College students have been shifting towards science and technology, away from the liberal arts

WASHINGTON — After years of parents and schools hammering kids to get degrees in computer science and other technological fields, it seems the message has started sinking in, if the number of college degrees handed out over the past decade is any indication.

In conjunction with the job search Website Careerbuilder.com, the statistical analysis company EMSI analyzed a comprehensive dataset from the federal Department of Education that incorporates any institution that takes federal student aid, whether it be a community college granting associate degrees or a four-year institution handing out bachelors degrees. Their findings show a shift away from liberal arts majors towards science and math.

First, some context. Overall, growth in the number of college degrees issued has dropped markedly from its surge in the middle of the recession — completions surged 8.9 percent in 2010, as people forced out of the labor market went back to school. As the economy recovered, the yearly increase sank steadily to 0.3 percent in 2013 and 0.8 percent in 2014.

But that dropoff isn’t distributed equally. Primarily, it’s come from humanities fields like education, where the number of degrees granted dropped 9 percent from 2010 to 2014, and English, which shrank 2 percent over the same period. Those are just two of the larger degree categories, with 320,501 and 69,557 graduates in 2014 respectively — history and foreign languages, which are much smaller majors, also shrank since the height of the recession.

Fields where completions jumped during the recession and grew more slowly after include two of the largest: Healthcare (which grew 36 percent between 2006 and 2010, but only 8 percent between 2010 and 2014) and business management and marketing (up 14 percent in the first period, and 4 percent in the second).

And then there are the degrees that really started to take off after the recession. Take computer and information sciences, which actually shrank from 2006 to 2008, to 109,004 graduates, before jumping 32 percent between 2010 and 2014. Or engineering, which grew 26 percent over that period, to 153,676.

Overall, the picture is one of students shifting to degrees more focused on getting specific jobs, rather than broad liberal arts majors — which seems to bear fruit, if you look at the majors in which graduates are the most likely to have a job offer before they graduate.