Program closure has become a more consequential issue for colleges and universities as demographic pressure, uneven enrollment, and rising instructional costs force institutions to scrutinize academic portfolios more closely. The question is particularly acute for regional universities and primarily undergraduate institutions, where relatively small changes in enrollment can materially affect departmental economics.

As demographic pressures become more pronounced, there is also a tendency to oversimplify what those trends mean for individual institutions and academic programs. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education's 2024 Knocking at the College Door projections estimate that the number of U.S. high-school graduates will peak at roughly 3.9 million in 2025 and decline to about 3.4 million by 2041, a reduction of approximately 13 percent. WICHE projects that 38 states will have fewer high-school graduates in 2041 than in 2023.

That projection is significant, but it does not translate into a uniform decline in college enrollment. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association reported that public full-time-equivalent enrollment increased 3.6 percent in fiscal year 2025, reaching 10.8 million students and marking a third consecutive year of growth after more than a decade of decline. Even after that recovery, however, public FTE enrollment remained 7.2 percent below its 2011 peak, and enrollment in 34 states and the District of Columbia remained below 2015 levels.

That combination—a near-term enrollment recovery occurring alongside a longer-term demographic contraction—helps explain why academic program review has become difficult. Institutions cannot assume that every recent decline is permanent, but neither can they assume that enrollment will eventually return to previous levels.

The central problem is therefore not simply identifying programs with few majors. It is determining whether a program's academic contribution, financial requirements, and future prospects justify the resources required to maintain it.

Counting majors is easy. Measuring a program is not.

Program review often begins with the number of majors and graduates. Those figures matter. A degree program that consistently attracts only a small number of students warrants scrutiny, particularly when it requires several dedicated faculty positions and courses that routinely operate below typical enrollment levels.

Declared majors, however, measure only one part of a program's activity.

A department may serve relatively few majors while generating substantial enrollment through general education, prerequisites, service courses, minors, professional preparation, or interdisciplinary programs. Physics provides a familiar example at many smaller institutions: the number of physics majors may be modest, while physics courses remain necessary for engineering, chemistry, health professions, and other STEM pathways. Similar patterns occur in mathematics, chemistry, languages, philosophy, and other fields.

For this reason, student credit hours and course enrollments often provide more useful information about instructional activity than major counts alone.

Even those measures require context. A laboratory course with 16 students cannot necessarily be evaluated against a lecture course enrolling 80. Accreditation requirements, equipment limitations, pedagogical design, clinical supervision, studio instruction, field experiences, and safety requirements can all create legitimate differences in class size and instructional cost.

A meaningful program review therefore requires several measures rather than a single enrollment ratio.

Cost accounting can be more misleading than it appears

Financial analysis introduces a second problem: distinguishing between the cost assigned to a program and the cost that would actually disappear if that program closed.

Universities routinely allocate portions of facilities, administration, information technology, libraries, utilities, and other institutional expenses across academic units. Those allocations are useful for understanding total institutional costs, but they do not necessarily measure the savings produced by eliminating a particular degree program.

The more relevant concept is avoidable cost.

If a program is discontinued but its faculty remain necessary to teach general-education or service courses, much of the salary expense remains. If the institution continues to operate the same building, maintain the same library, support the same information systems, and employ essentially the same administrative infrastructure, those expenditures remain as well.

A program may therefore appear expensive under a fully allocated accounting model while its elimination produces substantially smaller cash savings.

The reverse can also occur. A program requiring specialized facilities, accreditation expenses, low-enrollment clinical sections, or costly equipment may contain expenses that can genuinely be reduced if the program disappears.

This distinction matters because program decisions are sometimes framed around measures such as "cost per major" or "cost per graduate." Those measures may be useful, but they can overstate the economic benefit of closure if much of the assigned cost is fixed or simply redistributed elsewhere in the institution.

The relevant financial question is not only how much expense has been attributed to the program. It is how much recurring expenditure can actually be eliminated, over what period, and with what secondary consequences elsewhere.

Revenue calculations are equally complicated

Assigning revenue to academic programs presents similar difficulties.

At tuition-dependent institutions, it may appear reasonable to compare tuition generated by a program's majors with departmental expenditures. But students do not generally purchase degree programs as self-contained financial units. They enroll in institutions and take courses across multiple departments.

A biology major may take chemistry, mathematics, English, psychology, and general-education courses. A nursing student may generate substantial enrollment across departments that are not part of the nursing program. A student initially attracted to an institution by one major may later change fields while remaining enrolled.

Assigning all tuition revenue to a student's declared major can therefore distort the economics of academic programs.

The calculation becomes even more complicated where tuition discounting is substantial. Published tuition is not equivalent to net tuition revenue, and program-level revenue estimates should reflect what the institution actually receives rather than the sticker price attached to enrollment.

Public institutions add another layer because tuition is only one part of educational revenue. According to the 2025 State Higher Education Finance report, public institutions received an average of $12,082 per FTE in education appropriations and $7,459 per FTE in net tuition and fee revenue. Total education revenue averaged $19,443 per FTE. Those figures vary substantially by state, but they illustrate why public-program economics cannot be reduced to tuition alone.

The same report also shows how rapidly institutional conditions can change. Net tuition revenue per FTE declined 3.5 percent in 2025, while total education revenue per FTE fell 1.9 percent.

The financial context surrounding a program is therefore dynamic, not fixed.

Small programs are not automatically inefficient

One persistent assumption in academic portfolio review is that small programs are inherently inefficient.

Sometimes they are.

A program with several dedicated faculty members, very few majors, low course enrollment, limited service teaching, and weak prospects for future growth may represent a significant opportunity cost. Faculty lines and operating funds committed to such a program might support areas experiencing substantially greater demand.

But size alone is not sufficient evidence of inefficiency.

Some disciplines are comparatively inexpensive to maintain despite low major counts. Others provide a disproportionate amount of instruction outside the major. Still others may be central to accreditation, general education, teacher preparation, preprofessional curricula, or the academic identity of the institution.

The more useful distinction is between low-major programs and low-contribution programs.

Those categories overlap, but they are not identical.

A defensible review would therefore examine a broader set of indicators: majors and graduates over several years; total student credit hours; section fill rates; faculty FTE; instructional cost; contribution to general education; dependence of other programs on its courses; accreditation requirements; student outcomes; regional competition; and realistic prospects for restructuring or growth.

No single metric resolves the closure question.

Trend is more important than a single year's enrollment

Short-term enrollment figures become particularly problematic when used to justify irreversible decisions.

Programs can lose students temporarily because of faculty vacancies, weak recruitment, curricular bottlenecks, unusual cohort patterns, delayed course rotations, or changes in advising. Conversely, a sudden increase in enrollment may reflect a transient labor-market trend rather than durable demand.

Multi-year data are therefore essential.

A program graduating six students this year after graduating three, four, and five in preceding years occupies a different position from one graduating six after a decade in which annual graduating cohorts were routinely 20 to 25.

The absolute number is identical. The trajectory is not.

WICHE's projections make this distinction increasingly important. The expected decline in the number of high-school graduates is national, but its effects will not be distributed evenly. WICHE projects substantial variation among states and regions, meaning that a regional university serving a contracting rural population may face a fundamentally different recruitment environment from an institution located in a growing metropolitan area.

National demographic projections cannot substitute for an institution's own recruitment geography, transfer market, adult-student population, and program-specific demand.

Academic programs operate as a portfolio

Programs are also difficult to evaluate as isolated business units because universities operate portfolios of academic offerings.

Some programs generate large enrollments or substantial net revenue. Others are more expensive. Some support large numbers of students outside their own majors. Others serve smaller populations but contribute to an institution's identity, accreditation structure, or general-education mission.

Cross-subsidization is therefore not necessarily evidence of financial dysfunction. It is a normal feature of higher education.

The relevant question is whether the institution understands the subsidy and considers it justified.

A university may rationally support a small philosophy program because philosophy remains part of its conception of liberal education. It may subsidize physics because physics is necessary to sustain engineering, chemistry, or preprofessional programs. It may maintain a language program because international education is central to the institution's mission.

Such decisions become problematic when the subsidy is neither measured nor periodically reassessed.

Mission should influence resource allocation. It cannot make resource allocation irrelevant.

Closure should be compared with redesign

The binary choice between continuation and elimination can also obscure less disruptive options.

A weak program may be reorganized rather than closed. Two majors can sometimes share a common academic core. A major with limited demand may remain viable as a minor, concentration, or certificate. Courses may be placed on predictable rotations rather than offered annually. Departments may share faculty positions. Retirements may provide opportunities to restructure staffing without immediate layoffs.

Programs can also be repositioned around changing student interests.

A traditional chemistry program, for example, may support pathways in biochemistry, environmental chemistry, materials science, forensic science, or pre-health education depending on the institution's resources and regional demand. Similar restructuring occurs throughout the humanities, social sciences, business, and technology fields.

The relevant distinction is whether the discipline has become unsustainable or whether the current configuration of the program no longer aligns with student demand.

Those are not the same conclusion.

Governance matters because closure can affect tenure

Program discontinuance is not simply an exercise in academic planning. It can directly affect faculty appointments, tenure, and academic freedom.

A 2020 AAUP analysis examined policies at 198 institutions with tenure systems. It found that 85 percent had policies governing program discontinuance, compared with 81 percent approximately two decades earlier. The same analysis found that 62 percent of program-discontinuance policies specified a faculty role in decision-making, 83 percent provided notice or severance provisions, and 76 percent required efforts to place affected faculty members in another suitable position.

Those findings are important for two reasons.

First, program closure can function as an indirect mechanism for terminating appointments that would otherwise carry substantial employment protections. Second, institutions vary considerably in the procedures used to make such decisions.

AAUP standards have historically placed substantial weight on faculty participation when academic programs are discontinued, particularly when the discontinuance results in termination of tenured appointments. Institutions are not universally bound by AAUP standards, and the governing rules depend on faculty handbooks, collective-bargaining agreements, state law, board policy, and institutional governance structures. The larger point remains: when program discontinuance can terminate faculty appointments, the evidentiary and procedural standard should be higher than that applied to routine budget reallocations.

A defensible closure decision requires convergence of evidence

There is unlikely to be a meaningful national threshold at which a program should automatically close. A rule such as "fewer than ten majors" ignores differences in institutional size, mission, cost structure, academic interdependence, and geography.

A stronger case for closure emerges when several forms of evidence point in the same direction.

Demand is persistently weak. Majors, graduates, and course enrollments remain low or decline over several years rather than during a temporary downturn.

The program consumes meaningful avoidable resources. Closure or restructuring would produce real savings rather than simply redistribute institutional overhead.

Its contribution to other programs is limited or replaceable. General education, accreditation, and related degrees can continue without substantial disruption.

Outcomes do not justify the continuing subsidy. Student demand, completion, employment, graduate-school placement, or other mission-relevant outcomes provide limited evidence of continuing value.

Attempts at restructuring have not produced a credible path forward.

And the institution has a plausible alternative use for the recovered resources.

The last point is especially important. Program closure is not merely subtraction. It is a resource-allocation decision.

The relevant comparison is what comes after closure

Program discontinuance is often presented as a way of "saving" a defined amount of money. That framing can be incomplete.

The strategic value of closure depends on what happens to the recovered resources.

Eliminating a low-enrollment program and leaving faculty lines vacant may improve the operating margin. Redirecting those lines to a high-demand program may increase instructional capacity and enrollment. Reallocating specialized space may permit expansion elsewhere.

But closure can also carry costs that are difficult to capture in a departmental budget. It may reduce curricular breadth, weaken supporting programs, complicate accreditation, increase reliance on adjunct instruction, reduce retention among affected students, or make the institution less attractive to certain applicants.

The relevant comparison is therefore not simply the program versus no program.

It is the institution with the program versus the institution that will exist after the program's resources have been withdrawn or redeployed.

That is a more demanding analysis, but it is also closer to the actual strategic decision.

Program closure is likely to become a more common feature of institutional planning as demographic pressures intensify and colleges attempt to align academic portfolios with changing enrollment patterns. Some closures will be financially and academically justified. Others may result from short-term pressures, incomplete accounting, or an excessive reliance on major counts as a proxy for program value.

The distinction cannot be established by enrollment alone.

A credible decision requires evidence concerning demand, instructional activity, avoidable cost, academic interdependence, student outcomes, future viability, and the alternative use of institutional resources.

The central question is therefore not whether a program is small or expensive.

It is whether continuing to operate it remains a better use of institutional resources than the realistic alternatives.