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Students, faculty pay the price for miscalculations at WVU

3 min read

When E. Gordon Gee became president of West Virginia University in 2014, he put forward an ambitious plan to increase the number of students attending its main campus in Morgantown, W.Va., along with its satellite campuses.

Over a 10-year period, Gee asserted, WVU could boost its enrollment by 7,000 students. To match these aspirations, facilities were renovated and built and more student housing was proposed, all set to make the campus more appealing and house the newcomers.

But, a decade later, things have not turned out the way Gee planned. Not at all.

Rather than increase enrollment, the number of students attending WVU has dipped by 5,000 over the last nine years, dropping from 31,000 to 26,000. The downturn is expected to continue over the next decade — by 2033, projections have it that 21,000 students will be attending WVU. The declining number of Mountaineers is attributed to the rising cost of attending a college or university, questions about the value of a bachelor’s degree, the pandemic, and the tight job market, which have led some potential students to try their luck in the workplace instead. Fewer graduates are coming out of West Virginia’s high schools, and the state’s legislature has been more and more parsimonious with funding.

Granted, Gee couldn’t have seen all this coming, but for a seasoned university leader — he had been president of Ohio State, Brown and Vanderbilt universities before taking the helm at WVU — making grandiose forecasts about growing enrollment was a serious miscalculation.

Now, faced with a $45 million budget shortfall and additional deficits predicted, WVU has announced that is trimming academic programs and cutting faculty and staff. If the plan is approved next month, the university’s languages programs would be on the chopping block, as well as master’s programs in creative writing, public administration and other areas. All told, 7% of WVU’s faculty would be handed pink slips, and 32 majors would be axed. University officials say the programs are not attracting as many students as other areas, and they want to put their resources into programs that are projected to grow, mostly in science and technology.

But a university that appears to be in retreat, that wants to narrow its focus, hardly seems like an institution that would be attractive to students in the years ahead, particularly those from outside West Virginia. It’s also another dispiriting instance when majors within the liberal arts are sacrificed. WVU is not the only school where it has happened recently — colleges in Alaska, Virginia and Massachusetts have similarly thrown some humanities programs overboard.

Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, said in a letter to Gee, “Access to these courses is especially important in public higher education, which is often the only route to a degree for many state residents. The humanities should not be reserved for students who can afford private higher education.”

Trimming away at the liberal arts might help the bottom line at places like WVU, but it only makes the rest of us poorer.

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