Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards:  From North Carolina to Montana, a nationwide course-correct?

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01: Postcards

In case you missed it over the Thanksgiving weekend, Open Campus local reporters Brianna Atkinson (WUNC), Molly Minta (Mississippi Today), and Amy Morona (Signal Cleveland) and The Hechinger Report published a story on shrinking majors at rural colleges and regional public universities. (It was co-published with The Washington Post.)

This edition of Mile Markers focuses on their reporting. I’ll provide excerpts from their thorough work and some additional analysis based on my last three years reporting on rural education across America.

Dwindling rural courses and colleges cut deep

I’ve written before about how devastating the departure of a university can be, including how it turned one West Virginia community into a veritable ghost town.

But even without a public four-year school completely leaving, rural communities often see their educational options whittled away in subtler ways — a death by a thousand cut courses, critical services, and satellite offices.

The University of Montana is phasing out or freezing more than 30 programs, while West Virginia University is 28 programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. Branch campuses at Penn State are reviewing courses due to declining enrollment, and other colleges, from Minnesota to Alaska, have been cutting courses for years.

For many rural students, there are already few places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges that are in rural areas or serve large proportions of rural students have closed since 2020, data show.

Regional public universities are seeing outsized cuts too, while also receiving significantly less money from their states — about $1,100 less per student, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges.

ARRC director Andrew Koricich, an Appalachian State University professor, told our reporters that the scarcity of options creates “a second class of people,” adding that rural folks are presented with a set of options that their urban and suburban peers would never accept.

Program cuts often have disproportionate impacts on low-income and minority communities: For example, 20 degree programs are being phased out at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where more than half the students are low income and 28 percent are Black.

“Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?” asked Azariah Journey, a second-year graduate student in history who comes from a rural town in Kentucky.

As enrollments and budgets shrink, what can colleges do?

Enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014 at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss., an unfortunately all-too-common situation faced by rural universities across the country.

A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.

“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to rightsize the budget,” Ennis said.

But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a 2021 report that problems such as enrollment drops made worse by the pandemic are being exploited by administrators to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”

While traveling the country reporting on rural education, I’ve often writing about the creative ways that rural colleges have tried to remain relevant even as the value of higher education is being questioned more and more.

Those that seem to be thriving most have done so by reimagining their very definition. For instance, in California, where figurative political fires and literal wildfires led many rural community colleges to consider becoming abortion pill providers and firefighters.

From Florida to Idaho and Montana, reimagining education has meant reshaping curricula from book-heavy majors to skills-based courses that more resemble bootcamps (rewarding certifications in everything from gun smithing to construction and nursing in a matter of weeks instead of years).

And as nonprofits like the Washington, D.C.-based Education Design Lab work with states to create more composable education pathways, one can already see what direction rural colleges will pursue after cutting so many traditional programs: from static degree pathways to mix-and-match offerings.

As their supporters argue, these new programs certainly may be more affordable and time-effective for rural students, allowing them to tackle their education in bite-size chunks while getting them into paying jobs sooner.

However, given the fact that many of these programs are so directly focused on filling state workforce needs, they may contribute even more to the lack of choice for rural students that Koricich pointed out.

Certainly, course closures and shifts to more skills-based certificate programs can be positive if they help rural colleges stay financially solvent and effectively serve student needs.

But if that educational shift leads to little-to-no career pathways outside of those with clear workforce demand?

Then colleges are essentially telling rural students that they can only become welders, or nurses, or whatever blue-collar career is being pushed by regional employers and state decision-makers at the time.

And that, as Koricich puts it, is not a satisfactory message for most rural Americans.

“It’s almost like, ‘Well, this is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”

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