Should Colleges Let Ailing Majors Die or Revamp Them?

Ted Schurter for The Chronicle

When majors aren’t thriving, you can soup them up or let them go. Both tactics are complicated, and neither carries a guarantee. But, say administrators, doing nothing is not an option.

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is updating and reinvigorating a number of traditional majors by combining them with computer science. The reasoning is that liberal-arts, arts, and agricultural fields increasingly encompass data analysis that requires computer-science skills. Assumption College, in Worcester, Mass., on the other hand, is simply cutting some declining majors, especially in the humanities, and banking on entirely new programs, pre-professional in thrust, to buck worrisome New England enrollment trends.

Illinois saw “incredibly high demand” from employers for what it calls “CS + X” majors, “students whose interest and skills manifest in a different way,” says Leonard B. Pitt, associate head of computer science and director of the department’s undergraduate programs. In various disciplines, he says, “computation was becoming naturally embedded in their area.” The CS-plus programs have allowed for growth in his department, and the hope is that they’ll also bolster the partner programs. Results so far have been heartening.

Should Colleges Replace or Enhance Unpopular Majors?

Assumption College is doing the former; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign the latter. Idea Lab looks at why, how, and what’s at stake.

• It’s Time to End College Majors as We Know Them

Double majors in computer science and another field can be too burdensome for students, even requiring an extra year for an undergraduate degree. Minors aren’t comprehensive enough. The CS-plus programs, he says, are the happy medium, intense but doable for students, and producing graduates who are sought after by employers.

The computer-science department previously had only two blended undergraduate degrees, says Pitt. The mathematics and computer-science major was established in 1964, and statistics and computer science followed in 1988. They were created as collaborations between the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering, but the blended majors were housed in the former. Those “legacy degrees” served as models for the recently added CS-plus programs: anthropology, astronomy, chemistry, and linguistics. In the fall, Illinois will add combined CS programs in crop sciences and music, and the university is considering others, including advertising.

It was in 2010 that the computer-science department began thinking about alternatives for students “who wanted to engage in computer science but didn’t fancy themselves as engineers,” Pitt says. It wanted to develop programs for students interested in software applications and computer-assisted problem solving, as opposed to the traditional major’s focus on building software and operating systems.

The anthropology, astronomy, chemistry, and linguistics majors rolled out in 2014 were chosen in part because “there were champions of those areas that were very interested in partnering with us,” says Pitt, as well as the “natural links” the fields had with computer science.

The new majors needed to be approved by curriculum committees with faculty from both the computer-science department and the departments it would be cooperating with, as well as the educational-policy committee, the faculty senate, the provost’s office, the Board of Trustees, and the Illinois Board of Higher Education.

Pitt says it was a challenge “getting the faculty to appreciate that there’s a different notion of how computer scientists might engage with the world than doing network programming.” The CS-plus majors are housed not in computer science or the College of Engineering, but in the partner departments. That helps brand the new programs in a more liberal-arts way, making the traditionally engineering-heavy major attractive to more students.

In 2013, before the inception of the CS-plus-linguistics major, only 58 students were enrolled in linguistics. Four years later, the program has 152 students enrolled, with 69 majoring in CS plus linguistics. Other departments have also seen growth. Astronomy had 40 students enrolled in 2013 and increased to 110, with about 29 percent of those in the CS-plus major.

Students in CS-plus majors do not have to take as many physics or chemistry classes as traditional computer-science majors do. The degrees are generally close to half computer-science classes and half classes in the combined field. Illinois wanted to make sure that the students in these programs “don’t get a watered-down computer-science degree along with an X degree,” says Pitt. “We want students who will excel in both areas.”

The CS-plus majors also seem to be drawing more women into computer science, says Roxana Girju, director of the CS-plus-linguistics program since its start. The percentage of women in the overall computer-science program, including CS-plus majors, rose from 10 percent to more than 25 percent in about four years. The share of women in the freshman class in the College of Engineering rose from 11 percent in 2012 to about 45 percent in 2016.

Ted Schurter for The Chronicle

Morgan Wessel, a CS-plus-linguistics major, chose it because “it basically ties into natural-language processing, so you can use your linguistic knowledge to pair with your computer-science knowledge.” The sophomore chose to attend the University of Illinois because it offered the combined majors. The value of such linkages, she says, can be seen in inventions like Apple’s Siri, Google searches, Google Translate, and other applications that use text search and language processing. Wessel’s courses started solely in linguistics, then expanded to computational linguistics and computational morphology — the processing of written and spoken language.

“I think it’s good to have some sort of specialization within computer science because it is so big,” she says. “If you go to companies and say, ‘I’m a computer-science major, but I don’t have a specific skill,’ they’re not as excited to hire you.”

Over the years, says Girju, the CS-plus programs have worked with employers at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to keep their curricula up to speed with changes in the industry. “We’ve realized,” she says, “that this kind of combination is much more appealing to these employers than just doing individual degrees and trying to cobble them together.”

The demand for computer-science courses has been so high, says Pitt, that students who don’t make it into the selective major try to enroll in the CS-plus programs to get to them. But, he says, the computer-science department is highly selective when it comes to choosing students for the CS-plus programs. “We don’t want to take students who can’t quite do CS and want to do X. We want students who are going to be at the top of both.”

Future CS-plus degrees are in various stages of development, but for now the computer-science department is at full capacity. As resources become available, Illinois will grow the CS-plus programs slowly and selectively. “Should future degrees be created,” Pitt says, “We are lucky enough to have approved a process that can be streamlined.”

Assumption, a small, Catholic liberal-arts college in Worcester, Mass., has taken a different tack. After a hard look at its majors, it decided to cut some of them even as it has started up more than a dozen new programs. The process and the decisions have been painful and tense — tense enough to contribute in October to a vote of no confidence, by nearly half of Assumption’s 120 faculty members, in its president, Francesco Cesareo. There were other factors: Faculty members were upset about changing standards for tenure and promotion, and had general qualms about Cesareo’s leadership, says Owen D.V. Sholes, a professor of biology who this spring is stepping down from the presidency of the faculty senate and will retire from Assumption this summer.

But the greatest points of contention, he says, were declining enrollment — down 7.4 percent in 10 years — faculty layoffs, and program cuts. Within the same 10 years, a Chronicle analysis shows, tuition revenue has dropped 5.4 percent. Faculty are worried, says Sholes, about the survival and management of the college.

Administrators sympathize, but the statistics regarding wilting departments spoke for themselves.

Most of the programs cut were in the humanities, says Louise C. Keeley, former chair of the philosophy department and now provost. “I regret that immensely,” she says. Art history, classics, geography, French, Italian, and studio art were among the casualties.

Cuts and layoffs are two tools for survival, Sholes says, but “you can’t cut your way to prosperity.”

So, over the last three years, 13 new programs have been created to attract more students. Those include majors like actuarial science, data analytics, and health sciences, which includes specialties like physical therapy and occupational therapy. Six more programs — including cybersecurity, nursing, and neuroscience — are under development.

If Assumption doesn’t innovate, it could be clobbered by a projected drop in college enrollment across New England. “We wanted to be on top of the wave,” says Keeley, “not getting smacked by the wave.” Of the 13 new programs, the most promising, she says, are the nursing, cybersecurity, and physician-assistant degrees.

Keeley credits faculty input for the new programs and praises faculty members’ “incredible innovation and collaborative spirit,” but the administration also hired an outside consultant to look at prospects and weigh the viability of existing majors.

Programs were evaluated from three tiers, says Keeley: innovation committees, made up of faculty members, exploring opportunities for graduate and undergraduate program development; a team of faculty looking at existing undergraduate majors; and a review from the outside consulting firm. In addition, the student-government association also surveyed students to ask them what majors they would be most interested in seeing the college start.

Both the in-house committees and the consultants agreed there was promise in the nursing and physician-assistant programs, Sholes says, but start-up costs could be in the millions — including new faculty hires. “They figured they would actually be making money about five years out,” he says. Rather than using its operating budget, the college plans to draw from its endowment to fund the new programs, Sholes said. Assumption had an endowment of nearly $94 million in 2016, according to tax records.

A feasibility study was also conducted for the new cybersecurity program after it was proposed by an innovation committee. Keeley says wedding Assumption’s liberal-arts focus to this preprofessional area could work nicely because companies “wanted students who could read and write and think, and knew what questions ethically to ask the data.”

As far as deciding which programs to cut, “the faculty team said there’s nothing to eliminate,” says Keeley. “The marketing research team said, ‘You know we’re not telling you what to eliminate,’ but they gave us the data, and it was very clear.”

The consultant’s report put each program into one of three categories: stars, cash cows, or dogs. If a program had low demand and low growth, it was a dog. Cash cows were programs deemed as high in demand but low in growth, without the resources needed to expand. Stars had high demand and high growth. Latin American studies, Italian, French, history, and classics were among the dogs — a term, Sholes says, that “was not warmly received.”

Keeley knew that a lot of faculty members from the senate were upset about the cuts. “I understand perfectly well,” she says, “how difficult this is for individual people who have almost without exception served the institution very well. … With any kind of changes there are going to be some bumps.”

“The vast majority of faculty have really rolled up their sleeves and are helping, and understand that this is a new opportunity to move the college forward,” she says.

Sholes, however, says a recent satisfaction survey showed that 75 percent of faculty don’t believe the college is headed in the right direction.

The dice are rolling.

“If we get a good incoming class for the fall, then people are going to feel a whole lot better,” he says. “If we don’t, then people are going to feel a whole lot worse.”