Budget cuts, culture wars, and enrollment crashes are pushing American universities off the edge.
By Donald Earl Collins
Professorial Lecturer at American University in Washington, DC
Published on 24 April 2025
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 enrollments peaked in 2010 but have consistently fallen 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 facing a tsunami. The trickle of institutions closing or operating on the margins is all but assured to turn into a flood between now and the end of the 2020s.
Sonoma State University (also known as 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 social sciences.
The most expansive retrenchment in the past decade, however, occurred at West Virginia University in 2023. That August, after a six-year campaign to increase enrollment, West Virginia announced that it had incurred a $45m budget deficit and that enrollment 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 foreign language programs and its maths doctoral program—and 169 faculty positions. 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 toward austerity has led to a steady stream of faculty and administrators resigning or taking retirement buyouts to leave West Virginia. Again, undergraduate liberal arts majors and small academic graduate programs were the main targets for cuts.
Stories like those at Sonoma State and 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 enrollees to 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 at least partially explain this steep fall in enrollment.
Other higher education institutions are even 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 merged with other institutions in the US, affecting tens of thousands of students and several thousand faculty members. Nearly all have cited budget shortfalls and lower enrollment 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 in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021, including a drop of 350,000 after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As of this past fall, enrollment had climbed to 15.9 million, 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. Their findings are based on “the worst-case scenario predictions coming to pass from the upcoming demographic cliff (or a 15 percent decline in enrollment).” Demographers have also predicted an imminent drop in college enrollees starting this fall, a consequence of the economic distress that began with 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 faculty and student protesters, and under 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 to 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, Mahmoud Khalil, nor any of the hundreds of other victims of this injustice have committed any crimes under US law. Unless attending a funeral, writing an op-ed, or exercising the First Amendment right to protest is considered criminal behavior.
In 2023-24, more than 1.1 million international students attended US colleges and universities at undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels. But with the Trump administration threatening, arresting, and deporting foreign students and scholars by the dozens, it is all but certain that international student enrollment from the Middle East and South Asia will drop in the coming year. There will likely also 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.
After decades of universities hiring armies of part-time professors instead of full-time, tenure-stream instructors and researchers, and college presidents running their campuses like for-profit businesses, the implosion of US higher education has been almost inevitable. Despite Harvard recently standing against the Trump administration’s repression of colleges and universities, top-down hierarchies and disempowered workforces have rendered higher education’s responses to conservative and far-right movements utterly impotent. Add to this the conservative assumptions about liberal arts fields as “immoral,” “indoctrination,” and “libtards,” instead of what they truly are: an expansion of one’s knowledge of people and the world. There has also been a decades-long overemphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The possibility of Trump’s Project 2025 gurus privatizing the federal student loan program would pretty much be the straw that breaks US higher education’s back at this point.
Liberal arts departments especially will continue to consolidate, or university administrators will continue to find reasons to eliminate them as a cost-saving measure. Ever larger numbers of senior faculty will take severance pay, early retirement, or will simply be dismissed. Non-tenured faculty and junior staff will become unemployed and, in many cases, unemployable in a shrinking US higher education landscape. Most of all, students who find themselves at institutions outside the top 136 elite universities or the top 50 flagship public colleges may no longer be able to afford college, with tens of thousands unable to complete their degrees. American higher education is not just staring into the abyss—it has already fallen into it.
This article was retrieved from Al Jazeera.
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