Total Spending on Humanities Research Drops Slightly

In 2016, inflation-adjusted spending for academic humanities research decreased for the first time since 2007, the first year for which reliable data are available. Expenditures in 2016, approximately $435 million, were down slightly (less than 0.1 percent) from the year before. The data are from the Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The spending is a small fraction of that for other disciplines. Federal spending made up about 13 percent of the humanities research funds -- less than half the share of federal funding in all other fields, which ranged from 29 percent in nonscience, nonhumanities fields to 67 percent for the mathematical, statistical and physical sciences.