When Christina Westman began studying at St. Cloud State University, she dreamed of working with Parkinson’s disease and stroke patients as a music therapist.
But his schooling took a hit in May when Minnesota College administrators announced plans to eliminate its music department as it cuts 42 degree programs and 50 minor programs.
It’s part of a wave of program cuts in recent months as U.S. colleges large and small try to meet their expenses. Among their budget challenges: Federal Covid relief money is now gone, operating costs are rising and fewer high school graduates are heading straight to college.
Cuts mean more than just savings or job losses. Often, they spell trouble for students who chose a campus for a particular degree program and then wrote checks or signed up for student loans.
“For me, it’s really filled with anxiety,” Westman, 23, said when he began the effort that eventually led him to transfer to Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”
At St. Cloud State, most students will be able to finish their degrees before the cuts go into effect, but Westman’s music therapy major was a new major that hadn’t officially started. She has spent the past three months frantically rushing to find work in a new city and to pay for her apartment in St. Cloud even though she had already signed the lease. She was moving into her new apartment on Friday.
Larry Lee, who was St. Cloud State’s acting president but left last month to lead Blackburn College in Illinois, said many colleges avoided making cuts for several years.
He said college enrollment declined during the pandemic, but officials hoped figures would return to pre-COVID levels and in the meantime used federal relief money to bolster their budgets.
“They persisted, they persisted,” Lee said, adding that colleges must now confront their new reality.
Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showed that higher education saw some improvement in the fall and spring semesters last year, largely due to a surge in enrollment at community colleges.
But the trend toward four-year colleges remains worrisome. Even without rising concerns about the cost of college and the long-term burden of student debt, the number of young adults attending four-year colleges is declining.
Birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and never recovered. Now those younger classes are preparing to graduate and go off to college.
“This math is very hard to grasp,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and a leading authority on student demographics.
Further complicating the situation: the federal government’s chaotic changes to its financial aid applications. Millions of students have entered summer vacation, but they’re still wondering where they’ll go to college this fall and how they’ll pay for it. With jobs plentiful, though not as many as last year, some experts fear students won’t bother to enroll at all.
“The situation is going to be worse this fall than it is next year,” said Katherine Mayer, a fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the nonprofit Brookings Institution. “I think a lot of colleges are really concerned that they won’t be able to meet their enrollment targets.”
Many colleges, like St. Cloud State, have already begun spending their budget reserves. The university’s enrollment, which peaked in 2020 at about 18,300 students, will slowly decline to about 10,000 students in 2023.
Lee said St. Cloud State’s student population has now stabilized, but expenses remain too high for the reduced number of students. The college’s budget has fallen by a total of $32 million over the past two years, forcing extensive cuts.
Some colleges have taken even more drastic measures, closing their doors: Birmingham-Southern College, with 1,000 students in Alabama, Fontbonne University, with 900 students in Missouri, Wells College, with 350 students in New York, and Goddard College, with 220 students in Vermont.
Cuts, however, appear to be common. Last month, two North Carolina public universities got the green light to eliminate more than a dozen degree programs, ranging from ancient Mediterranean studies to physics.
Arkansas State University announced last year that it was phasing out 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 cutting and phasing out programs include West Virginia University, Drake University in Iowa, the University of Nebraska campus at Kearney, North Dakota State University and Dickinson State University on the other side of the state.
Experts say this is just the beginning. Even schools that aren’t making immediate cuts are reviewing their degree offerings. At Pennsylvania State University, officials are looking at duplicative and low-enrollment academic programs as the number of students at its branch campuses declines.
Particularly affected have been students in smaller programs and the humanities, with fewer students now graduating than they were 15 years ago.
“This is a human disaster for all faculty and staff, not to mention the students who want to pursue the subject,” said Brian Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University who has written on higher education. “It’s an open question as to how far colleges and universities can cut their way to sustainability.”
For Terry Vermillion, who retired after 34 years as a music professor at St. Cloud State, the cuts are hard to watch. He said while country music programs have taken a hit during the pandemic, Zoom band has been nothing short of “devastating” for many public school programs.
“We were unable to effectively teach music online, so there’s a gap,” he said. “And, you know, we’re just starting to come out of that gap and we’re just starting to bounce back a little bit. And then the cuts are coming.”
The biggest fear for St. Cloud State music majors like Lily Rhodes is what will happen when the program ends. New students won’t be admitted into the department and their professors will be looking for new jobs.
“When you suspend the entire music department, it becomes very difficult to keep groups alive,” he said. “There are no musicians coming in, so when our seniors graduate, they move on, and our group gets smaller.
He said, “If the situation remains like this, it will be a bit difficult to move forward.”