The year 2001 was an exciting time to be a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Fighting Illini made the Sugar Bowl in football and the Elite Eight in basketball. Tuition was only $3724 annually for in-state residents.1 During this year, there was roughly one English major for every two Engineering majors.
2010 was a difficult year for Fighting Illini athletics, and tuition jumped tremendously to $9484.2 While the iPhone 4 was being released, there were more History majors than Computer Science majors.
In 2024, a mediocre football season was resolved by the Big Ten Basketball Championship. Tuition increased to $12,712.3 There is now one English major for every twelve Engineering majors and one History major for every six Computer Science majors.
The Grainger College of Engineering has seen unimaginable growth in the last 15 years. Engineering programs alone have added almost a thousand students per graduating class and computer science enrollment has tripled in the same timeframe. The Mathematics Department, although outside of the engineering college, has quintupled its annual graduates.
Part of the success is due to local factors, mainly that Grainger has some of the highest ranked engineering and computer science programs in America, becoming an international hub for those disciplines. However, this cannot explain all of it. Illinois has been on the frontlines of the “digital revolution” since the founding of Netscape and PayPal.
In this “Age of Big Data”, quantitative analysis is seen as essential for maintaining market competitiveness in almost any aspect of business operation. Information is costly to not use. This is evident by the fact that half of engineering majors do not work professionally as engineers, since their skills are applicable elsewhere.4 The interesting question is why the transformation took place in the early 2010s, rather than earlier.
The tradeoff of focusing on the rational, quantifiable, and computable is losing the intuitive, abstract, and peculiarly human. Insights gained from these disciplines are usually seen as less grounded and more biased, not fitting for our highly technologically-integrated world. Being the inverse of the previous cohort, these subjects dramatically decreased in enrollment in the early 2010s.
This is most evident with humanities subjects. The English and Communications Departments have unusual shapes due to a popular previously existing major, “Speech Communications”, transferring between them. I infer this administrative shift corresponded with an important alteration in content, away from literature and towards more modern marketing and media studies. Even combined, the totals have decreased from 955 in 2009 to 608 in 2024. Looking at the English Department alone, it has the most dramatic collapse out of any subject.
Experiencing similar declines, the History Department currently has half the annual graduates as in 2008. As a history major myself, I am surprised that the research and argumentative nature of the subject are perceived as applicable only to professions like teaching and law. However, the lack of acquired technical and quantitative skills is obvious.
There has been significant yearly variation in Education Department enrollment, but its lowest numbers of the century were in 2023. It is odd that this department has declining enrollment while teacher shortages are increasing. The state of Illinois alone has almost 5000 unfilled positions.5 Perhaps the upswing in 2024 reflects a response to the favorable teaching job market.
While the most highly technical and quantitative degrees take ground from the most nebulous and qualitative ones, there are a few caught in the middle. This cohort encompasses popular subjects with static enrollment.
The Social Science title encompasses many subjects, from economics to political science, which incorporate elements of the humanities with distinctive technical analysis. It makes sense that these fields would “fall in between” the experiences of the two other cohorts, although seeing the enrollment for each particular major would be useful. Biology did not see the same growth as related health majors but remains a popular major on campus. Despite the competitive job market, the prestigious Gies College of Business has seen only a modest increase in enrollment. This is highly unexpected. If contemporary college students choose their field of study predominantly to secure high-paying careers, then studying business is the obvious choice.
No one variable can account for this large shift in human behavior. An obvious answer relates to employment opportunities. In the year 2000, 24.4% of Americans had attained a Bachelor’s Degree or Postgraduate Degree. The current number is 37.7%.6 Since the relative value of simply having a degree has diminished, the pursuit of more technical majors allows students to differentiate themselves. There are also concerns of decreasing educational standards and politicization of material, which I would assume would affect humanities the most. Another could be a consequence of increased international enrollment, as STEM students have relaxed student visa restrictions.
Given these reasons, it is shocking that the Gies College of Business showed only a modest increase in enrollment. There may be local factors that resulted in this, such as a desire to maximize its prestige by keeping acceptance rates lower. However, the financial benefits of greater enrollment would be tremendous, both in terms of tuition payments and increasing the alumni base. It is possible the business school did not see the same increase in demand as other departments such as Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics for other reasons.
A fundamental commonality in departments that either exploded or collapsed in enrollment is their approach to information gathering and reasoning. In fancy terms, their epistemological basis. Although difficult to prove precisely, I believe there is a social shift towards viewing quantitative analysis as a superior method to using more abstract qualitative skills. This is furthered by the embedding of digital consumer technologies into all aspects of our lives, where our daily behavior is encoded to be interpreted by ourselves, businesses, or governments.
When looking at the graphs, the early 2010s marks the transition point for college curriculum. It also marks a major transition outside of the classroom. The 2010s is when smartphones went from being owned by a third of the American population to over 80%.7 At the end of the decade, the search term “data science” was 75 times more popular than it was at the start.8 Tech startups blossomed and cloud computing became embedded in corporate America. It goes without saying that these new technologies had immense impacts on culture and people’s worldviews.
I worry that the proverbial pendulum may have swung too much in one direction. After all, it is our human reasoning that allows us to interpret the importance of numeric outcomes, creatively invent new conceptual frameworks, and understand the dynamism of individual people. I can explain concepts like derivatives, standard deviation, and an exponential function without using a single number, but I cannot describe the process of writing this article in an equation.
Sources:
UIUC enrollment and graduate data available at www.dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/, specifically used Miscellaneous Statistics for Survey series
2005-2024 data used for proportion graph (Excel): UIUCMajors *2016 values are estimated*
(1) http://archives.provost.illinois.edu/programs/urbana/2003/general/tuitionfees.html
(2) https://archive.registrar.illinois.edu/financial/tuition_archive1011/ugrad_base.html
(3) https://cost.illinois.edu/Home/UgradBase?DiffCode=BASE&TermCode=120248&TableType=1
(4) https://ira.asee.org/national-benchmark-reports/workforce2019/
(5) https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/state-teacher-shortages-vacancy-resource-tool-2024
(6) https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-51.html
(7) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/
(8) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0jt3_q3&hl=en
© Peter Derrah 2025. All rights reserved.