The State Higher Education Executive Officers association and the American Council on Education have both documented a rising number of academic program discontinuations and, in a smaller number of high-profile cases, institution-wide restructuring, as colleges confront what demographers call the enrollment cliff — the drop in the traditional college-age population reaching campuses in the mid-2020s that follows the birth-rate decline after the 2008 financial crisis. West Virginia University's widely reported 2023 program review, which eliminated dozens of majors including its world languages department, became a widely studied case of how quickly a straightforward enrollment-and-cost review can generate faculty and public backlash when the process is seen as opaque.
This is a framework for how provosts have approached program-review decisions, not a recommendation on any specific institution's cuts.
What Metrics Actually Belong in a Program Review?
A defensible program review looks beyond a single enrollment or major-count figure: cost per student credit hour, which captures a program's actual instructional efficiency rather than just how many students declare it as a major; service-course load, since some low-major programs, particularly in the humanities and languages, teach large numbers of students from other majors through general-education and service courses that a headcount-of-majors metric misses entirely; and a program's contribution to accreditation requirements or professional licensure pathways in other majors, since eliminating a small department can trigger unexpected compliance problems for programs that depend on its courses.
Provosts who review only declared-major counts and instructional cost per major, without the service-course and accreditation-dependency data, are working from an incomplete picture that a faculty senate reviewing the same decision will often catch immediately, undermining trust in the process even when the underlying budget pressure is real.
What Process Elements Separate a Defensible Review From a Backlash-Generating One?
Case studies of program-review processes, including retrospective analyses of the WVU restructuring, point to a few recurring process failures: reviews conducted with limited faculty input before decisions were largely finalized, which faculty senates and accreditors both flag as a legitimacy problem regardless of the review's underlying data quality; unclear or shifting criteria, where the metrics used to justify a cut appear to have been selected after the target programs were already identified rather than applied consistently across all programs; and a compressed timeline that leaves affected faculty, students partway through a major, and academic partners with too little time to plan a transition.
How Should a Provost Handle Students Already Enrolled in a Cut Program?
A teach-out plan — a defined, published commitment to complete instruction for currently enrolled majors, typically through a combination of remaining faculty, visiting instructors, or partnership with another institution — is close to a universal expectation among accreditors reviewing a program discontinuation, and its absence is one of the fastest ways a program cut draws formal accreditation scrutiny rather than just internal criticism. A provost's review timeline should build in enough runway for this teach-out to be publicly committed before, not after, the cut is announced.
What Should Replace a Cut Program, If Anything?
Program reviews driven purely by cost-cutting without a parallel investment plan tend to generate the sharpest institutional criticism, since faculty and students reasonably read pure subtraction as a signal about institutional priorities beyond the specific budget math. Reviews that pair discontinuations with a stated reinvestment plan — new or expanded programs in areas of demonstrated enrollment demand, workforce alignment, or research strength — generally fare better both internally and in public perception, even when the total headcount reduction is similar, because the review reads as strategic repositioning rather than only retrenchment.
How Should a Provost Communicate the Decision?
Publishing the review's actual criteria and the data behind each affected program's evaluation, before the decision is announced rather than only in response to criticism after, is the single change program-review researchers most consistently recommend. A provost who can point to a public, consistently applied rubric faces a fundamentally different conversation with faculty than one who is perceived to be explaining a decision already made.
