Colleges and universities across the country are struggling with budget deficits. Costs are up, enrollment is dropping, government aid is drying up, and public trust is at rock bottom. This new reality creates opportunities to make state universities both leaner and better by reviewing their program offerings and reassessing the educational value of the subjects they cover.
As confidence in higher education collapses, fewer students are attending college. Mississippi’s Delta State University has seen a 48 percent enrollment decline since 2010, resulting in an $11 million budget deficit for the 2024–2025 academic year. Portland State University faced a nearly $20 million operating deficit, with enrollments down 21 percent since 2017. The University of Nebraska at Kearney, Western Washington University, San Francisco State University, and other schools face steep deficits as well. Flagship universities like the University of Nebraska, the University of Minnesota, Penn State University, and West Virginia University have all recently cut budgets to balance the books.
Universities’ normal response to budget crises is to demand more aid from state legislatures and to tighten belts. When the budget shortfalls get too large, however, schools must review programs to ask whether programs and courses are in line with the university’s vision of a high-quality education. Today, many of their most ideological programs and departments are not—and they should be scrapped.
Reviews allow universities to trim or eliminate programs entirely—and even suspend tenure protections—to cut budgets or serve missions. In the past, administrators have been reluctant to make value judgments about which programs to reduce, preferring instead to make “neutral” cuts based purely on metrics like low enrollment or high expenses.
This approach often results in a gutting of the humanities. Confronting a $36 million shortfall, Miami University (Ohio) cut or consolidated 18 programs that had fewer than 12 graduates per year. These included German, French, Art History, Social Justice Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. West Virginia’s 2024 program review discontinued 28 academic programs, many in the humanities. Even flush schools like Texas A&M have been known to cut low-enrollment programs.
Economic considerations can hardly be ignored when balancing budgets, but educational vision can and should shape program reviews, too. Cutting programs like queer or women’s studies may save less money than cutting an engineering program, but it would help elevate a different vision of professionalism and respectability on campus.
In fact, failing to do so is part of what has reduced trust in our universities. Commingling ideological standards with professional ones leaves universities open to corruption. Though sociology may, in some cases, have higher enrollments than electrical engineering, the money spent on sociology as it currently exists is less consistent with a university’s educational mission. Heavily ideological, partisan disciplines exert untold costs on universities. They make ideological orientations respectable. They attract ideological faculty, who must be appeased on committees. They devalue serious research.
Vision-focused program reviews are not unprecedented. A 2015 Wisconsin policy lets administrators weigh educational mission-fit along with financial considerations. In 2018, under this policy, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point board released a bold plan, subsequently modified, to slash 13 underperforming, non-missional majors including history, philosophy, political science, and sociology.
Rather than shy away, state legislatures should clarify the state university system’s educational mission to achieve more focused and effective program reviews. Disciplines and programs based on identity politics categories should be expunged.
In Wyoming, for instance, by statute, state universities must provide “a liberal education” and training in “various branches connected with the scientific, industrial, and professional pursuits.” But the Wyoming legislature, under these circumstances, could expand on its mission by borrowing from Florida’s foundational higher education reform bill, SB 266. That law targets “programs . . . based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” Wyoming should simply elaborate that such programs are not consistent with its university’s mission and will not be funded through state appropriations or through other means.
More states should adopt aggressive program reviews. They not only save money; they could also restore seriousness and public confidence in higher education.
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