Research Spending on Humanities Is Up

Research and development spending on humanities at colleges and universities reached $498.7 million in the 2017 fiscal year, an increase of 9.8 percent over the previous year, according to new data from Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The spending is a small fraction of that in science fields. Unlike science fields, where the federal government is a major supporter of research, only 12 percent of the funds in the humanities come from the federal government.