Has higher education become more interdisciplinary? a longitudinal analysis of syllabi using natural language processing

Despite the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary research in universities, we know little about the extent to which university education is interdisciplinary. This study investigates whether higher education has embraced interdisciplinarity. By applying natural language processing techniques to a dataset of 478,233 syllabi from 2004 to 2019, our analysis examines three key dimensions: lexical, topical, and pedagogical. Contrary to the prevailing narrative of growing interdisciplinarity, the findings reveal remarkable stability in the disciplinary boundaries of course content. Lexical analysis indicates minimal convergence in terminology across disciplines, while topical analysis shows consistent topic distributions within broad academic fields. Similarly, pedagogical strategies, as evidenced by the verbs used in learning objectives, display no significant shift toward interdisciplinary actions as outlined in Bloom’s taxonomy. These results suggest that despite institutional rhetoric, interdisciplinary education remains largely static, emphasizing the need for deliberate institutional strategies to better align educational practices with interdisciplinary research goals.