A team of reporters at The Hechinger Report describe the damages of budget cuts at rural universities. The universities respond to declining enrollments and declining revenues by eliminating majors; students who want those majors are left in the lurch. Chemistry, science, math, foreign languages, philosophy, physics—Almost everything is on the chopping block somewhere.
The Hechinger Report team limns in the details:
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 undergraduateswho 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.
The states could intervene but so far they have not. The federal government could help, but under Trump, it won’t.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is the second political irony that has plopped into my consciousness today. This morning on some news feed, there was a discussion of the tariff issue, in which it was suggested that the corn and soybean farmers stood to lose the most by the suggested tariffs on Mexico and Canada. No group has voted more consistently Republican Party than farmers. Now this report shows that modern Republicans, Trump and otherwise, hurt rural places more than urban and suburban spots. And there is no place more thoroughly Trump.
now that the abortion car has been caught, the Republicans are turning to the immigration car to chase. Musk continues to mount his takeover of Trump’s party, even as the man himself fades into his own dotage. Musk would be king maker. Is he in league with Peter Thiel? Is JD Vance to be created as Trump 3.0 even as Musk creates Musk political figure 1.0? Or is there to be a fight for the party between billionaires?
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Farmers are a prime example of a group that votes against its own interests.
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My prediction….SCOTUS is going to do something with Griggs V Duke Power and Disparate Impact.
https://lawliberty.org/a-novel-plan-to-reduce-student-debt/
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I don’t know if killing Griggs would turn back the clock on college costs (which seem more like a ratchet than a dial), and I don’t know if there are cases in the pipeline that challenge Griggs, but I’m sure there are groups willing to fund such cases, and I would guess SCOTUS would be interested in abandoning Griggs.
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You’re a lawyer and you have different knowledge and perspective. I have college students so I get to hear the cultural underground stuff associated with the generation. Young black men (according to them!) are tired of being “tokenized” by the mostly white, liberal elite and want to go back to a system of meritocracy. Regardless of what some people say/think, most black people don’t see the US as pre-1960’s (white and racist). They don’t deny that racism exists or existed, but they see themselves as having overcome that for the most part and wish to be treated as any other human being. They see Clarence Thomas as a hero for their cause.
I remember a time when the only thing one needed to become a teacher was to go and take a test before being admitted to a “teacher’s college”….same with nursing school, police/fire departments etc. College wasn’t necessary for everyone. I hear parents tell their college kids all the time….just get the degree, any degree, because that is the foot in the door for a lot of “jobs” (not careers) that are available.
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I have a college student, too, but not in a US college. It’s very different overseas.
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Put me in the category of avid reader, lifelong learner, very much pro education. The reality is that the vast majority of college students have little to no interest in liberal arts education. They are in college in hopes of getting a good job someday, because their parents forced them to go against their will, because they like the party atmosphere, etc. Few of them do any serious independent reading even during breaks from school, and few will ever crack even one serious book for the rest of their lives. Colleges are reducing the number of courses and majors because the demand is just not there. Not surprising for many reasons, including how poor so much of K-12 education is. This article is enlightening, and the reader comments by teachers are even more eye-opening.
https://nypost.com/2024/11/29/opinion/as-a-teacher-i-know-how-we-dumbed-down-education-and-how-kids-suffer/?utm_campaign=nyp_postopinion&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20241130&lctg=607d91c04adeb921db1964eb&utm_term=NYP%20-%20Post%20Opinion
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I don’t know about this article.
I see the homework my grandchildren bring home from public school, and the academic level is much, much higher than anything I encountered at their ages.
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Good afternoon Diane and everyone,
I’ve been teaching all levels for over 30 years. I agree with much of the Post article although there is great variety in school districts. Sadly, the attitude of most students (even the very best ones) is to just get good grades to get into a good school. There’s no joy of learning for itself. I’ve had study halls for years. Kids don’t read. You would be amazed at the filth that comes out of their mouths. Even outstanding students who grow up in good homes say inappropriate things that knock my socks off. They have no social skills, and they really don’t understand why they need to have them. It’s really hard to be a teacher now. We’re just teachers. We can’t compete with social media, neglectful parents and a sick society.
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There are upsides and downsides to everything, and boarding school for sure has its downsides, but whenever I visit my son’s boarding school, I am blown away with the social skills the students have. Eye contact, polite, generally articulate. I’m sure they become beasts back in the dorms but even so, they’re doing something right.
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flerp! I have to agree with the social skills aspect of the private schools. Some of the kids become beasts, I’m sure, but many carry those social skills into college and they ARE better prepared for the organizational challenges that “some” college courses have maintained….lecture halls, note taking, time management, professor office hrs etc.
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Michelle….I agree! I’ve got one in a good state college and the work is minimal from when I attended in the early 80’s and again early 90’s. I paid for child #2 to attend private HS and his ELS reading lists were extensive….he got into a good college with a nice scholarship and he has yet to read a book and he rarely cracks open the online text. His grades are calculated on attendance, group projects, online homework and a few quizzes (maybe a final) thrown in. It’s sad that it costs so much for so little real education.
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LisaM,
I think that the workload varies a great deal from school to school and department to department at any university. Most would say that stem fields are the most challenging and humanities (and some professional schools) the least.
Economics tends to be one of the more challenging departments. When I am teaching on a semester schedule, all my classes have three midterm exams and a cumulative final exam. These make up 80% of the students final grade. In introductory classes, a portion of all exams are multiple choice, but a portion are also free response. In upper level classes all questions are free response.
May I ask what your student has decided to major in?
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TE….my son is majoring in Accounting/business. He was instructed by some in the field to do the 5 yrs and then sit for the CPA exam. Just recently, the college announced that the same program could be completed in 4 yrs with a 6 month internship in the field, due to a lack of CPA’s being churned out over the past 10 yrs. Even if he finds that he doesn’t want to do that for the rest of his life, it’s still a skill that he can use. Students applying to the Business School aren’t doing any better.
Some of his friends have switched from Computer Science to Economics. They didn’t realize that Econ is a “social science”….they just think that they can make a lot of money like the fat cats on Wall Street with an Econ degree.
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LisaM.
My general impression is that business classes are not especially challenging, though accounting and sometimes finance classes can be an exception to that rule. Perhaps the classes in accounting will be more challanging. My youngest tried a few business classes, but decided to take more interesting classes. He ended up double majoring in history and economics with a minor in english.
Computer science is likely to be heavily impacted by AI models writing all the code that used to be written by junior level programers, so perhaps your son’s friends are making a smart move. It is also true that salaries for economics majors tend to be high, though not as high as engineering majors. Economics sprinkles in some mathematics, some coding, some information science, and a lot of common sense. It is a good general education degree.
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Colleges and Universities need to respond to changing student interests as well as the reduction in the number of students attending college. As my Provost once said to me, its fine to have some programs/majors that lose money, but we need to have fewer money losing programs in order to survive.
Scaling back a program may not be possible given the tenure structure of the institution. If a department is all tenured faculty, the administration has to choose to either keep them all until the faculty member decides to retire or close the program and lay off all the faculty. Typically closing the program is one of the few ways that the institution can lay off tenured faculty.
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College can be boring if students have had good or superior secondary teachers. I hear the high school graduates in my community who have taken AP and other challenging courses ask “why do we have to relearn this stuff?” They want to take challenging classes, learn, and get on with life. Plus, realize that college and university professors are not required to take a single Methods or Curriculum class or do any student teaching with a Master or Mentor teacher like credentialed K-12 teachers have to do, and they often have interns teach their classes and grade their papers. In addition, teachers with a Masters or doctorate in education and not a subject area cannot teach at the community college level, even though they can teach at a university. We need to demand that professors at the community college and university level have teaching methods, curriculum-building knowledge and subject matter expertise.
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My university accepts AP courses and students are not required to retake those classes. In your experience, which universities require their students to relearn the materials?
I am confused about your term “interns”. I am in my 36 year of university teaching and I have never had an “intern” teach any class or grade any work. Do you mean a teaching assistant who is a PhD student?
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Students don’t retake AP courses. The content of their college classes, they are telling me, are not as rigorous or interesting as their AP and and college-bound classes were in high school. The students in my area are talking about their local community college. As far as the university is concerned, yes, I do mean teaching assistants who are PhD students. These are generally those who have not completed their dissertations.
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