&S and moved them to MTD.

In the 2023-24 academic year, H&S had a headcount of 1,187 and in the 2024-25 academic year, it had a headcount of 1,111 students. As of Sept. 9, data on the headcount of total students in each school for the 2025-26 academic year is not yet publicly available. The drop of around 200 students enrolled in H&S in the 2022-23 academic year to the 2024-25 academic year shifted H&S from making up 25.86% of the student body to 23.3% of the student body.

Claire Gleitman, dean of H&S, said via email that one of the reasons enrollment in H&S has decreased is that after 2023, the Exploratory Program, which was previously counted in H&S, was changed to the pathways program. This added a pathway program to the School of Business, the Roy H. Park School of Communications, and the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance, in addition to two pathways in H&S.

Junior Indira Aranha said she was in the H&S pathways program during her first year before deciding on becoming a politics major. She said taking a variety of humanities classes helped her discover her passion for politics.

“Even though it seems like taking a year to figure things out is maybe a waste of time, it really isn’t,” Aranha said. “Taking time to adjust to a new environment and taking time to really explore different options will eventually lead you to the place you’re supposed to be.”

Kasia Bartoszynska, associate professor in the Department of English and coordinator of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, said her department has lost six faculty members since she arrived at the college in Fall 2020 to retirement, faculty moving to administration and cuts during the Academic Program Prioritization process.

“If there are less students, there is less money,” Bartoszynska said. “We can’t offer the same number of classes if we don’t have the same number of people to teach. That’s just an unpleasant reality.”

Gleitman said that H&S has not seen the same intensity of decline in enrollment in its humanities programs that is present nationwide. Gleitman said individual H&S programs ebb and flow in their size year by year, making some smaller and some larger year by year.

“The reduced number of students overall, both in H&S and at Ithaca College, has resulted in some recalibration in terms of how many course sections need to be offered in any given semester,” Gleitman said via email. “But we take care to ensure that this recalibration does not negatively impact students’ ability to complete their major or their [Integrative Core Curriculum] requirements.”

H&S is the only school on campus without its own dedicated building, aside from the Center for Natural Sciences for STEM majors. Junior Sienna Blake, a double major in legal studies and politics, said the lack of a dedicated building for humanities classes makes her feel like the humanities programs are being overshadowed by the programs with dedicated buildings.

“[Locations for H&S classes] definitely jump around a lot, and they’re always really small classrooms,” Blake said. “In one of my classrooms this year, there are not enough seats. … It shows that there’s definitely not as much funding there for us.”

Senior politics major Login Abudalla, a transfer student from Wells College, said that while the humanities classes at IC are small, they have more students enrolled in them than at her previous college, which closed in 2024.

“My classes were really like two or three people,” Abudalla said. “Unless it was like a large [general education] course.”

Bartoszynska said she thinks humanities classes are valuable, despite any potential economic anxiety discouraging students from studying the humanities.

“Our classes are about critical thinking and analysis, and those are skills that are useful in every aspect of life,” Bartoszynska said.

Hall said the college needs to work at better championing the value of the humanities for prospective students.

“I think we really have to do a better job at talking about the measured outcomes within the humanities and really shining a spotlight within that area of study, because it’s so vast,” Hall said. “You have english, psychology, sociology, you have a number of disciplines that could lead to really great jobs in the future.”

Blake said she thinks the college could do a better job at emphasizing the importance of taking humanities classes, even for students who are not interested in majoring in the humanities by highlighting the success of H&S alumni.

“I’ve met plenty of Ithaca College alums who are lawyers, but you just don’t really hear about that,” Blake said. “Bob Iger, we have him, but he probably took humanities classes to get where he is.”