‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ choices shrink as colleges slash majors
As enrollments fall, rural-serving universities are shedding a huge number of programs
by JON MARCUS, BRIANNA ATKINSON, MOLLY MINTA and AMY MORONA
CLEVELAND, Miss. — Although she won a scholarship to Mississippi State University, two hours’ drive away, Shamya Jones couldn’t get there because she had a new baby and no car.
So she enrolled instead at a local community college, then transferred to the four-year campus closest to her home in the rural Mississippi Delta — Delta State University.
She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, Delta State eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music.
“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. “It’s like we’re not getting the help or benefits we need.” The cuts “take away from us, our education.”
That kind of frustration is growing. Rural Americans already have far less access to higher education than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and financial crises. Many rural private, nonprofit colleges are closing altogether.
“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, well, ‘This is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”
When programs at rural colleges and universities are eliminated, “It’s not just, if this institution doesn’t do it, another one can pick up the slack,” Koricich said. “It’s that if this institution doesn’t do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It’s not an option.”
While large-scale cuts to majors in the years during and since the Covid-19 pandemic have gotten some attention, what many have in common has been largely overlooked: They’re disproportionately happening at universities that serve rural students or are in largely rural states.
Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.
But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.
St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.
The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.
Among the many other regional public universities that are dropping programs and majors are Missouri Western, Eastern Kentucky, Arkansas State, Dickinson State in North Dakota and the University of Nebraska at Kearney. North Dakota State University has proposed cuts to 14 programs; the university did not respond to questions about the status of that plan.
“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of both Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System.
At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.
A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis,told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.
“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to right-size the budget,” Ennis said.
But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a report that administrators are exploiting these problems to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”
Many of the programs affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to urban and suburban ones.
These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that is also eliminating majors. “We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”
But Welch said states are often simply trying to reduce duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities receive.
“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”
Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more three years later. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.
The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.
