As we are learning given lesser outcomes for many majors, yes. Even some high end schools are providing job guarantees to calm prospective parents.
It may be short sighted in thought and the death of soft skills going forward but it is a trend we continue to see.
People see today….not tomorrow.
And given the expense of providing and paying for an education, while maybe not wise, it is understandable.
I think Recreation and Sports Management majors have the lowest comp from my state’s public U’s… followed by Early Childhood Ed and Legal Studies.
Vocational majors, no? Virtually guaranteed a job, no? Nobody tells their grandparents at Thanksgiving “I’m majoring in Early Childhood” and gets the “what are you going to do with that?” eyeroll.
But to enter fields with low starting salaries- and frankly, not much advancement long term- is that not the definition of a “lesser” outcome? You can get a job as a probation officer (which is where many of the Legal Studies folks end up when they realize they aren’t qualified to become lawyers without three years of grad school) with just an AA. Why pay for a four year degree then?
I think it’s fair. Much of society is under employed or over educated for what they do.
Many jobs, mine included, require a degree. Many of my colleagues, have an MBA like me. The VP has no college but she started 40+ years ago and that was allowed. I’ve worked for others over the years with no college education.
Many of us will say - I don’t use my degree in my job. Maybe we do without realizing but….
We’ve had the debate on the CC b4 and most say job prep isn’t why I wanted my kid to go to college.
But I’ll against state the CC is a bubble. I’d surmise a huge chunk of college students go, not based on desire, but because you’re supposed to - or join the military.
So I do think most students and parents seek job training. Otherwise, why do we have a job prospects thread saying so and so with a communications degree from a southern school can’t find a job and regrets it or the Ga Tech Biomedical Engineer who can’t. Or that UNC CS grads send out 150 resumes with no response. Why should the kid who got a great education regret four years just because they can’t find a job ?
As it is, research shows half of parents don’t want to send their kids to college and research shows while students want to attend, they don’t want to if their families can’t afford.
It’s natural people expect a return on their investment. Even people posting on this website, even if they themselves say otherwise as noted above from our jobs prospect thread, they likely sought job training too. If their kids found jobs, they don’t have reason to second guess the statement.
I admit - I wanted this for my kids. The secon’s major was like mine - not job proof - or so I thought. But I’m very fortunate - she’s very fortunate - that she’s landed.
I guess as long as the one professor is willing to do all the work - submit the paperwork for grades and applications for graduation, the book list for the bookstore, request for classroom space, budget, he can have his own department and let students from other majors take his classes. Of course when he retires or dies, we’ll all be saying “Oh, I can’t believe Brown doesn’t offer Egyptology anymore. How sad they dropped that.”
Or they can just have the one professor join another department and be a specialty in that department. The Egypt specialist can do exactly what he does but not offer a stand alone major.
When my kids were looking at colleges, every tour we went on had a tour guide say “Oh, if we don’t have your desired major, you can design your own!” On CC that was also talked about a lot. I never see that mentioned anymore.
Schools can’t offer everything, or a department for everything, or a professor for everything. My engineer daughter went to a tech school, and could not have majored in Spanish, art, music, or history, but she took classes in them, or there were campus activities like theater and orchestra for students, faculty, and staff to participate in. I don’t think all those subjects had departments and were probably just supervised by a general studies office because they weren’t majors.
Others have pointed out some of the flaws in your thinking, but it’s worth noting that colleges have done a way bad job explaining how they work—and so your ideas about how much it costs to deliver programs are reasonable, even though they aren’t correct.
Because remember, we’re talking about majors being eliminated here, not departments. As one example, my C25 will be going to a university where linguistics is offered as a standalone major within a department of comparative literature, languages, and linguistics—and that structure means that all of the majors in that department are being offered with very little overhead spread among them.
You are correct that colleges can’t all offer anything. But using that as a handwave ignores the fact that if we’re actually trying to be in the business of developing new knowledge, somebody has to offer everything—yes, even Egyptology. With the current race to the bottom, we are legitimately on the way toward losing that.
Note also that faculty in a subject may have to exist even in the absence of associated majors, if the courses are needed to service students of other majors.
I think the implication is broader than the small number looking at particular majors. I think some college advisors, parents, and students, will look at this as a sign of political (as opposed to budgetary) meddling, and be fearful about the implications for what else might change at the school.
And in another direction - when you start to eliminate particular majors, you reduce the intellectual diversity of the community. Just like some dishes only needs a pinch of salt - but would be bland and less palatable without it.
If the political ideology of a state’s legislature is driving these types of cuts/changes, then I wonder about the long-term economic future of those states.
For instance, if the focus is on CS/engineering/healthcare/job-specific majors, what happens when those job fields are facing economic downturns? Or when they become obsolete (AI, anyone)? Will there have been a broad enough education of sufficient rigor for those graduates to pivot to different fields, or will they be required to retrain for alternative fields? I have a fear that those who have very specialized majors could end up like many of the coal miners or manufacturing workers of the past…great during boom times and then crippled when the markets change.
And if that is largely influenced by a state’s political ideology, then that can increase the divide between states that continue to offer majors in fields that more easily allow for a career pivot vs. states that eliminated those majors. Our country is already so divided, and I suspect that states that make decisions like this will make it even more divided.
But as I said, schools can offer a class in a subject (language, dance, math) without offering a major or offering enough depth in the subject to offer a major. Even a big school, but especially a small school. Daughter took Spanish at her school for 1 semester. I think they may have offered 2 semesters, but that’s not enough to offer a major, or even a minor. Were there other ways for students to take Spanish? Sure (online, summer, study abroad) but not enough interest for the school to spend the money to offer it.
U of Colorado Boulder doesn’t offer nursing (and hasn’t for at least 50 years, maybe never, I don’t know). But the University system offers it (at the med school campus in Aurora). Are there undergrads who really want to go to school in Boulder and major in nursing? Yes. Many of them. But it is a matter of how best to use the resources the CU systems has.
Goucher dropped math major a few years ago. Doesn’t mean they don’t offer math, just the major. If students want to major or minor in math, Goucher isn’t the school for them. If they just want more math, they can take the classes offered on campus, go to one of the other schools in the area (Towson, Hopkins, Loyola), take it in the summer somewhere else, do an independent study.
I think the state of Indiana probably has the majors that IU eliminated at one of the other state schools or that there is a more general degree that can be obtained with the same courses (English rather than English Lit). It makes sense to consolidate programs and make the programs strong where they are offered, to have 5 really strong Early Educ programs rather than have 15 so-so programs around the state. Will that make some students unhappy because they wanted to go to IU but now will have to go to ISU? Yes. Is the student who wanted to major in dance but minor in math going to pick a school other than Goucher? Probably.
I agree that some school will offer the major you are looking for, but not every school will, or can, offer everything. I also don’t think a school is ‘less’ because it can’t offer everything, every language, every art, every music class.
I agree with much of what you say. In West Virginia, for instance, I’ve suggested a lot of consolidations across the universities. Same for Pennsylvania. I understand that every campus can’t offer every major.
I’m pretty confident, however, that a lot of the majors that are being eliminated at IU aren’t offered at any of the other Indiana public colleges. The state of Indiana had designated Purdue as its engineering/applied STEM college while IU was business and liberal arts (which includes science and math, but not engineering). So with the vast majority (if not all) of these proposed cuts at IU, I’m 99% sure that the state of Indiana is proposing the elimination of those fields of study IN THE STATE, not just at IU. And that is what I find potentially problematic for the future of Indiana (the state).
That’s not how the Indiana law works, there’s no analysis across campuses. This law has nothing to do with saving money and/or being efficient and/or making sure all majors are available at a minimum of one campus in the system. All public colleges have to eliminate or combine majors with fewer than 15 grads (at the undergraduate level). Spanish at IU isn’t a good example, because it had 26 grads in 2024, so is not mandated to eliminate/merge. Something else is going on there that we don’t yet know. There are different hurdles for numbers of students in AA, graduate and PhD programs.
RE: IU --I would continue to watch how this plays out, as there may be mergers to save majors. For example, some of my FB groups blew up about the fact that the ballet major was going to be dropped as of yesterday. Per parents with kids in the program, they have a BS in ballet, a BS in ballet with an outside concentration (which I believe is akin to a minor)–and these are separate majors. They also have a contemporary dance major which they are planning on absorbing into the ballet department (they have been housed in separate schools in the past) and changing the degree to a BS in dance with concentrations in ballet or contemporary. For anyone interested, it is fairly commonly understood that IU is one of the top four classical ballet programs in the country, and is regularly argued to be #1.
I wonder if other majors on the cutting block will do the same sort of joining forces.
This is what I am assuming about the foriegn language offerings. They may be pooled together for a BA in Modern European Languages and similar groupings for different geographic regions.
Due to the cultural orientation that most foreign language departments have taken, it’d require some complicated conceptual high wire act to put them all under one big umbrella - Hispanic Studies wouldn’t cover Portuguese, Latino Studies and European Studies would split into Spanish, Francophone Studies wouldn’t include Italian, etc. I guess you could have a European, Francophone, Hispanic major. Or perhaps a Modern Languages&Cultures major, Hispanic studies concentration, Latin American concentration, etc..
Most Departments at R1 public universities include a service branch (gen eds, typically elementary&low intermediate courses) taught by Assistants; professors split their service into themed intermediate courses, advanced undergraduate courses and seminars, or graduate courses, and a course in another department (media/cinema, African studies, freshman seminar, comp lit, history, art history, Jewish studies, Urban Studies, etc.) As a result, gutting these majors is a double (triple) whammy since it affects these specialist classes, the graduate offerings, and another department.
The elimination of programs often means that the college does not hire new TT faculty in that field, however, and TT faculty who retire or take jobs elsewhere may not be replaced.
It’s not unusual for this sort of teaching to be done primarily by overworked and massively underpaid adjuncts, particularly for online courses.
It has been many years since the department at Brown was this small.
This is, however, the case at Indiana U, where Steve Vinson has been running an Egyptology program single-handedly and doing an excellent job of placing students into PhD programs. The elimination of the MA program in Middle Eastern studies at the university is a significant loss to the field, as only one other institution in the US routinely admits students for a terminal MA in Egyptology (the University of Memphis).
““during the most recent legislative session, one of our top agenda items included ensuring that Indiana’s higher education institutions are preparing students for career opportunities in the most in-demand fields of today and the future.””
Stuck out to me…
A true university is for expanding learning and knowledge, which goes beyond job preparation. It makes me sad people in these positions don’t get it.
The university I work at had all of the (non-Indigenous, non-English) languages pooled together into a single department some time ago, and all students majoring in a foreign language simply get a BA in “Languages”. Yes, they either specialize in one language (French, German, Spanish, or Japanese) or specialize in two languages (any combination of those four, Russian, or ASL), but it’s simply a “Languages” degree on the transcript.
This is what’s wild to me - I’m a musical theatre professional, and even I know that IU has one of the top ballet schools in the country. IU also has a strong theatre department at both the undergrad and grad levels, and anyone with any knowledge of college theatre programs knows that these programs are intentionally kept small (because you quite simply can’t learn how to act if you only get to do a scene once a semester). Pedagogically, there’s a reason many performing arts programs aren’t turning out more than 15 grads per year.
Watch for more programs closing, and possibly for grad school closings. Effective July 1, 2026 Grad Plus loans are eliminated for new students (those currently enrolled can borrow to complete their program). I know for a fact that this will reduce the number of students who can afford grad school, because private loans are not an option for many grad students. I think that this will have an immediate effect on admissions - perhaps applications won’t drop immediately, but matriculation will plummet when admitted applicants realize that they need to obtain a private loan. If I still worked in my previous job in grad school financial aid, I would throw in the towel now.
I’m late to the discussion about the changes in Indiana but my understanding is that Purdue is going to be combining some of these smaller programs to meet the state threshold. There is quite a lot of overlap in course requirements on the Purdue list of small majors. I’d expect that the other schools in IN will be doing the same.