US universities cut core subjects and cut programs after years of delays

Christina Westman dreamed of working as a music therapist with patients with Parkinson’s disease and stroke when she began studying at St. Cloud State University.

But her academic career was in jeopardy in May when the Minnesota university’s board of trustees announced a plan to dismantle the music department and eliminate 42 programs and 50 minors.

It’s part of a wave of program cuts in recent months as U.S. universities large and small try to make ends meet. Among their budget challenges: Federal COVID-relief money has now run out, operating costs are rising and fewer high school seniors are heading straight to college.

The cuts mean more than just budget cuts or even job losses. They often create unrest among students who chose a campus for certain programs and then wrote checks or signed up for student loans.

“For me, it’s really been an anxiety disorder,” Westman, 23, said of beginning the endeavor that eventually led her to Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”

At St. Cloud State, most students are able to earn their degrees before the budget cuts take effect, but Westman, a music therapy major, was new and hadn’t officially started yet. She’s spent the past three months in a frenzy of trying to find work in a new city, subletting her St. Cloud apartment after signing a lease. She moved into her new apartment on Friday.

For years, many colleges have been putting off budget cuts, said Larry Lee, who was acting president of St. Cloud State but left last month to lead Blackburn College in Illinois.

College and university enrollments fell during the pandemic, but officials hoped they would rebound to pre-COVID levels. In the meantime, they had used federal relief to shore up their budgets, he said.

“They held on, held on,” Lee said, noting that colleges must now confront their new reality.

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that higher education made up ground last fall and into the spring semester, largely because enrollment at community colleges began to rise again.

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But the trend for four-year colleges remains worrisome. Even without growing concerns about the cost of college and the long-term burden of student debt, the group of young adults is shrinking.

Birth rates fell during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and never recovered. Now those smaller classes are preparing to graduate and go to college.

“It’s a very difficult math problem to solve,” said Patrick Lane, vice chairman of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and a leading expert on student demographics.

Complicating the situation is the federal government’s chaotic overhaul of the financial aid application process. Millions of students entered summer vacation still wondering where they would go to college this fall and how they would pay for it. With jobs still plentiful, though not as plentiful as last year, some experts fear students won’t enroll at all.

“This year, next fall, it’s going to be bad,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Governance Studies Program for the Brown Center on Education Policy at the nonprofit Brookings Institution. “I think a lot of colleges are really worried that they’re not going to meet their enrollment goals.”

Many colleges, like St. Cloud State, had already begun to tap into their budget reserves. The university’s enrollment rose to about 18,300 students in fall 2020, before steadily declining to about 10,000 students in fall 2023.

St. Cloud State’s student population has stabilized, Lee said, but spending was far too high for the reduced enrollment. The university’s budget deficit totaled $32 million over the past two years, forcing the deep cuts.

Some colleges have taken more extreme measures and closed their doors. These include the 1,000-student Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, the 900-student Fontbonne University in Missouri, the 350-student Wells College in New York and the 220-student Goddard College in Vermont.

But cuts seem to be happening more often. Two of North Carolina’s public universities were given the green light last month to cut more than a dozen programs, ranging from ancient Mediterranean studies to physics.

Arkansas State University announced last fall that it would cut nine programs. Three of the 64 colleges in the State University of New York system have cut programs because of low enrollment and budget problems.

Other schools drastically cutting their programs include West Virginia University, Drake University in Iowa, the University of Nebraska’s Kearney campus, North Dakota State University and, on the other side of the state, Dickinson State University.

Experts say this is just the beginning. Even schools that aren’t cutting back immediately are rethinking their degree offerings. At Pennsylvania State University, officials are looking to close overlapping and understaffed academic programs as enrollment at its campuses dwindles.

Especially students in smaller courses and in the humanities, who now graduated a smaller proportion of students than 15 years ago.

“It’s a humanitarian disaster for all the faculty and staff involved, not to mention the students who want to pursue this,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University who has written about higher education. “It’s an open question how much more colleges and universities can economize their way to sustainability.”

For Terry Vermillion, who just retired after 34 years as a music professor at St. Cloud State, the cuts are hard to watch. The nation’s music programs took a hit during the pandemic, he said, with Zoom band downright “disastrous” for many public school programs.

“We just couldn’t really do music lessons online effectively, so there’s a hole,” he said. “And you know, we’re just starting to get out of that hole and we’re just starting to recover a little bit. And then the cuts come.”

For St. Cloud State music students like Lilly Rhodes, the biggest fear is what will happen if the program is phased out. New students will not be admitted to the department and its professors will be looking for new jobs.

“If you shut down the entire music department, it’s terribly difficult to keep ensembles alive,” she said. “You don’t have musicians coming in, so when our seniors graduate, they move on, and our ensembles get smaller and smaller.

“It’s a little hard to move on when it’s like that,” she said.

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Heather Hollingsworth, The Associated Press