Amid colleges sunsetting programs, what makes a major worthwhile?

In early April, Rosie Jacobson got an alumni email from Earlham College, a liberal arts university in Indiana from which she graduated in 2010. It bore the news that her major, sociology/anthropology, would soon no longer exist.

“Man, this does not bode well,” Jacobson said she texted a friend who graduated in the same program. “We’re both just kind of stressed about it.”

Earlham’s case is not unique.

Between 2015 and 2024, the share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in humanities majors dropped from 10.9% to 8.5%, replaced by an increase in the share for STEM fields, according to educational consulting firm College Transitions.

That decline correlates to about 35,000 fewer graduates per year in the humanities, including in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages, area/ethnic/gender studies, and visual and performing arts — the latter aside, all of which had double-digit declines. STEM degrees, in contrast, rose in market share from 17.4% to 21.9%.

Students are turning away from the humanities, and some colleges, including Earlham, are following suit by sunsetting those majors.

Jacobson initially sought out Earlham as a small, intimate school devoted to the liberal arts. Now holding a master’s degree in education as a community initiatives manager with the University of Pennsylvania’s library system, she said the critical thought involved in her time as an undergraduate has been a throughline.

“I feel like I learned to think in a very critical, academic, and also accepting and open way when I was there – in no small part, due to the major that I had,” Jacobson said.

The driving force behind Earlham’s changes was financial – the school cited the effects of economic forces like inflation and tariffs, but also demographic shifts and a decline in international enrollment.

The college will maintain 26 majors and sunset 14 — the latter group including sociology/anthropology and majors that may be seen as more traditional, like economics, French, Spanish studies, and philosophy. Some majors, like international relations, will be folded into other majors as interdisciplinary tracks.

At Syracuse University, the administration announced earlier this month it would pause or close 93 programs. The administration has said that decision was not financial, and instead based on student demand – just 258 students were enrolled in the affected programs, and nearly 60% of the programs had no students enrolled.

But Syracuse has also faced declines in international enrollment, as have academic institutions across the country. While international students made up around 15% of total enrollment nearly every year from 2014 to 2022, that dropped to 12% in 2023 – and to 5% this past fall, largely due to changes in U.S. federal policy.

Gregg Lambert, who heads Syracuse’s humanities department, said many of those students were paying a full tuition rate. The university’s endowment eclipsed $2 billion for the first time in its history in 2025, but that’s dwarfed by richer private research institutions.

“The university… became more and more dependent upon this demographic and this funding stream,” he said. “Syracuse is not a university that has a lot of private endowment, like Yale and Harvard and some of the Ivies. It doesn’t have that kind of buffer.”

The business of higher education

At public colleges, the elimination of majors and programs is also being driven by legislation. In Indiana, a 2025 state law mandated its public colleges cut or consolidate hundreds of programs that graduate low numbers of students. Similarly, an Ohio law last year that mainly took aim at diversity efforts also required public colleges to cut programs that produced fewer than five degrees on average annually over a three-year period.

Vlad Kogan, a political science professor at Ohio State University, said those types of laws can provide political cover for administrators to make tough decisions based on budget realities. But, in Ohio State’s case, he said it was an issue of student demand, like at Syracuse.

“It’s never a popular thing as a dean to shut down a major, even if there’s not a lot of students in it,” Kogan said. “You have units that have almost no majors – certainly that is something that needs to be addressed… legislators don’t necessarily understand all the nuances, and there’s always unintended consequences.”

One of the consequences is the strain it puts on programs in the liberal arts and humanities, Lambert said, which has been fueled by a changing relationship between American consumers and higher education.

“This is a business model that’s not been working for a long time,” Lambert said. “This is just a bill that’s come due. It’s been broadcast for many years concerning the changing demographics and the fact that higher education, the value of the degree, is losing its value in some ways.”

That is, a model that uses a fiscal-minded, economic rationale to justify the value of a bachelor’s degree, Lambert said, the sticker price of which seems to never stop growing.

“Students have been told they need to get degrees in areas and majors that will lead directly to jobs,” he said.

Lambert said the cuts, while not exclusive to liberal arts programs, have had a focus in the humanities that don’t necessarily have a guarantee of financial success following graduation.

He said many of his students are in a “moment of crisis” — having studied during the COVID-19 pandemic and now, in an uncertain job environment where even jobs in tech and business could be threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence. Lambert said he’s concerned about how students will see their own futures and their roles as citizens.

“That's the greatest thing that not only college gives them, but humanities and social sciences,” Lambert said. “It teaches you to be a citizen of the world – and not only of your own culture, of your own family. And so I'm worried about that aspect of this decline.”

Humanities: the new luxury product?

Kogan and Lambert agreed the issue is with student demand. But a ramification of that is the humanities becoming a luxury, which Lambert said subverts the democratic purpose of higher education. And if those areas of study don’t exist for those who aren’t attending Ivy League colleges that can still afford to offer the humanities, he said entire areas of knowledge could be removed from the core of society.

“If you limit the humanities and what they offer to the most elite group… then you’re giving them an opportunity that basically you’re denying everybody else, including the middle class,” Lambert said. “We're limiting that to only the most elite political and economic classes.”

And while the 93 majors being cut by Syracuse only represented roughly 1.2% of the student body, Lambert said some of the majors still reflected key areas of study. Once those programs are gone as standalone majors, they might be difficult to bring back.

For example, among the affected programs were bachelor’s degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Modern Jewish Studies.

“These are programs that are being closed precisely at the moment that I think we need more,” Lambert said. “I don't see that these kinds of knowledge are going to be able to exist outside a university environment.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, Jacobson said the young people she works with regularly are driven toward finding jobs after college throughout their undergraduate career. That could be a necessity for them, she said. But she rues the fact that those students might not have the freedom to have a “well-rounded” college experience.

“I think that we’re losing that,” Jacobson said. “I feel deeply sad that other people might not be able to have that experience – and that other young weirdos are not going to be challenged and invited into a legacy of thought the way that I was.”