State of the Humanities 2022: From Graduate Education to the Workforce

Given the recent decline in students earning bachelor's degrees in the humanities, a great deal of concern is focused on undergraduate education. But many of the questions received by the Humanities Indicators staff have to do with outcomes for those who earn a graduate degree in the field. This report explores several key topics related to graduate education, including degree trends, the demographics of degree recipients, the extent to which programs engage students in career preparation activities, and graduates' career outcomes. The report relies heavily on the high-quality data collected by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, and also the National Science Foundation's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, several of whose surveys yield valuable information about graduate degree holders in the humanities.The findings include a few surprises: 1) while most of the attention in the disciplines seems to focus on PhDs, the field conferred almost five times as many master's as doctoral degrees in recent years; 2) even so, the number of master's degrees conferred annually in the humanities has been in decline over the past several years and their share of all master's and professional degrees reached a historic low in 2020; 3) the number of humanities PhDs awarded each year was at a near-record high in 2020, but as a share of all doctoral degrees, they fell to a historic low; 4) while the academic job market for humanities PhDs has been depressed since 2008, there is no evidence that this is due to the substitution of adjunct for tenure-track positions; and 5) regardless of where they end up—either in academia or out—the large majority of graduate degree recipients in the humanities are satisfied with their jobs, despite earnings that are considerably lower than those of their counterparts from other fields.This report reflects the ongoing mission of the Humanities Indicators, a nationally recognized source of nonpartisan information about the field. The Indicators website covers 121 topics and includes more than 340 graphs detailing the state of the humanities in schools, higher education, and the workforce; levels of support for research and other key activities; and the role of the humanities in the day-to-day life of the nation. The project draws on data sources that meet the highest standards of social scientific rigor, relying heavily on the products of the U.S. federal statistical system

State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce & Beyond

How should one measure the value of a college degree? In recent years, policy-makers have focused their attention on earnings as the primary measure of the value of a degree, often using that metric to single out humanities degrees as less valuable than others. But there are other—less tangible—measures of value, such as satisfaction with one's work and life more generally, that might also be applied to these discussions.Without taking a position on which metrics are best, this report, based largely on original research commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Humanities Indicators, examines a variety of outcome measures, including graduates' satisfaction with their jobs, their finances, and their lives generally. The evidence shows that humanities graduates tend to earn less and have slightly higher levels of unemployment than business majors and graduates from some STEM fields. With respect to perceived well-being, however, humanities majors are similar to graduates from almost every other field. The data cannot explain the seeming disparity between the objective and subjective measures, but they provide a starting point for a more nuanced discussion about the relationship among fields of undergraduate study, employment, and quality of life. And for faculty, the report also points to a potential area of concern regarding the way they communicate to students about the skills developed in the course of an education in the field, as a substantial share of humanities graduates perceive little or no relationship between their job and their degree. The data were all gathered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but past experience tracking this sort of data for the humanities—particularly through the Great Recession—gives us little reason to expect a significant shift in values over the medium term

Accessing the Safety Net: Administrative Barriers to Public Benefits in Metropolitan Chicago

Accessing the Safety Net is a report of the Public Benefits Hotline Research Project. It presents a portrait of a year in the life of the public benefits system in metropolitan Chicago (Cook County) from the perspective of individuals trying to navigate within it. It analyzes the record of calls made to the Public Benefits Hotline by area residents reporting difficulties in obtaining access to benefits. It reveals systematic difficulties that Chicago-area residents have experienced in accessing safety-net programs. The record of calls also illuminates some of the rarely seen day-today realities of a complex administrative system at work

Mosquito Species (Diptera: Culicidae) and the Transmission of Ross River Virus in Brisbane, Australia

This study aimed to identify the major mosquito vectors of Ross River virus (family Togaviridae, genus Alphavirus, RRV) and to explore the threshold of mosquito abundance necessary for RRV transmission in Brisbane, Australia. Data on the monthly counts of RRV cases by statistical local areas from the Queensland Health and the monthly mosquito abundance in Brisbane between November 1998 and December 2001 from the Brisbane City Council were used to assess the pairwise relationship between mosquito abundance and the incidence of RRV disease over a range of time lags using cross-correlations. We used time series Poisson regression models to identify major mosquito species associated with incidence of RRV after adjusting for overdispersion, maximum temperature, autocorrelation, and seasonality. Our results show that Aedes vigilax (Skuse) (relative risk [RR] = 1.32; 95% CI = 1.01-1.74 per 100 mosquitoes per trap) and Culex annulirostris (Skuse) (RR = 1.14, 95% CI = 1.04-1.24 per 100 mosquitoes per trap) were most strongly associated with RRV transmission at a lag of 1 mo. Classification and regression tree (CART) analyses indicate that the occurrence of RRV was associated with an average monthly mosquito abundance ofAedes vigilax above 72 and Cx. annulirostris above 52. The validation analyses indicate that the crude agreement between predicted values and actual observations was 76% (sensitivity, 61%; specificity, 80%). The results may have applications as a decision support tool in planning disease control and risk-management programs