Siena Heights in Michigan closing after 25-26 academic year.
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Per College Navigator, there are about 1700 undergrads, and per the College Board’s site, it’s primarily residential with 89% of first year students living on campus. That’s a lot bigger of a college than I’m used to seeing closing on this thread.
I will give them props for closing in a respectful manner (i.e. giving an academic year’s notice).
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IU is in no danger of closing, but it is eliminating 100+ degree programs due to the most recent Indiana budget bill which requires majors to have a certain amount of grads each year (15 at the undergrad level.) Purdue will have to cut programs too, but I haven’t seen details on that.
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Wow - in addition to cultural programs and atmospheric sciences (no one believes in climate change), teaching programs are being eliminated.
Yep, our youth are about to be indoctrinated.
Maybe IU will soon have its name changed to Kelley (I say tongue in cheek).
This is scary.
Thanks for posting.
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Possibly . I just looked at the list. Cutting Statistics? IU Bloomington doesnt even have an average of 15 undergrads graduating with a stats degree? That just sounds odd to me for a large flagship.
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Are you sure they aren’t counting their applied math majors as distinct from their stats majors? If they consider them too different disciplines, it would make sense to just consolidate the stats major into the math department, no? And wouldn’t actually involve letting go faculty or any meaningful academic change- just nomenclature.
I know parents who will NOT let their kids go to a U which has “applied math” instead of statistics- thinking that applied math is a watered down, “suitable for teaching third grade” degree.
Possible?
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Yeah, math/stats departments sometimes slice their majors up too fine and end up not getting robust numbers in their respective buckets, especially in smaller departments. Ironic.
But IU has a separate stats department with just the BS in Stats. Thats why I thought it was odd. Maybe the students all flocked to some Data Analytics program at the university.
(Btw, applied math PhD here- your comment was spot on about that!)
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There was one undergrad stats major in 2023-24 who completed their degree. The data by major are here(for 2023-24, the most recent available):
Looking at the ‘big picture’ isn’t the issue, it’s the law that Indiana public unis have to end programs that don’t meet the minimums established by the state leaders (for political reasons, which we would have to discuss in the political forum.)
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From College Navigator, on the number of first majors in this fields who graduated in 2023-2024 (College Navigator - Indiana University-Bloomington):
The breadth and depth of the cuts is just stunning. And their position isn’t even consistent. There are way more than 15 Spanish majors graduating per year, and this is only counting the ones who listed Spanish as their first major (and not as their second major):
If these are real cuts and not just cuts that are actually nomenclature changes that will result in “specializations” within a broader major, then I am terrified for the future of higher education, and our country.
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It would not be surprising if the data science major took up the student demand that would go to the statistics major in the absence of a data science major.
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This is curious. I’m not going to go thru all 116 programs that IU identified as part of these eliminations/suspensions to see if they all really have fewer than 15 undergrads intending to major in it. I wonder if in the 2024-25 data (which we don’t have) Spanish majors have dipped? Or they are looking at the undergrad population as a whole right now and there are fewer than 60 undergrad Spanish majors?
The articles do say that the identified programs may be eliminated, but also could be merged. Maybe some merging will happen with languages?
Sadly the new law doesn’t seem to account for minors.
It will be interesting to see if these changes impact the number of students applying and/or enrolling in IU or Purdue.
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I’m not even talking about minors (which the IU Board of Trustees should be taking into account). The order that a student declares their majors (if they are double majoring) impacts whether a major is considered their first major or their second major. In 2022, 58 Bachelor’s degrees were given out by IU-Bloomington to students who had Spanish as their first or second major. Using the filters, we can see that 26 students had Spanish listed as their first major and 32 had it listed as their second major. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a similarly large number of students who had Spanish listed as their second major in subsequent years.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jonboeckenstedt/viz/BachelorsDegreesAwardedin2022/Dashboard1
It’s possible, but if they had 26 first majors in 2022 (and 58 first and second majors) and another 26 first majors in SY23-24, then I’d be gobsmacked if they didn’t have at least 15 majors in SY24-25. Of course, I’ve been gobsmacked, flabbergasted, dumbfounded, incredulous, and stunned by a lot of news lately.
I will, admittedly, be recommending IU much less often.
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This is likely as much about that you don’t need to know Spanish when everyone will be an English speaker.
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Maybe. For sure that’s the intent of the bill… to get rid of majors that could be DEI related/adjacent. But why would IU eliminate (maybe merge) a major that seemingly has plenty of students majoring in it? I can’t imagine the faculty support the new bill, perhaps the administration does? But I think I would still be surprised there too (but as @austennut said though, that’s becoming typical on the daily.) Let’s see how it all plays out.
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I surmise faculty at any school that gets hit doesn’t like it - even those on the brink of closure.
It impacts freedom to learn and selfishly to them, it impacts their livelihood.
But this seems to be happening in conservative leaning states.
There could very well be driven by reasonable budget issues but it sure seems it’s more driven by ideology.
And that’s sad.
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Probably the small number interested in those small majors may be more likely to look elsewhere.
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What about the teaching programs?
If they eliminate all foreign language offerings (something they’re nationally known for) will they also lose their critical language flagships?
Why a society is choosing to inflict itself such harm is as mysterious now as it was in 2016 when England&Wales chose Brexit.
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I see the business necessity of closing programs that only have 10 students majoring in that subject over 4 years. How many teachers, administrators, offices do you need to support those 10 students? Sure, other students might want to take Spanish. but they aren’t going to take Spanish 4000, or Spanish literature, or Spanish poets which you need to offer a major in Spanish. Or what about Italian or Swedish? Middlebury can offer all those languages (because they don’t offer some other things) but maybe IU just can’t.
If they want to offer more and more classes in different types of engineering or computer defense systems or even sports medicine, some of the old standards are going to take a hit. We toured one school that was an LAC but was touting it’s 3+2 engineering program. There were 5 professors listed for its physics department. FIVE. What if one gets sick or you don’t like him? You can’t attract kids who are really interested in physics with only a few professors, so that means they don’t offer enough classes to provide a decent major. We weren’t interested in a 3+2 program, but I didn’t have confidence one could get the ‘3’ part of the degree at this school.
Can the school promise an orchestra if there are only 10 students interested, and they are all violins?
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Good point. IU is a top language school.i think they house three flagships - Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.
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I understand your point.
But not every “department” needs departmental overhead. When I was in college, there was exactly one professor in the department of Egyptology. And typically, there would be one undergrad per year majoring in that subject.
BUT- if you added up the Classics majors who needed “antiquity adjacent” courses, and the Religious Studies majors who were doing a deep dive into the ancient Near East, and the architecture and art history and all those other students- there were hundreds of students per year who had some involvement with the department. No deans, no administrative assistants, just a renowned scholar with ties to museums and universities all over the world and was happy to connect students who had an interest in the subject with colleagues and research institutes and funding. A friend of mine did an independent study for a poli sci major comparing the slavery based economic systems with “free market” systems. Said the professor was invaluable.
Fully endowed chair- so didn’t cost the U a penny except for the heating and air conditioning in his office.
I get that the humanities aren’t as sexy as bio-engineering. But does every faculty person have to be able to connect the dots between his/her research and high paying jobs in the commercial sector?
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