When Christina Westman began her studies at St. Cloud State University, she dreamed of working as a music therapist with people with Parkinson’s disease and stroke.
But her academic career changed drastically in May when Minnesota university administrators announced plans to eliminate the music department and cut 42 degree programs and 50 minors.
The move is part of a wave of program cuts that have been made in recent months as U.S. universities, large and small, struggle to make ends meet.
Budget challenges include the loss of federal COVID-19 relief funding, rising operating costs and fewer high school graduates going directly to college.
The cuts don’t just mean savings and job losses. They often mean confusion for students who chose a campus for a particular degree program and then wrote a check or took out student loans.
“For me, it was just so anxiety-ridden,” said Westman, 23, who began the work that ultimately led to her transfer to Augsburg College in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”
At St. Cloud State, most students were able to complete their degrees before the cuts began, but Westman’s music therapy major was a new one that hadn’t yet officially begun.
She’d been desperately trying for the past three months to find work in a new city and to sublease her St. Cloud apartment after signing a lease. She was scheduled to move into her new apartment on Friday.
Larry Lee, who served as acting president of St. Cloud State University and became president of Blackburn University in Illinois last month, said many colleges have refrained from cutting staff for years.
College enrollment has fallen during the pandemic, but officials expect numbers to bounce back to pre-COVID levels and have been using federal relief funds to shore up their budgets in the meantime, he said.
“They persevered,” Lee said, noting that universities now have to face a new reality.
Higher education saw a slight recovery last fall and spring semester, mainly because community college enrollment began to recover, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
But the trends at four-year colleges remain worrisome: Young people are attending them in smaller numbers, even without growing concerns about the cost of college and the long-term burden of student loans.
The birth rate fell during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and has never recovered. Now, a small class of students is preparing to graduate and go on to college.
“That’s a very difficult calculation to overcome,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, a leading expert on student demographics.
Complicating the situation is a confusing federal review of financial aid applications.
Millions of students entered the summer not knowing where they’ll attend college this fall or how they’ll pay for it.
Job openings, while not as abundant as last year’s, are still plentiful, leading some experts to worry that students may not bother enrolling at all.
“It’s going to get worse between this fall and next fall,” said Catherine Meyer, a research associate in the Governance Studies Program at the nonprofit Brookings Institution’s Brown Education Policy Center. “I think a lot of colleges are really worried that they’re not going to meet their enrollment goals.”
Many universities, such as St. Cloud State University, had already begun using budget reserves.
The university’s student population increased to about 18,300 in fall 2020 but has since declined steadily to about 10,000 in fall 2023.
St. Cloud State’s student population is now stable, but expenses were too high for a declining student population, Lee said.
The university’s budget shortfall has reached $32 million over the past two years, forcing it to make deep cuts.
Some universities have taken even more extreme measures and closed down.
The incidents occurred at Birmingham-Southern University in Alabama, which has 1,000 students; Fontaine College in Missouri, which has 900 students; Wells College in New York, which has 350 students; and Goddard College in Vermont, which has 220 students.
But cuts appear to be becoming more common: Two public universities in North Carolina were given permission last month to eliminate more than a dozen degree programs, ranging from ancient Mediterranean studies to physics.
Arkansas State University announced last fall that it would phase out nine programs, and three of the 64 schools in the State University of New York system have cut programs due to declining enrollment and budgetary challenges.
Other schools that have significantly cut or phased 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 at universities that aren’t making immediate cuts, they are reassessing their degree programs. Penn State is trying to identify duplicate or under-enrolled programs as its branch campuses lose students.
Particularly affected are students in smaller programs and Humanities,the current graduation The proportion of students is smaller than it was 15 years ago.
“This is a humanitarian disaster for all the faculty involved and, of course, for students who want to pursue this field,” said Brian Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University who writes about higher education. “How far universities can cut back toward sustainability is an open question.”
For Terry Vermillion, who recently retired after 34 years as a music professor at St. Cloud State University, the cuts are hard to ignore. Taken a hit during the pandemicHe said Zoom bands have been a real “disaster” for many public school programs.
“There was a gap because we couldn’t effectively teach music online,” he said, “and we’re just starting to come out of that gap and start to pick up a little bit. And then the cuts come.”
For music majors at St. Cloud State like Lily Rose, the biggest worry is what will happen if the program is phased out: Freshmen won’t be able to enroll in the department and professors will have to find new jobs.
“When you close an entire music department, it becomes very difficult to maintain an ensemble,” she says. “Because musicians aren’t coming in, people just graduate and the ensembles just get smaller and smaller.”
“It’s a little hard to continue when it’s like this,” she said.
