Christina Westman dreamed of working with patients with Parkinson’s disease and stroke as a music therapist when she began studying at St. Cloud State University.
But his schooling took a hit in May when administrators at the Minnesota college announced a plan to eliminate its music department while cutting 42 majors and 50 minors.
It is part of a wave of program cuts in recent months as U.S. colleges large and small try to survive. Among its budgetary challenges: federal money for COVID relief has run out, operating costs are rising and there are fewer high school graduates. going straight to college.
The cuts mean more than just savings or even job losses. They often create turbulence for students who chose a campus because of certain degree programs and then wrote checks or signed student loans.
“For me, it was really anxiety-ridden,” Westman, 23, said as she began the effort that led her to transfer to Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”
Cloud State, most students will be able to finish their studies before the cuts begin, but Westman’s music therapy course was new and hadn’t officially started yet. She spent the last three months in a mad dash to find work in a new city and sublease her St. Cloud apartment after already signing a lease. She was moving into her new apartment on Friday.
For years, many colleges avoided making cuts, said Larry Lee, who was interim president of St. Cloud State but left last month to head Blackburn College in Illinois.
Refused college enrollment during the pandemic, but officials expected numbers to recover to pre-COVID levels and in the meantime used federal aid money to prop up their budgets, he said.
“They were hanging in there, hanging in there,” Lee said, noting that colleges must now face their new reality.
Higher education recovered some ground last fall and spring semester, largely due to community college enrollment. began to recovershowed data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
But the trend toward four-year colleges remains troubling. Even without growing concerns about the cost of college and the burden of long-term student debt, the number of young adults is declining.
Birth rates have fallen during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and never recovered. Now, these smaller classes are preparing to graduate and move on to college.
“It’s some pretty tough math to get past,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, a leading authority on student demographics.
To complicate the situation: the federal government’s chaotic review of its request for financial aid. Millions of students entered summer break still wondering where they would go to college this fall and how they would pay for it. With jobs still plentiful, although not as much as last yearsome experts fear that students Don’t worry about signing up.
“This year, next fall, is going to be bad,” said Katharine Meyer, 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 worried about not meeting their enrollment goals.”
Many colleges like St. Cloud State have already started spending their budget reserves. Enrollment at the university rose to about 18,300 students in fall 2020, before falling steadily to about 10,000 students in fall 2023.
St. Cloud State’s student population has now stabilized, Lee said, but expenses were too high for the small number of students. The college’s budget deficit has totaled $32 million over the past two years, forcing sweeping cuts.
Some colleges have taken more extreme measures, closing your doors. This happened at the school of 1,000 students Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, the 900 students University of Fontbonne in Missouri, Wells College, with 350 students, in New York, and Goddard College, with 220 students, in Vermont.
Cuts, however, appear to be more common. Two of North Carolina Public Universities received the green light last month to eliminate more than a dozen degree programs ranging from ancient Mediterranean studies to physical.
Arkansas State University announced last fall that it was eliminating nine programs. Three of the 64 colleges in the State University of New York system have cut programs amid low enrollment and budget problems.
Other schools that are reducing and eliminating programs include West Virginia UniversityDrake University in Iowa, the University of Nebraska campus in Kearney, North Dakota State University and, on the other side of the state, Dickinson State University.
Experts say it’s just the beginning. Even schools that aren’t making immediate cuts are reviewing their undergraduate offerings. At Pennsylvania State University, officials are looking for duplicative and under-enrolled academic programs as student numbers decline at branch campuses.
Particularly affected are students on smaller programs and those in the humanitiesthat now graduate a smaller share of students than 15 years ago.
“It’s a humanitarian disaster for all the faculty and staff involved, not to mention the students who want to pursue this course,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University who has written about higher education. “It’s an open question to what extent colleges and universities can pave the way toward sustainability.”
For Terry Vermillion, who just retired after 34 years as a music professor at St. Cloud State, the cuts are hard to follow. The country’s musical programs suffered a blow during the pandemiche said, with the Zoom band nothing short of “disastrous” for many public school programs.
“We haven’t been able to teach music online really effectively, so there’s a gap,” he said. “And, you know, we’re just starting to get out of that hole and starting to recover a little bit. And then the cuts are coming.”
For St. Cloud State music greats like Lilly Rhodes, the biggest fear is what will happen when the program closes. New students will not be admitted to the department and their teachers will look for new jobs.
“When you suspend the entire music department, it’s very difficult to keep ensembles alive,” she said. “There are no musicians coming in, so when our seniors graduate, they keep going, and our ensembles get smaller and smaller.
“It’s a little hard to keep going if it’s like this,” she said.
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