As enrollments fall, rural-serving universities are shedding a huge number of programs
This story was originally published by The Hechinger Report.
CLEVELAND, Miss. — Although she won a scholarship to Mississippi State University, two hours’ drive away, Shamya Jones couldn’t get there because she had a new baby and no car.
So she enrolled instead at a local community college, then transferred to the four-year campus closest to her home in the rural Mississippi Delta — Delta State University.
She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, Delta State eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music .
“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. “It’s like we’re not getting the help or benefits we need.” The cuts “take away from us, our education.”
That kind of frustration is growing. Rural Americans already have far less access to higher education than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and financial crises.
Many rural private, nonprofit colleges are closing altogether
“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, well, ‘This is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”
When programs at rural colleges and universities are eliminated, “It’s not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack,” Koricich said. “It’s that if this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.”
While large-scale cuts to majors in the years during and since the Covid-19 pandemic have gotten some attention, what many have in common has been largely overlooked: They’re disproportionately happening at universities that serve rural students or are in largely rural states.
“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’”
Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, which Koricich directs, as those that share such characteristics as being located in counties classified as rural and a certain distance from metropolitan areas.
Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.
But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.
St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.
The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.
Among the many other regional public universities that are dropping programs and majors are Missouri Western, Eastern Kentucky, Arkansas State, Dickinson State in North Dakota and the University of Nebraska at Kearney. North Dakota State University has proposed cuts to 14 programs; the university did not respond to questions about the status of that plan.
“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of both Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System.
At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.
A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis, told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.
“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to right-size the budget,” Ennis said.
Are administrators exploiting the problems?
But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a report that administrators are exploiting these problems to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”
Many of the programs affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to urban and suburban ones.
Courtesy UNC
The library at University of North Carolina Greensboro. The university is eliminating 20 majors and programs.
These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that is also eliminating majors.
“We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”
But Welch said states are often simply trying to reduce duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities receive.
“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”
[Related: What one state learned after a decade of free community college — 36 states followed their lead]
Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more three years later. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.
The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.
Students’ perspectives and questions
Owen Bertram is a senior theater studies major at Youngstown State University. Bertram is about to graduate, but says he hears his classmates asking the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”
“It is easy to just write us off as, ‘Oh, well, do they really need that school?’ when there are so many other majors,” said Bertram, whose theater major program has so far escaped the cuts. “But I don’t think it’s that simple.”
Courtesy YSU
Youngstown State University campus in Youngstown, Ohio, has eliminated more than 25 programs and majors.
His classmates who will be affected by the changes “are such creatives at heart, and they all came here because they loved what they were doing,” said Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university’s College of Creative Arts. He said it’s hard to watch these students struggling with the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”
For rural students, there are few other places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.
“It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren’t enough of you here,’” Koricich said.
“In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don’t really have choice.”
COurtesy ACE/CPRS
From the report, “Education Deserts: The Continued Significance of “Place” in the Twenty-First Century.”
In many cases, this particularly affects low-income and Black students. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example — another institution in a largely rural state, which is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics — more than half the students are low-income and 35 percent are Black, according to the university.
Holly Buroughs is a physics major at University of North Carolina Greensboro. Buroughs started a petition protesting the elimination of 20 degree programs — including physics. “UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want,” she said.
[Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open]
Azariah Journey is a second-year graduate student in history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, who comes from a rural town in Kentucky. She asked, “Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?”
Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve large proportions of rural students have closed outright since 2020; some of the rural private institutions that remain are also axing majors.
The proportion of rural high school graduates going to college at all is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
[Related: A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’]
Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music major students at Delta State University as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship, which he isn’t sure he would have gotten if his only options to study piano had been at the state’s larger, more competitive universities.
Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.
Courtesy DSU
Bologna Performing Arts Center at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi.
“Used to be, used to be, used to be,” he remembered people telling him.
Now he’s hearing that again.
His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.
“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’”
[Related Grant Opportunity: Large education improvement research grants]
Rural-serving public universities cutting degree programs
- St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics.
- The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40 programs, including earth sciences, hospitality administration and geography and environmental resources.
- West Virginia University is eliminating 40 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration.
- Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25 programs in disciplines including history, political science and biology.
- Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 programs and majors in English, physics, history and chemistry, all language courses except Spanish and minors in French, German and journalism.
- The University of Montana is phasing out, has frozen or has announced that it will closely monitor more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations.
- Delta State University in Mississippi has eliminated 21 degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music.
- North Dakota State University announced plans to phase out 14 programs, including food safety and soil science, and has proposed getting rid of 10 more. The university did not respond to questions about the status of this process.
- The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 degree programs, including sociology, philosophy, industrial management, French and Spanish.
- The University of Nebraska at Kearney is cutting nine degree programs, including geography and recreation management.
- SUNY Potsdam is eliminating chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other degree programs.
- The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing degree programs in religious studies, drama, philosophy and classics, and concentrations in French and German.
- Missouri Western State University eliminated majors, minors and concentrations in English, history, sociology, political science and other subjects.
- Eastern Kentucky University shut down economics and other majors.
- Arkansas State University has shed programs in multimedia journalism and music, a master’s degree in criminal justice and others.
- Dickinson State University in North Dakota eliminated communication, information analytics, math, math education, music and political science, a university spokesperson confirmed.
Rural private colleges closing or cutting majors
In addition to rural-serving public universities and colleges, more than a dozen private colleges serving rural places have closed since 2020.
- Chatfield College in Ohio
- MacMurray College in Illinois
- Nebraska Christian College
- Marlboro and Goddard colleges in Vermont
- Holy Family College in Wisconsin
- Judson College in Alabama
- Ohio Valley University in West Virginia
- Lincoln College in Illinois
- Marymount California University
- Cazenovia and Wells colleges in New York State
- Finlandia University in Michigan
- Presentation College in South Dakota
- Iowa Wesleyan University
- Bacone College in Oklahoma lost its accreditation, filed for bankruptcy and stopped enrolling students
Many rural private institutions are also axing majors, including:
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Reporters in the Open Campus Local Network who contributed: Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson and Signal Ohio’s Amy Morona.
This story about rural college majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening local coverage of higher education. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter. Listen to Hechinger’s higher education podcast.
This story also appeared in Open Campus and The Washington Post.