A Quarter-Century of Majors at the University of Illinois
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 releasing, 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 winners: Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics
The Grainger College of Engineering has seen unimaginable growth in the last 15 years. They added almost 1000 annual undergraduates from engineering programs alone and tripled their computer science enrollment. Although outside of Grainger, the Mathematics Department quintupled their 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 losers: English, History, Education, and Communications
The tradeoff of focusing on the rational, quantifiable, and computable is losing the intuitive, abstract, and peculiarly human. There are valid critiques about how the humanities and related subjects are taught which help explain this phenomenon, but this does not suffice for such a dramatic enrollment decrease. Insights gained from these disciplines are usually seen as less grounded and more biased. Directly paralleling the previous cohort’s trends, this cohort decreased tremendously in the early 2010s.
My research suggests the English and Communications Departments have unusual shapes due a previously existing major entitled “Speech Communications” transferring between the departments. I infer this administrative shift corresponded with a shift in content taught, away from literature and towards more modern marketing. Even combined, the totals have decreased from 955 in 2009 to 608 today. If you look at the English department alone, it is a collapse from one of campus’ most popular majors to a rare one.
Suffering from the same issues, the History department currently has half the annual graduates as in 2008. As a History major myself, I am surprised the research and argumentative proposals are not seen to be applicable for professions outside of teaching and law. However, the lack of acquired technical skills is obvious. The field of study for six of the last fifteen American Presidents has an uncertain future.5
Education graduates have seen a tremendous yearly variation, 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.6 Perhaps the upswing in 2024 reflects a response to the favorable teaching job market.
Middle of the pack: Social Science, Business, and Biology
While the most highly technical and quantitative degrees take ground from the most inexact and qualitative ones, there are a few caught in the middle. This cohort encompasses various subjects with variable levels of growth or decline.
Unfortunately the Social Science title encompasses many departments, which makes it difficult to interpret the data. As my personal favorite subjects, I am happy they have escaped the fate of other “less-marketable” fields. Biology did not see the same growth as related majors (Community Health, Kinesiology, etc.), 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 graduating students. Anecdotally, I have heard there are physical limitations regarding classroom availability that may contribute to static enrollment. Surely the business people know how much money there is to be made.
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://history.illinois.edu/resources/careers/famous-history-majors
(6) https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/state-teacher-shortages-vacancy-resource-tool-2024