In January 2023, after four combat tours and 11 years in the U.S. Air Force, Jeremy Crider left active duty on disability. By August, he’d enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson with a long-term plan. Having managed athletic facilities in the Air Force, he aimed to earn a B.S. in business administration and then a Ph.D. in sports management, with the goal of ultimately working in the field.

Three years later, Crider’s ultimate career goals haven’t changed, but his major has. He expects to graduate in May with a B.A. in applied humanities (with a concentration in business administration) and a B.S. in creative intelligence and innovation, the latter a program run through the school’s honors college that allows him to work with community groups on problem-solving. “For me, humanities made sense because with AI, learning the human side of business became much more valuable than just understanding the numbers,” says Crider, now 36. “One hundred percent, I feel like this is going to give me an edge.”

His senior thesis for the honors program focuses on developing a framework to help sports teams make decisions that account not only for costs and profits, but also for their own identities and those of their communities—something that could have a longer-term impact on the value of a franchise and its fan base.

Crider’s educational swerve could be a harbinger of a comeback for humanities majors after more than a decade of steep decline. Already, a handful of schools are seeing growth, while national reports suggest the number of students majoring in fields such as English and history is bottoming out.

Both humanities’ decline and possible revival can, no surprise, be traced to concerns about career and financial security. For a time, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors had the golden ticket. Now some engineering specialties (including computer engineering) have seen a sharp decline in entry-level jobs, as artificial intelligence reduces the demand for junior workers in their fields.

At the same time, those graduating with English and some other humanities degrees are finding that their versatile skills make it easier to get hired , even if they do still earn less than the engineers. The emerging conventional wisdom: In the age of AI, human skills such as creativity, communication and collaboration could provide a crucial professional edge, whatever the field.

“We really believe that the humanities equal jobs,” says Matthew Mars, head of the University of Arizona’s 8-year-old Public and Applied Humanities program, which as of last spring had more than 400 majors. Students like Crider combine an applied humanities core with courses ranging from business and entrepreneurship to fashion studies and, most recently, astrobiology. They also complete a three-course career sequence with internship preparation, an internship and a course to help them explain what they’ve learned to prospective employers.

Arizona isn’t the only university bucking the national trend. At the University of California, Berkeley, the top public university in Forbes’ 2027 college rankings , declared majors in the Division of Arts & Humanities increased 55% in the six years prior to May 2026, with English majors up 92%.

Berkeley’s approach is different from Arizona’s. “What we haven’t done, and what I don’t see us doing, is ‘applied humanities,’” sniffs Sara Guyer, dean of the Division of Arts & Humanities since 2021. “Berkeley still is connected to the foundation of the disciplines.”

But in addition to hiring 70 new faculty, updating course offerings and aggressively marketing her departments, Guyer has worked to make the connection to professional success more apparent to undergraduates. She is expanding a “career design” service and summer internships (some international) for her majors and brings successful alumni back to campus to talk about their jobs in tech, entertainment, business and other industries.

Berkeley’s San Francisco Bay location—the center of the AI industry—means it got a head start on thinking about the impact of the technology. Five years ago, Guyer says, “you couldn’t drive in San Francisco without seeing billboards for AI,” and those at Berkeley realized that “writing, thinking—that’s going to be maybe more important than old-fashioned coding.” The English department has added a mid-degree seminar on critical thinking, methodology and intensive writing. Meanwhile, faculty in Guyer’s division are involved in research on large language models, as well as the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding AI.

A merican colleges awarded 164,847 bachelor’s degrees in the humanities in 2025, the fewest since 1991 and 30% below a 2012 peak, according to new data from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project. Overall, humanities accounted for just 8% of all bachelor’s degrees, down from 13% in 2012. During that period, English degrees fell 44% and history degrees dropped by 41%.

And yet, buried in those numbers are signs that the decline may have run its course. Humanities degrees overall fell just 0.4% from 2024 to 2025, the smallest annual drop since 2012. The number of philosophy majors, after years of decline, increased in both 2024 and 2025, returning to its 2015 level.

Robert Townsend, director of the Academy’s Humanities, Arts and Culture Programs, is reluctant to predict a broader national recovery just yet. A new Academy report coming out on Wednesday, based on focus groups with high school students conducted in 2025, shows they struggled to connect a humanities degree to a career. Many “couldn’t even conceive of what you would do with a humanities degree after college,” Townsend says. “They were pretty good at articulating a lot of the social values of the humanities—they thought they would be better citizens, better members of the community—but not quite so clear on the careers thing.”

That “careers thing” is a big deal. The rising cost of college and the burden of student debt have increased pressure to choose majors with an obvious payoff. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for young college grads has been growing , and the advance of AI has led to fears (and data) suggesting that entry-level workers in the most AI-exposed occupations are taking the hit. Students have noticed. Enrollment in computer and information sciences at four-year colleges fell 8.4% in spring 2026 from the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center , but is still well above its level of five years ago.

The same can’t be said for English and literature majors, which as of last spring were still on a long-term decline. With colleges themselves under financial pressure, humanities departments have been, and will continue to be, tempting targets for cuts unless their numbers of majors increase. “Majors tend to be the coin of the realm when it comes to deciding whether to keep a program or not,” Townsend observes. So whether students start perceiving a humanities major as a path to a job is crucial to whether humanities professors keep theirs.

Townsend suggests that this requires professors to up their own communication game about the skills they’re teaching. To write a term paper about the French Revolution, he says, a student needs to formulate a good question, critically evaluate an answer, trace claims back to their sources and communicate information effectively—all of which are needed to work successfully with AI. He encourages faculty to spell out skills such as research, organization and communication on their syllabi.

It ’s probably no accident that one of the colleges seeing signs of a humanities rebound has a history of emphasizing the practical side of every major. Pace University , in New York City, has blended professional education and the liberal arts since its founding as an accounting school in 1906. Applications from prospective English majors for this year’s freshman class rose 28% to 299, while the number who actually enrolled almost doubled from last year—to a still tiny 32, out of a class of 1,992 .

Kelley Kreitz, Pace’s associate provost for academic strategy and student success, is herself an English professor. Interest in the field is rising now “in the context of conversations about AI and what that’s going to do to the future of work,” she says. “What I tell my students,” Kreitz adds, is “they need to learn how to write better than AI.”

Pace’s combination of liberal arts, hands-on learning and connection to industry for internships and permanent jobs, Kreitz says, “seems to be really resonating with students right now” and is well suited for a moment when graduates can’t assume training for any specific job provides career security and need to be prepared “for a job of the future that might not currently exist.”

Anyway, she says, students shouldn’t have to choose between practicality and intellectual enrichment. “Our position is that actually you need both, even if all you care about is how much you’re going to make after you graduate, which is totally understandable.”