XPost: alt.sodomites.barack-obama, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns XPost: sac.politics
There is no other way to say it. The American university as the United
States has known it since the 1960s is at an end. The spate of college
closings and consolidations that began 15 years ago is certain to increase
over the next few years.
Overall college enrolments peaked in 2010, but have fallen consistently
since then, as the cost of college, the COVID-19 pandemic and other trends
have curtailed students from attending higher education institutions. But
with the recent crackdowns against protests on college campuses, the anti-
DEI climate and the US government’s persecution of foreign students,
American universities are truly up against a tsunami. The trickle of institutions closing or on the margins is all but assured to turn into a
flood between now and the end of the 2020s.
Sonoma State University (aka, California State Sonoma) is among the latest universities facing budget cuts. Despite a Sonoma County court ruling that
has temporarily put the university’s plans on hold, Sonoma State still
faces a budget shortfall of $24m. Even if the order holds beyond May 1,
Sonoma State can and likely will work in good-faith negotiations with
staff, faculty and students to eliminate upwards of 22 majors, six
departments, and more than 100 faculty positions. Specifically, the art history, economics, geology, philosophy, theatre/dance, and women and
gender studies departments are on Sonoma State’s chopping block, mostly
liberal arts and the social sciences.
The most expansive retrenchment in the past decade, though, occurred at
West Virginia University in 2023. That August, after a six-year campaign
to increase enrolment, West Virginia announced that it incurred a $45m
budget deficit, and that enrolment had dropped from roughly 29,000 in 2017
to just under 26,000 in 2023. The austerity plan was to cut 32 majors– including all of their foreign language programmes and its maths doctoral programme – and 169 faculty positions. But after weeks of student
protests, the number ended up being 28 majors (nearly one-fifth of its undergraduate majors) and 143 faculty (a 13.5 percent reduction) instead.
The sudden shift towards austerity has led to a steady stream of faculty
and administrators resigning or taking retirement buyouts to leave West Virginia. Again, the undergraduate liberal arts majors and small academic graduate programmes were the main targets for cuts.
Stories like what is happening at Sonoma State and has already occurred at
West Virginia are part of a larger and terrible trend. As college
matriculation for women has incrementally increased over the past 50
years, there has been a more drastic decline in men attending college, especially among white men. Since 1970, men have gone from 58 percent of
all undergraduate college enrollees to only about 40 percent as of the
early 2020s. Fully 71 percent of the decline in college attendance since
2010 coincides with the decline of men as students in higher education.
Perhaps sexism disguised as disinterest in higher education in the wake of
a women-dominant student body might be at least part of the explanation
for this steep fall in enrolment.
But other higher education institutions are worse off: Clarion University
of Pennsylvania, California University of Pennsylvania, The College of
Saint Rose in New York and Independence University in Utah, for example.
These are among the 76 colleges and universities that have either closed
their doors or have merged with other higher education institutions in the
US, affecting the lives of tens of thousands of students and several
thousand faculty members. Nearly all of these institutions have cited
budget shortfalls and lower enrolment as reasons for their demise or
mergers.
Nationally, the number of students attending US colleges and universities
fell from a peak of 18.1 million students in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021, including a drop of 350,000 students after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of this past fall, enrolment had climbed to 15.9 million
students, a 4.5 percent increase, but hardly enough to stem the tide of closures, austerity and consolidations.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s financial stress
test model for American higher education institutions, as many as 80
colleges and universities in the US could permanently close their doors by
the end of the 2025-26 school year. They based their findings on “the worst-case scenario predictions com[ing] to pass from the upcoming
demographic cliff (or a 15 percent decline in enrolment).” Demographers
have also foreseen an imminent drop in the numbers of college enrollees starting this fall, a consequence of the economic distress that began the
Great Recession of the late-2000s.
Then there is Trump 2.0 and his administration’s persecution of foreign
college students. The recent crackdowns on academic freedom under former President Joe Biden, with pro-Palestinian college faculty and student protesters, and under mostly Republican governors like Greg Abbott in
Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida over Critical Race Theory and DEI, have escalated under President Donald Trump. The Trump administration’s move to revoke the visas of more than 1,700 foreign faculty and students, and
kidnap and deport many others, mostly over pro-Palestine activism and
other political stances deemed against the interests of the
administration, threatens the one area of sustainable growth in higher education. Neither Alireza Doroudi, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, nor
any of the hundreds of other victims of this injustice, have committed any crimes under US laws. Unless going to a funeral or writing an op-ed or exercising the First Amendment right to protest is criminal behaviour.
In 2023-24, more than 1.1 million international students attended US
colleges and universities at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels. But with the Trump administration threatening, arresting and
deporting foreign students and scholars in their dozens, it is all but
certain that international student enrolment from the Middle East and
South Asia will drop in the coming year. There will also likely be a drop
in students from China as a consequence of the ongoing tariff fight
between the two nations. One-quarter of all foreign students in the US are
from China.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/24/the-great-collapse-of-us- higher-education-has-begun
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