By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH Associated Press

Christina Westman dreamed of working with Parkinson’s disease and stroke patients as a music therapist when she began studying at St. Cloud State University.

But her schooling changed in May when administrators at Minnesota College announced a plan to eliminate its music department as it cuts 42 majors and 50 minors.

It is part of a wave of program cuts in recent months, as American colleges, large and small, scramble to make ends meet. Among their budget challenges: Federal Covid aid money is now gone, operating costs are rising and fewer high school graduates going straight to college.

The cuts mean more than just savings, or even lost jobs. Often they create turbulence for students who chose a campus because of certain programs and then wrote checks or took out student loans.

“For me, it’s been really angsty,” said Westman, 23, as she began the effort that ultimately led her to transfer to Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “It’s just the fear of the unknown.”

At St. Cloud State most students will be able to finish their degrees before the cuts begin, but Westman’s major in music therapy was a new one that hadn’t officially begun. She has spent the last three months in a mad rush to find work in a new city and is subletting her apartment in St. Cloud after she had already signed a lease. She was supposed to move into her new apartment last Friday.

For years, many colleges have been waiting to make cuts, said Larry Lee, who was acting president of St. Cloud State but left last month to lead Blackburn College in Illinois.

College enrollment declined during the pandemic, but officials hoped the numbers would recover to pre-Covid levels and had used federal aid money to prop up their budgets in the meantime, he said.

“They kept going, kept going,” Lee said, noting that colleges now have to face their new reality.

Higher education made up some ground last fall and during the spring semester, largely as college enrollment began to recovershowed National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data.

But the trend toward four-year colleges remains troubling. Even without growing concerns about the cost of college and the long-term burden of student debt, the pool of young adults is shrinking.

The birth rate fell during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and never recovered. Now the smaller classes are preparing to graduate and head off to college.

“It’s very hard to overcome math,” said Patrick Lane, vice president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a leading authority on student demographics.

Complicating the situation: the federal government’s chaotic overhaul of its application for financial support. Millions of students entered the summer break still wondering where to go to college this fall and how to pay for it. With jobs still plenty, though not as much as last yearsome experts fear students I can’t register at all.

“This year going into next fall, it’s going to be bad,” said Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Governance Studies program for the Brown Center on Education Policy at the nonprofit Brookings Institution. “I think a lot of colleges are really worried that they’re not going to meet their enrollment goals.”

Many colleges such as St. Cloud State had already begun plowing through its budget reserves. The university’s enrollments rose to approximately 18,300 students in the fall of 2020 and then steadily decreased to approximately 10,000 students in the fall of 2023.

St. Cloud State’s student population has now stabilized, Lee said, but the expenses were far too high for the reduced number of students. The college’s budget deficit totaled $32 million over the past two years, forcing the sweeping cuts.

Some colleges have taken more extreme steps, closing their doors. It happened at the 1,000th student Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, the 900 student Fontbonne University in Missouri, the 350-student Wells College in New York and the 220-student Goddard College in Vermont.

However, cutbacks seem to be more common. Two of North Carolina Public University got the green light last month to scrap more than a dozen degree programs ranging from ancient Mediterranean studies to physics.

Arkansas State University announced last fall that nine programs are being phased out. Three of the 64 colleges in the State University of New York system have cut programs due to low enrollment and budget problems.

Other schools cutting and phasing out programs include West Virginia UniversityDrake University in Iowa, the University of Nebraska campus in Kearney, North Dakota State University and, on the other side of the state, Dickinson State University.

Experts say it’s just the beginning. Even schools that do not immediately make cuts are reviewing their degree offerings. At Pennsylvania State University, officials are looking for duplicated and under-enrolled academic programs as the number of students shrinks at its branch campuses.

Particularly affected are students on smaller programs and those in humanitieslike now degree a smaller proportion of students than 15 years ago.

“It’s a humanitarian disaster for all the faculty and staff involved, not to mention the students who want to pursue this,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior fellow at Georgetown University who has written about higher education. “It is an open question to what extent colleges and universities can cut themselves towards sustainability.”

For Terry Vermillion, who just retired after 34 years as a music professor at St. Cloud State, the cuts are hard to see. The nation’s music program took a hit during the pandemiche said, with the Zoom tape being nothing short of “catastrophic” for many public school programs.

“We just couldn’t effectively teach music online, so there’s a gap,” he said. “And you know, we’re just starting to get out of that gap and we’re just starting to recover a little bit. And then the cuts come.”

For music majors in St. Cloud State as Lilly Rhodes is the biggest fear what will happen when the program is phased out. New students will not be admitted to the department and her professors will seek new jobs.

“When you shut down the entire music department, it’s extremely difficult to keep ensembles alive,” she said. “There are no musicians coming, so when our seniors graduate, they move on, and our ensembles just get smaller and smaller.

“It’s kind of hard to keep going if it’s like this,” she said.

Picture at top: Student Christina Westman poses at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minn., on July 30, 2024. (AP Photo | Adam Bettcher)

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