Easing the Pain of Program Closings

When years of enrollment growth ground to a halt a few years ago, officials at Biola University knew they had to shift gears. High-school graduates, they discovered, wanted more offerings in science and technology, where jobs were plentiful. The Southern California institution’s outdated facilities weren’t making the grade.

Investing in STEM fields required cutting money somewhere else, so the painful reallocation process began.

It’s a dreaded but familiar exercise at colleges when budgets are tight and enrollment pools shrinking. Program cuts usually make headlines when top-down mandates or widespread layoffs prompt faculty to vote no confidence in the president, unions to threaten censure, or accreditors to warn of sanctions. The University of Wisconsin at Superior came under heavy criticism from both faculty members and students last month when administrators caught them by surprise in suspending two dozen majors and minors.

Sensible, Humane Approaches to Program Closures

Slashing recklessly won’t save the money you think it will, but it’s guaranteed to stir up resentment — and maybe lawsuits too. Take a deep breath, level with your faculty, and consider challenges collaboratively.

• What to Consider When Closing an Academic Program
• A College Weighs Its Priorities Before Making Cuts
• 4 Ways to Make Program Closures Easier

There are ways, though, to minimize the pain and disruption for both faculty members and students when restructuring the curriculum means closing academic programs.

First, those who have been through the process say, don’t get so caught up in the numbers that you lose sight of the attachment people have to their programs.

“These decisions will feel rational and data-driven from the institution’s perspective, but it’s important to remember that they will have an incredible emotional impact on faculty and students,” says Sherri Lind Hughes, who directs a leadership development program for the American Council on Education. She oversaw program cuts in her previous job as provost at Marymount University. “The institutions that do it well are proactive in acknowledging that and helping people land safely.”

For faculty members whose jobs will be eliminated, the first question is whether their skills would match up with a job in another department where enrollment is growing, possibly with a little extra training. If that won’t work, the college could help them connect with other potential employers or provide research support in their final semesters so they can beef up their CVs.

Students majoring in programs that are being phased out will need help finishing their degrees. At least one faculty member in the discipline should be retained to close out the program, which might take up to four years.

Academic advisers should help students who want to transfer to a college with a more robust program. Ideally, they should reach out to affected students individually.

When the situation seems dire, boards may be tempted to cut programs quickly. That can put them on the wrong side of watchdog groups like the American Association of University Professors, which have a clear set of expectations for how such cuts should be handled, especially for tenured faculty members.

The association aggressively safeguards tenure and faculty jobs, but makes exceptions when a college declares financial exigency. Whatever the reason for program cuts, faculty members should be central to the process from the start, the association says. If the reason is a financial crisis, administrators should provide professors with detailed data backing that up, it says.

A possibly temporary enrollment drop isn’t enough to justify axing a program, according to the AAUP; the move must reflect a long-range determination that the college’s mission will be better served if the program closes.

That can be a tall order for a college in financial distress. When the College of Saint Rose cut 27 academic programs in 2015, citing budget and enrollment challenges, 23 tenured or tenure-track faculty members were given one-year terminal contracts. The AAUP censured the New York college, saying it had failed to adequately involve faculty members in the decision making and had rushed through the cuts without considering their long-term impact.

College officials disputed that, saying serious financial pressures had required quick action. Accreditors may also get involved if they feel their guidelines for cutting programs aren’t being followed. In one such directive, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools says colleges must submit a plan detailing how students enrolled in a discontinued program will be able to finish their coursework at the same or another institution.

Given the protections colleges are expected to offer those affected by the cuts, the financial savings they’re hoping for may not pan out, experts caution. “Many look to program closures when they’re under financial strain hoping for short-term or immediate savings,” says Ms. Hughes. “Those are hard to get because the process of making sure you take care of students and see them through and take care of faculty are difficult.”

Regardless of their financial health, colleges are continually adding and subtracting programs as student interests change. “The reality is that for a tuition-driven institution with a limited endowment, every year you have to make hard decisions,” says Donald E. Heller, provost and vice president of academic affairs at the University of San Francisco. Starting a new program often requires cutting another.

So how does a college decide which programs to cut?

Rather than focusing on short-term enrollment trends, experts say, institutions should consider whether programs still fit the college’s evolving mission. “The criteria they use to decide when a program should be closed should mirror the criteria used to decide when to launch a program,” Ms. Hughes says.

A typical target for cuts is the department with the fewest number of majors, but that isn’t always the best choice. Some liberal-arts programs, for instance, may have lower enrollments or fewer majors, but because they lack expensive laboratory equipment, they may cost less to run. Many are crucial to the college’s general-education requirements and hone writing, critical thinking, and other skills all students need.

Science and math departments can also end up on the chopping block when enrollments dwindle.

More than a dozen physics departments across Texas were in danger of closing several years ago when the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board voted to phase out 64 degree programs that didn’t attract enough majors. (A Texas law passed since then stripped the board of its authority to close “low-producing” programs, as boards in some other states are still authorized to do.)

Thirteen of the 25 undergraduate physics-degree programs at the state’s public institutions were judged underperforming, and six were phased out or consolidated after being given a chance to appeal to the board.

Many of those department heads argued that even if a discipline attracted few majors, a lot of other students might need to take courses in that field. Physics, for instance, can be a challenging major that scares off many undergraduates, but it provides important courses for students in health or other STEM fields.

Recognizing that, a college may continue to offer lower-level courses to students in other majors even after killing off the degree program. But while it may save money by eliminating smaller upper-division courses, the college could lose top professors who would prefer to teach advanced students in a robust department.

Sometimes that’s exactly what a struggling college is hoping for: that highly paid senior professors will willingly move on, allowing the college to replace them with cheaper adjunct instructors. That move, critics warn, could save money but compromise quality.

Disciplines can sometimes live on without a major, or even a department.

“The music doesn’t end just because you close the music department,” says James E. Samels, a longtime higher-education consultant and co-author of Consolidating Colleges and Merging Universities: New Strategies for Higher Education Leaders. It might continue, he says, in an interdisciplinary performing-arts department.

Streamlining programs into interdisciplinary clusters makes economic sense, he says, but college leaders should start by establishing trust with small groups of faculty members. Money shouldn’t be the focus, but “if 20 percent of the programs are creating 80 percent of the revenues, they need to know that.”

When evaluating which programs to close, colleges should ask themselves three questions, says Richard Staisloff, a former college administrator who founded rpk GROUP, a campus consulting firm. Who wants this? What’s our success with the students who go into those programs? And how does it help us create an overall sustainable business model?

Cost, quality, and relevance are the three factors that Peter D. Eckel, senior fellow and director of leadership programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, often hears cited.

But the ax frequently falls on programs with the least political clout, measured in part by the outspokenness of the alumni and the organizing power of the faculty, says Mr. Eckel, author of Changing Course: Making the Hard Decisions to Eliminate Academic Programs.

Social media is allowing more players — and louder voices — to enter the fray when programs are considered for cuts. “It provides a platform to build coalitions both on and off the campus,” Mr. Eckel says.

Outsiders played a role in resurrecting a finance degree at Southern University and A&M College, a historically black institution in Baton Rouge. The Louisiana Board of Regents had decided to eliminate the freestanding degree because of low completion numbers. But the board agreed to reinstate it after the state’s Department of Insurance gave the university $460,000 and local employers agreed to take on finance majors as interns.

The unexpected windfall from the insurance department was part of a $2.7-million investment the department made in training future insurance professionals at six Louisiana universities after the department won a lawsuit over the disbanding of a health maintenance organization.

Sometimes the best way to keep a program alive is to partner with a neighboring college, as some colleges do for administrative services, says Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education, Joseph C. Rallo. “This, sadly, is going to be a huge conversation for universities as states continue to disinvest in higher education,” he says. The state’s Board of Regents, which he heads, regularly reviews programs with low enrollment and has recommended dozens for closure.

At Biola, a Christian university with around 6,100 undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff members spent more than a year prioritizing academic and administrative programs and freeing up money for STEM and other growing disciplines. The $63-million science building, paid for through a separate capital campaign, has state-of-the art simulation labs and realistic hospital-like settings, says Donell Campbell, an associate professor of nursing.

“At this point, for everything that’s being eliminated, we found a way to do it at a much more modest level,” says Biola’s provost, Deborah L. Taylor. “Majors became minors, minors became concentrations.”

The environmental-science major became a concentration within the biology department; and physical education, within kinesiology. A master’s program in Christian education was demoted to a concentration within the department of Christian ministries. So far, no faculty members have been laid off, although one left voluntarily, officials say.

The university appointed two task forces, each made up of faculty and staff members. One tackled academic programs; the other, administrative. The groups spent about five months creating templates for each program, looking at such factors as mission compatibility and job opportunities. Each program was asked to describe what it would do if it had 20 percent more money and how it could trim if it had 20 percent less.

The academic task force, on which Ms. Campbell served, assigned programs to one of five categories, ranging from ones that should be expanded to those that should close. The online report was opened to the entire faculty and staff for comment. The administration considered those comments and conducted conversations with deans to decide which programs to cut.

In addition to the $6.7 million in budget savings the departments themselves identified, the reallocation process freed up another $4.8 million to invest in new or growing programs.

“It was a painful process,” Ms. Taylor says. “It was very time-consuming, and it led to moments of anxiety while people were waiting for the decisions.”

But it would have been far more painful if it had been a top-down decision.

“There’s a greater sense of collegiality,” she says, “when everyone feels they’re working together.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.