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Christina Westman dreamed of working with Parkinson’s disease and stroke patients as a music therapist when she began her studies at St. Cloud State University.
But his school was upended in May when administrators at Minnesota College announced plans to eliminate the music department as it cut 42 degree programs and 50 minors.
It’s part of a wave of program cuts in recent months, as US colleges large and small try to make ends meet. Among the budget challenges: Federal COVID aid money is now gone, operating costs are rising and fewer high school graduates are going straight to college.
Cuts mean more than savings, or even job losses. Often, they create a stir for students who choose a college because of a certain degree program and then write a check or apply for a student loan.
“For me, it was really worrying,” said Westman, 23, as he began the quest that eventually led him to Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”
In St. Cloud State, most students can finish their degree before the cutoff begins, but Westman’s music therapy major is a new one that hasn’t officially started yet. She had spent the past three months on a mad dash to find work in a new city and sublet her apartment in St. Cloud after she had signed the lease. He moved into his new apartment there.
For years, many colleges held off making cuts, said Larry Lee, who is the president of St. Cloud State but left last month to lead Blackburn College in Illinois.
College enrollment has declined during the pandemic, but officials hope those numbers will recover to pre-COVID levels and use federal aid money to boost their budgets, he said.
“They keep going, keep going,” Lee said, noting colleges now have to face new realities.
Higher education made gains last fall and in the spring semester, largely as community college enrollment began to rebound, National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data showed.
But the trend toward four-year colleges remains worrisome. Even without the worry of college costs and the burden of long student loans, the pool of young adults is shrinking.
The birth rate fell during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and has never recovered. Now the smaller classes are preparing to graduate and go to college.
“It’s very difficult math to beat,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a leading authority on student demographics.
Complicating the situation: the federal government’s chaotic review of financial aid applications. Millions of students enter summer vacation still wondering where to go to college this fall and how to pay for it. With jobs still plentiful, though not as many as last year, some experts fear students won’t bother to sign up.
“This year it’s going to be 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 concerned that they’re not going to make enrollment targets.”
Many colleges like St. Cloud State has begun processing budget reserves. The university’s enrollment rose to about 18,300 students in the fall of 2020 before continuing to decline to about 10,000 students in the fall of 2023.
The student population of St. Cloud State is now stable, Lee said, but is spending too much for a shrinking number of students. The college’s budget shortfall totaled $32 million over the past two years, forcing the cuts.
Some colleges have taken the more extreme step of closing their doors. This happened to 1,000 students at Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, 900 students at Fontbonne University in Missouri, 350 students at Wells College in New York and 220 students at Goddard College in Vermont.
However, cuts appear to be more common. Two public universities in North Carolina got the green light last month to eliminate more than a dozen degree programs ranging from ancient Mediterranean studies to physics.
Arkansas State University announced late this fall that it is eliminating nine programs. Three of the 64 colleges in the State University of New York system have cut programs amid enrollment and budget problems.
Other schools that have reduced and eliminated programs include West Virginia University, Drake University in Iowa, the University of Nebraska at Kearney campus, North Dakota State University and, on the other hand, Dickinson State University.
Experts say this is just the beginning. Even schools that don’t immediately make the cut are also reviewing degree offers. At Pennsylvania State University, officials are looking for duplicative and unenrolled academic programs as the number of students shrinks at branch campuses.
Particularly affected are students in smaller programs and those in the humanities, who now graduate fewer students than 15 years ago.
“This is a humanitarian disaster for all the faculty and staff involved, not to mention the students who want to pursue this,” said Bryan Alexander, a Georgetown University senior scholar who has written about higher education. “It’s an open question about how colleges and universities can reduce sustainability.”
For Terry Vermillion, who just retired after 34 years as a music professor at St. Cloud State, it was hard to watch. The country’s music programs have been affected during the pandemic, he said, with Zoom’s band not “catastrophic” for many public school programs.
“We just can’t teach music effectively online, so there’s a gap,” he said. “And, you know, we’re just coming out of that gap and we’re starting to bounce back. Then the cuts are coming.
For St. Cloud State music majors such as Lilly Rhodes, the biggest fear is what will happen as the program is phased out. New students will not be accepted in the department and their professors will be looking for new jobs.
“If you suspend the whole music department, it’s very difficult to maintain the ensembles,” he said. “There were no musicians coming in, so once our seniors graduated, they moved on, and our ensemble kept getting smaller.
“It’s hard to keep going like this,” he said.
