The Future of College Majors: Reinvention or Extinction? —— Part 3: Let It Go – Why Some Majors Need to be Cut for Higher Ed to Thrive
We Are the Problem—And the Solution
Higher education has reached an inflection point. Questions about cost, relevance, and long-term sustainability are no longer confined to think tank reports or state budget hearings—they’re now playing out in real time, on campuses across the country. Students and families are reconsidering the value proposition. Faculty and staff are weary. And institutional leaders face decisions that will determine whether their schools survive the next decade.
When Ignaz Semmelweis discovered in the 1840s that handwashing drastically reduced deaths in maternity wards, his colleagues rejected his findings. Not because the evidence was weak—it was overwhelming—but because it meant admitting they were the cause of the deaths. The discomfort of accountability outweighed the imperative for change. Nicole Poff (2025a) invoked this story in a searing critique of higher education’s well-meaning but self-defeating behaviors, and the metaphor is hauntingly apt. In our industry, we keep building new programs atop broken systems, afraid to acknowledge that we might be part of the problem.
Meanwhile, the closures are piling up. In the last few months alone, Northland College, Iowa Wesleyan, and Alverno College all announced permanent shutdowns (Donadel, 2025; Lederman, 2024; Marcus, 2025). Now, Limestone University—after 179 years of in-person education—is teetering on the edge of closure or a full pivot to online-only instruction, pending a last-ditch $6 million fundraising effort (Limestone University, 2025). These announcements are not early warning signs. They are symptoms of decisions that were delayed too long. Institutions rarely close because of a single misstep—they close after years of avoided conversations, failed pivots, and wishful thinking.
This third installment in the series isn’t about innovation or reinvention. That was Part 2. This is about triage. It’s about having the courage to let go of what no longer works—not only out of respect for what higher education can and should be, but out of respect for what students deserve. Today’s learners are making life-altering financial and personal commitments to attend college. They deserve institutions that are honest about what they can sustainably offer. With each unexpected closure or program elimination, public confidence in higher education takes another hit—eroding trust in a sector already on shaky ground.
A Cliff of Our Own Making
We’ve known about the demographic cliff for years. Birth rates plummeted after the Great Recession, and that shortfall is now coming due. The number of traditional college-aged students will begin a steep 15-year decline starting this year, falling by 13–20% depending on the region (Carey, 2022; Knox, 2024; Marcus, 2025). Some states like California and Illinois are projected to lose nearly a third of their college-going population (Knox, 2024).
But to blame what’s happening solely on demographics is to ignore our role in deepening the crisis. The enrollment cliff may be real, but the chaos we’ve layered on top of it—through short-sighted strategy, performative governance, political fear-mongering, and a retreat from student-centered design—is a cliff of our own making. As I argued in Rewiring the Academy, higher education isn’t just reacting to external threats; it’s unraveling from years of internal drift, distrust, and dysfunction. What we are experiencing isn’t a downturn—it’s the compound effect of unresolved crises across governance, culture, mission, and leadership (Pillar, 2025).
Public trust is wavering. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of young adults believe colleges have a negative effect on the country (Sanders, 2023). Student debt has topped $1.7 trillion, and nearly 40 million Americans hold some college credit but no degree (Weissman, 2023). These figures are not just symptoms of individual hardship—they are indictments of systemic failure. This isn’t a temporary dip. It’s a structural unraveling, and the institutions that continue to operate as if nothing has changed are the ones most at risk.
Institutions like Alverno and Northland didn’t close because people hate learning. They closed because their offerings no longer aligned with what students wanted or needed. They waited too long to change. They designed for a model of higher education that no longer exists—and clung to it even as the signals of urgency became deafening.
Too many colleges have tried to be everything to everyone—adding programs without clear strategy, expanding student services without alignment, chasing enrollment without defining whom they serve. But narrowing the focus too tightly comes with its own dangers. Building an institution solely around one population, such as traditional 18- to 22-year-olds, is a risky proposition in this demographic moment. Very few institutions have the brand strength, endowment cushion, or market dominance to sustain that strategy.
Instead, we need to step back and ask the hard questions: Who are we actually serving? What do today’s learners need? How do we stop designing for imagined archetypes and start building for real people? This is where the modern learner becomes central—not as a segmented demographic (adult learner, first-gen, residential, commuter), but as the unifying focus of institutional design. Whether they are 19 or 49, pursuing their first credential or a second chance, today’s students want flexibility, relevance, and value. They want institutions that acknowledge their complexity—not ones that ask them to conform to outdated structures.
Only a finite number of schools can afford to stay narrowly focused on one segment of the market. For the rest, resilience will come through coherence: designing for the modern learner with humility, adaptability, and purpose. As I wrote in the white paper, this is not just a philosophical shift—it’s a strategic imperative. It’s the difference between weathering the chaos and succumbing to it (Pillar, 2025).
When Good Intentions Go Wrong
In Part 1, I argued that some programs are simply no longer viable. In Part 2, I made the case for reinventing those worth saving. But what derails both efforts—more often than we’d like to admit—is how we tend to respond to challenge with performative fixes rather than structural solutions. When faced with institutional pressure, enrollment concerns, or shifting student needs, our default is often to add—another program, another center, another committee—without asking whether those additions actually solve the underlying problems.
Colleges love to respond to problems with addition. Another program, another support center, another layer of complexity. But as Nicole Poff (2025b) argues, these well-meaning actions often obscure root issues. We create programs before we validate problems. We collect data and never act on it. We build for yesterday’s students, not today’s.
A clear example: I’ve seen an institution launch a Center for Academic Community & Civic Engagement staffed by a single director. The goal—encouraging faculty to integrate service learning and community engagement into the curriculum, particularly the general education program—was worthy. But the center was not grounded in the institution’s strategic plan, nor clearly aligned to its mission, even though it could have been with better coordination. It operated largely in isolation. And like many “centers of one,” it struggled to gain visibility, traction, or sustainable influence. A more effective move might have been to house that role within the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning—another unit led by a single person—where their shared focus on supporting faculty could have amplified impact. Instead, the two centers operated side by side, siloed and under-resourced, each trying to reach faculty with overlapping goals.
This is what happens when we conflate motion with progress. We hold summits, form task forces, and create shiny new offices without pausing to ask whether these additions are integrated, resourced, or even visible to those they’re meant to serve. It feels like change, but it’s often just institutional theater.
Higher education doesn’t need more resilience. It needs reinvention. As Spiva (2025) puts it, “An ostrich with its head in the sand isn’t much safer than a sitting duck.” Students are voting with their feet, and they’re walking away from bloated systems that are hard to navigate, expensive to complete, and too often irrelevant to their futures. A system that produces millions of students with some credit and no credential isn’t underperforming—it’s broken (Weissman, 2023).
Today’s students—modern learners—aren’t interested in navigating five different offices to get basic help. They’re not waiting for us to untangle our org charts. They want flexible, efficient, meaningful pathways—and they’re increasingly finding them outside of higher ed. If we continue to design for the institution rather than for the learner, we will keep losing them.
The problem isn’t that higher education doesn’t care. It’s that we care in all the wrong directions. We try to care our way out of structural failure. We avoid hard choices, smooth over systemic cracks with well-intended new initiatives, and confuse activity with transformation. Until we fix that, no amount of reinvention will take hold.
Sunset Signals: Knowing When to Let Go
So what should go? Let’s start with the obvious:
- Programs graduating fewer than 10 students a year for five consecutive years.
- Degrees that consistently produce poor job outcomes.
- Programs whose curriculum hasn’t meaningfully changed in more than 10 years.
- Programs with four-year graduation rates below 40%.
- Majors misaligned with both institutional mission and workforce needs (The Change Leader, 2024).
These aren’t just inefficiencies; they are moral liabilities. They ask students to invest time and money into programs with unclear returns. And disproportionately, these students are first-generation, low-income, or students of color (Weissman, 2023). Programs with unacceptably low graduation rates or stagnant curricula are often silent indicators of broader dysfunction—poor advising, irrelevant coursework, lack of engagement, or outdated pedagogical approaches. If a curriculum hasn’t meaningfully evolved in over a decade, it’s not just an oversight—it’s a structural failure. What happened during annual assessments? During 3- to 5-year program reviews? How did that stagnation go unchallenged?
This is also where one of higher education’s most enduring internal tensions comes to the surface: the perceived divide between liberal education and vocational outcomes. As institutions face increasing pressure to demonstrate return on investment, some stakeholders argue that we’re losing sight of the intrinsic value of education. Scott Parker (2025), for instance, laments that education has been reduced to job training, writing that we’ve forgotten college is for “probing the human condition, not lining up a good internship.” His essay is heartfelt and eloquent—and I agree with much of it. But in today’s reality, where students are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to attend, few have the luxury to pursue a four-year degree purely for the enrichment of their inner lives.
This isn’t a binary. Schools don’t have to choose between preparing students for meaningful employment and offering a vibrant, engaging, and reflective liberal education. The best institutions do both. They expose students to literature, theory, and philosophy while helping them gain skills in research, data, collaboration, and critical analysis. But ignoring the economic stakes of a degree—especially for students with limited financial flexibility—is no longer ethical. Students are rational actors in a volatile market. If they don’t see a path from their program to a viable future, they’ll look elsewhere. And increasingly, they already are.
Letting go doesn’t mean disrespect. It means being honest about what we can no longer sustain, and imagining new ways those ideas and disciplines can still live on. Many programs that are no longer viable as standalone majors could thrive as part of broader interdisciplinary degrees, stackable certificates, or integrated credentials. A philosophy department doesn’t need to disappear—but it may serve more students when embedded in a major like Ethics and Public Policy, or when contributing to certificates in digital humanities, civic leadership, or pre-law pathways. These shifts are not diminishment—they’re redesigns, aimed at relevance and renewal.
Facing the Resistance
The biggest challenge in closing a program isn’t data. It’s denial. Academic departments are often confused with disciplines, which are often confused with programs (Rosowsky & Keegan, 2020). Faculty resist changes that threaten identity or autonomy. Shared governance, while essential, can default to protectionism (Rosenberg, 2024).
But the resistance isn’t purely bureaucratic—it’s emotional. Faculty aren’t just defending curriculum maps—they’re defending legacies. A major that has been cultivated over decades may represent a lifetime of scholarship, mentorship, and intellectual identity. To suggest that it’s no longer viable can feel like an existential threat, not just an administrative one. That’s why conversations about program review often turn into debates about institutional values and academic freedom, even when no one is challenging either.
As Ryder et al. (2023) explain, many departments suffering from dysfunction can’t recognize their own decline. Leadership avoidance, gridlock, and turf wars are common symptoms. Instead of confronting misalignment, we justify it. We tell ourselves that if we just marketed better or recruited harder, things would turn around.
And resistance often arrives in familiar packaging. There’s the optimistic belief that a new social media strategy or a rebranded flyer will revive interest. There’s the single success story—a student who got into law school or landed a Fulbright—offered as proof that the program still matters. There’s the quiet hope that this is just a cyclical downturn and the major will rebound next year. These narratives comfort us. But they are rarely grounded in enrollment or outcome data—and they defer hard decisions at the expense of future sustainability.
Shared governance, for all its flaws, doesn’t have to be the enemy of change. At its best, it offers a collaborative framework for making courageous decisions with collective wisdom. What it requires is a shift in posture—from approval-seeking to solution-building. Faculty don’t just need to be informed; they need to be empowered as co-authors of reinvention. That means data transparency, genuine dialogue, and the courage to lead through ambiguity rather than avoid it.
Ironically, students—the people most affected by these decisions—are often absent from the room. Their silence is not consent; it’s a signal that they’ve already made up their minds and moved on. They’ve transferred, changed majors, or chosen a different institution altogether. If a program can’t fill its seats, the market has already spoken. Our job is to listen.
Because no amount of rebranding can save a program that students no longer choose or employers no longer value. The question isn’t whether it still matters to us. The question is whether it still matters to them.
How to Close a Program with Integrity
There is a right way to do this. Institutions like Unity Environmental University show that bold restructuring can be done ethically and effectively. Their redesign embraced student-centered learning, workforce alignment, and digital delivery—without abandoning mission (Pillar, 2024). These kinds of decisions are never easy, but when made deliberately, they can refocus institutional priorities and revitalize impact.
Best practices include:
- Data transparency and inclusive planning that clearly define why decisions are being made and how.
- Guaranteed teach-outs and direct, personalized support to help impacted students revise their academic path—whether through a different existing program, a reimagined interdisciplinary curriculum, or an alternative credential.
- Retraining or reassignment pathways for affected faculty, ensuring the institution retains talent and supports long-standing contributors.
- Clear communication that frames closures not as loss, but as part of a larger renewal.
- Commitment to mission alignment—ensuring that strategic changes reinforce the values and educational goals of the institution.
Done poorly, closures breed mistrust. Done well, they not only free up resources for programs students actually want—they also give institutions the flexibility to strengthen student services, academic infrastructure, and other mission-critical functions.
Case in Point: A Cautionary Tale Still Unfolding – Jacksonville University’s Bold Moves
Jacksonville University recently announced the elimination of nearly 30 majors, minors, and certificates across its business, arts, and sciences portfolios as part of its “Future Focused” academic restructuring. The changes included cutting newer programs like FinTech, Data Science, and multiple MBA tracks, as well as long-standing staples like Philosophy, Music, Theatre, World Languages, and entire concentrations in Art History, Visual Arts, and Marine Science (Marbut, 2025). In total, 40 faculty members were laid off, and dozens of academic pathways sunset—touching both professional and liberal arts fields.
From a purely strategic lens, the rationale aligns with many arguments in this article. The university reported that fewer than 100 students across 4,000 were enrolled in the discontinued programs, and it committed to focusing on its 37 most in-demand undergraduate majors and 15 graduate programs. In its official release, JU emphasized alignment with workforce demand, improved efficiency, and plans to reinvest in high-growth areas like health sciences, policy, and digital learning (Jacksonville University, 2025).
Yet the handling of the announcement quickly took a turn. Within days, JU’s Faculty Assembly issued a vote of no confidence in President Tim Cost, citing a lack of transparency, trust, and shared governance in the process (Action News Jax, 2025). Some faculty reported being blindsided by the decision and publicly challenged enrollment figures used to justify cuts. Others noted that the sweeping changes seemed sudden and top-down, despite administrative claims of extensive consultation.
Even when done with clear communication and a sound strategic rationale, change is disruptive. Long-standing programs often carry deep emotional and professional meaning for faculty, and when they’re eliminated, it can feel like contributions, careers, and intellectual legacies are being erased. The status quo—even when unsustainable—offers familiarity. What Jacksonville is experiencing underscores that even necessary and well-communicated changes can provoke backlash. As this story is still unfolding, only time will tell whether the university’s decisions will ultimately strengthen its long-term future. But what is already clear is that transparency, early engagement, and sustained dialogue are essential to navigating such moments of institutional disruption.
JU’s example illustrates a larger truth: program closures must be more than just data-informed and mission-aligned—they must be relationally thoughtful, faculty-engaged, student-centered, and transparently communicated. Without those elements in place, even the most justified restructuring efforts risk damaging institutional culture and long-term trust.
Case in Point: Betting Boldly – Unity Environmental University’s High-Risk, High-Reward Restructurin
Unity Environmental University (formerly Unity College) offers an interesting counterexample. In 2020, facing financial instability and declining residential enrollment, the institution restructured around a new model designed to serve the modern learner. It made major cuts to traditional programming and pivoted toward flexible, workforce-aligned, hybrid and online academic offerings. These changes were not universally embraced. President Melik Peter Khoury faced intense criticism, including calls for his resignation from faculty and alumni who feared the institution had abandoned its roots (Curtis, 2020; Moody, 2023).
Despite the criticism, the institution moved forward with its strategic transformation. Unity emphasized career-relevant degrees in high-demand fields such as environmental science, conservation law enforcement, sustainable business, and animal health. The decision to focus on a “distance education” model allowed the university to reach students nationwide while maintaining affordability and flexibility. Enrollment grew dramatically—from 1,400 in 2020 to over 6,300 in 2023, and now more than 9,000 in 2024 (Unity Environmental University, 2024).
More than 90% of Unity graduates are employed or in graduate school within six months of completing their degrees, and the average salary for recent graduates exceeds $61,000. These metrics make it difficult to argue with the outcome. Unity didn’t just survive—it repositioned itself as a model and leader for environmental education in a digital-first landscape.
To be sure, some trade-offs were real and painful. Critics worry that the college lost part of its identity and sacrificed the communal ethos of its residential experience. But those who remained committed to the mission—and who embraced a broader definition of access, impact, and environmental stewardship—see a reimagined university that is better aligned with modern learners and global challenges. Their story highlights what’s possible when institutional leaders act decisively, communicate consistently, and stay grounded in purpose while adapting to changing realities.
Unity’s success doesn’t mean the path was smooth. But it does show that transformation—when paired with mission alignment, workforce relevance, and scalable design—can result in not just survival, but resurgence. Had this article been written in 2020, Unity might have occupied the cautionary tale slot. Today, it offers a possible glimpse into where Jacksonville—and other institutions making similar moves—might be in four to five years.
As institutions face mounting pressure to modernize, streamline, and refocus, these stories underscore that the hardest decisions can be the most necessary. But how those decisions are made—and communicated—can shape institutional culture for years. What comes next requires not just courage to change, but a commitment to doing fewer things better.
Doing Fewer Things Better
We must resist the urge to add our way out of crisis. As Poff (2024) and Blaylock et al. (2023) argue, complexity doesn’t equal quality. Real innovation comes from subtraction. Merging related disciplines, adopting cohort models, and focusing on student learning rather than teaching delivery are all strategies to streamline while improving quality. Institutions often feel pressured to demonstrate innovation through addition—new majors, new minors, new centers—but rarely ask whether these additions serve students or simply make the institution feel busier.
Many colleges suffer from academic sprawl—dozens of underperforming majors, outdated programs, siloed departments, and a cluttered catalog of undersubscribed minors. The latter is particularly deceptive: minors are often easy to create by stringing together existing courses, which makes them feel low-risk. But if few students are declaring or completing them, they are a drain on capacity, attention, and clarity. Sunsetting unused or outdated minors is not a loss—it’s an act of academic stewardship.
Some institutions are already taking bold steps. WashU revamped its English department by embracing creative writing and publishing; Ohio Wesleyan and Plymouth State are using interdisciplinary clusters to rethink how departments are organized (Cassuto, 2025; Anderson, 2024). Arizona State has adopted a knowledge core model, Georgia State uses predictive analytics to streamline student pathways, and Unity Environmental University (as noted earlier) has implemented a modular curriculum designed around learner flexibility and workforce alignment.
These moves aren’t just about administrative reorganization. They’re about designing systems that make sense to the students navigating them. The modern learner—whether 18 or 48—doesn’t benefit from bloated catalogs or overgrown org charts. They benefit from coherence, clarity, and connection between what they study and where they’re headed. They also benefit from holistic student support that’s integrated into their academic experience, not bolted on as an afterthought. Streamlining isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about delivering real value—academically, personally, and professionally.
This shift doesn’t diminish the role of faculty—it strengthens it. When faculty collaborate across disciplines, co-design curriculum, and focus on shared learning outcomes, they help students build intellectual bridges that mirror the real world. Fewer, stronger programs allow for deeper engagement, better mentorship, and more meaningful teaching and learning.
What "Doing Fewer Things Better" Looks Like
Streamlining doesn’t mean stripping away complexity for its own sake—it means refining the academic ecosystem to elevate quality and relevance. Here are examples of what that can look like in practice:
- Interdisciplinary majors like Environmental Policy & Justice or Global Health & Communication that bring together faculty from multiple departments around real-world challenges.
- Replacing siloed capstone courses with collaborative, community-based research or consulting projects tied to local partners or employers.
- Phasing out low-enrollment electives and redirecting faculty energy toward high-impact practices like first-year seminars, writing-intensive courses, or experiential learning.
- Revising general education programs to map directly to career-ready skills—critical thinking, ethical reasoning, data literacy—while still preserving liberal learning.
- Creating modular certificate programs that can stack into full degrees, serving both degree-seeking students and working professionals.
- Aligning advising and support services with academic programs so students see a cohesive, integrated path—not a series of disjointed offices.
- Sunsetting minors with low completion rates, using enrollment and outcome data to determine which combinations are adding value and which are adding clutter.
These are not just operational choices—they’re philosophical commitments. They reflect a willingness to prioritize impact over volume, connection over tradition, and design over inertia.
This isn’t about abandoning the liberal arts. It’s about redesigning them so they thrive in the world students actually live in—not the one we wish still existed. It’s about creating academic portfolios that speak with clarity, not confusion. And it’s about making hard choices not to diminish education, but to make it sustainable, relevant, and transformative.
Final Thoughts: Let It Go
Letting go of a major is hard. But so is watching your institution close because you didn’t.
Throughout this piece, we’ve examined the uncomfortable but necessary truth that higher education cannot sustain every program, structure, or tradition indefinitely. The landscape has changed—demographics have shifted, learner expectations have evolved, and public trust has eroded. The question is not whether institutions will adapt. It’s whether they’ll do so early and thoughtfully—or too late and reactively.
This is our handwashing moment. We have the data. We see the symptoms. And just like Semmelweis’s peers, we are faced with a choice: deny our role and delay the inevitable, or confront the reality with humility and clarity. Some of the harm has been self-inflicted—through indecision, overexpansion, and a resistance to rethinking what students truly need. But that means we also have the power to stop it.
Reinvention begins with release. Not reckless cuts or rushed restructuring, but careful, courageous decisions to let go of what no longer serves students, faculty, or the institution’s mission. It’s recognizing that fewer, stronger programs can lead to better learning, deeper engagement, and more sustainable outcomes. It’s knowing that clarity is kinder than confusion, and that students deserve institutions willing to change—not just for survival, but for their success.
We are not choosing between ideals and outcomes. We are choosing whether to build an academy that honors both. One that sees the liberal arts not as relics, but as adaptable tools for modern life. One that treats students not as enrollment targets, but as real people—investing time, money, and trust into our care.
And ultimately, one that understands that saying goodbye to a major isn’t the end of something—it’s the beginning of doing what we do best: learning, evolving, and leading with purpose.
Because sometimes, the most strategic, most compassionate, most student-centered thing we can do… is let go.
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