Colleges Slash Budgets in the Pandemic, With ‘Nothing Off-Limits’
Liberal arts departments, graduate student aid and even tenured teaching positions are targets as the coronavirus causes shortfalls.
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| Ohio Wesleyan is eliminating or phasing out majors in urban studies, journalism, comparative literature and 15 other subjects.Credit...Andrew Spear for The New York Times |
In Pennsylvania:
“We have been in aggressive recession management for 12 years — probably more than 12 years,” Daniel Greenstein, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, told his board of governors this month as they voted to forge ahead with a proposal to merge a half-dozen small schools into two academic entities.
Once linchpins of social mobility in the state’s working-class coal towns, the 14 campuses in Pennsylvania’s system have lost roughly a fifth of their enrollment over the past decade. The proposal, long underway but made more urgent by pandemic losses, would merge Clarion, California, and Edinboro universities into one unit and Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield universities into another to serve a region whose demographics have changed.
