College enrollment has dropped again this spring.
Research published by the National Student Clearinghouse in May reported a 1.7 percent drop in student enrollment, or a total of about 300,000 students.
These numbers don’t come as a surprise, as academia has seen a similar drop in enrollment every year since 2011.
While they disagree on minor aspects, most analysts consider this drop to be an outcome of the Great Recession.
The resulting lowered birthrate and the increased poverty among current and potential college students has both state and privately run institutions in crisis, competing desperately for ever-shrinking financial resources.
To address the enrollment crisis, institutions across America are asking the question: What are today’s youths looking for in a college education?
In working to answer this question and remain relevant for the “rapidly-evolving higher education marketplace,” Elizabethtown College is undergoing its own process of academic and operational realignment.
As a part of this process, the College will be phasing out its philosophy and theatre majors and its theatre, peace and conflict studies and film studies minors, as well as furloughing seven faculty positions after this academic year.
The college has also eliminated seven staff positions and is leaving 14 vacant because of an adjustment in its general operations and staff responsibilities.
Etown’s realignment is not a unique occurrence.
Many academic institutions across America are making similar adjustments to better meet student interest.
With the job market increasingly prioritizing hard skills – the technical and quantifiable skills learned through specialized training and education – universities are expanding their offerings of pre-professional and STEM-focused programming.
Many institutions are gutting or removing their liberal arts programming entirely to facilitate this expansion.
According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, only one in 20 undergraduate degrees awarded today applies to the liberal arts disciplines.
With such an evident lack of student interest, many institutions feel that these cuts are a necessary part of remaining relevant and financially stable.
While Elizabethtown’s realignment was not an explicit trade-off of liberal arts programming for pre-professional and STEM alternatives, all the discontinued academic programming fell within the liberal arts disciplines.
In consideration of changing student demand, the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma recently unveiled its own plan for realignment.
Starting this year, the university will be dropping departments and degrees it has deemed superfluous, transitioning from 15 academic departments and 68 degree programs to three academic divisions with 36 degree programs.
It will be cutting liberal arts offerings like its Russian and Chinese studies, philosophy, and religious studies degree tracks.
Etown plans to use the related funds on general curriculum programs, and towards its efforts to increase student retention.
Gordon College is one institution that has chosen to combine its liberal arts programming, rather than eliminate any offerings altogether.
In March of this year, the college eliminated 36 faculty and staff positions as well as adjusting their budget to allow for a seven percent reduction in operations cost over the next few years.
One aspect of these changes means merging the history, philosophy and political science departments into one.
They hope to offer multidisciplinary or “integrated” majors in the future, allowing students to earn dual degrees in these disciplines.
Other institutions have chosen to forgo the reduction of their liberal arts program budgets altogether.
Some are making their liberal arts degrees more marketable, like Macalester College, which has injected practical career training into its humanities degree requirements.
Wake Forest University is one institution choosing to run a promotional campaign for its liberal arts programming.
Seeking to articulate the value of liberal arts degrees, the campaign focuses on the skills like critical thinking, communication, writing and complex reasoning that are integral to liberal arts degrees and promotes them as a means of standing out from other job applicants in the market upon graduation.
Newberry College and the College of St. Joseph are just two of many small, private liberal arts colleges that have shuttered their doors this year.
Others, like Marlboro College in 2018, have been forced to merge with larger institutions.
Research indicates that college closures and drops in student enrollment will worsen considerably in the coming years, with one Harvard researcher predicting that 50 percent of all American colleges and universities will close in the next decade.
While it seems to most that a commitment to pre-professional and STEM programming is the safest way forward for academic institutions, some scholars alternatively feel that this is a dangerous practice.
With the potential saturation of these degrees and the projected explosion of the automation industry rendering many STEM jobs obsolete, many graduates with supposedly “marketable” degrees will be unemployable.
Whatever the case, it is apparent that the wave of innovation and changing values sweeping across America requires institutions make major changes in order to best serve their students.
