By Jon Marcus, Brianna Atkinson, Molly Minta and Amy Morona for The Hechinger Report.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for West Virginia News Service reporting for The Hechinger Report-Public News Service Collaboration
Although she won a scholarship to Mississippi State University, two hours' drive away, Shamya Jones couldn't get there because she had a new baby and no car.
So she enrolled instead at a local community college, then transferred to the four-year campus closest to her home in the rural Mississippi Delta - Delta State University.
She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, Delta State eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs, including history, English, chemistry and music .
"They're cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving," Jones said. "It's like we're not getting the help or benefits we need." The cuts "take away from us, our education."
That kind of frustration is growing. Rural Americans already have far less access to higher education than their counterparts in cities and suburbs. Now the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and financial crises. Many rural private, nonprofit colleges are closing altogether.
"We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept," said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. "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.' "
When programs at rural colleges and universities are eliminated, "It's not just, if this institution doesn't do it, another one can pick up the slack," Koricich said. "It's that if this institution doesn't do it, it just does not happen. It is not offered. It's not an option."
While large-scale cuts to majors in the years during and since the Covid-19 pandemic have gotten some attention, what many have in common has been largely overlooked: They're disproportionately happening at universities that serve rural students or are in largely rural states.
Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, which Koricich directs, as those that share such characteristics as being located in counties classified as rural and a certain distance from metropolitan areas.
Even some flagship universities that serve rural places are making big cuts. The most widely reported were at West Virginia University, which is eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A similar review is under way at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University.
But most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states - about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships - even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.
St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System scaled back more than 40, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.
The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.
Among the many other regional public universities that are dropping programs and majors are Missouri Western, Eastern Kentucky, Arkansas State, Dickinson State in North Dakota and the University of Nebraska at Kearney. North Dakota State University has proposed cuts to 14 programs; the university did not respond to questions about the status of that plan.
"Some institutions have no other options" than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of both Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System.
At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.
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 right-size the budget," Ennis said.
But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a report that administrators are exploiting these problems 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."
Many of the programs affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to urban and suburban ones.
These subjects "do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities," said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that is also eliminating majors. "We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently."
But Welch said states are often simply trying to reduce duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities receive.
"The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can't rely on big endowments," Welch said. The pandemic, he said, "threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing."
Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more three years later. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.
The university points out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.
"It is easy to just write us off as, 'Oh, well, do they really need that school?' when there are so many other majors," said Owen Bertram, a senior theater major whose program has so far escaped the cuts. "But I don't think it's that simple."
His classmates who will be affected by the changes "are such creatives at heart, and they all came here because they loved what they were doing," said Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university's College of Creative Arts. He said it's hard to watch these students struggling with the questions, "Do I stay?" "Do I leave?" "Is it worth it?"
For rural students, there are few other 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.
"It is creating a second class of people to say, 'You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can't have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren't enough of you here,'" Koricich said.
"In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction. If you only have one option, you don't really have choice."
In many cases, this particularly affects low-income and Black students. At the University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example - another institution in a largely rural state, which is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics - more than half the students are low-income and 35 percent are Black, according to the university.
"UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want," said Holly Buroughs, a physics major who started a petition protesting the cuts.
"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.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges in rural areas or that serve large proportions of rural students have closed outright since 2020; some of the rural private institutions that remain are also axing majors.
The proportion of rural high school graduates going to college at all is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music students at Delta State as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship, which he isn't sure he would have gotten if his only options to study piano had been at the state's larger, more competitive universities.
Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.
"Used to be, used to be, used to be," he remembered people telling him.
Now he's hearing that again.
His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.
"All you hear is, 'We used to have this, because we used to have more students.'"
Jon Marcus, Brianna Atkinson, Molly Minta and Amy Morona wrote this article for The Hechinger Report.
Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.
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A new report from The Sycamore Institute reveals the persistent challenge of college affordability in Tennessee. Despite state and federal aid programs, many students still struggle to cover the costs of higher education.
Brian Straessle, executive director of the institute, said maintaining scholarships is a challenge for some students because of academic, service or renewal requirements. He pointed out students often drop out due to housing costs, food insecurity and transportation issues.
"There are also sort of cost of living challenges frequently where housing, obviously across the board, across the country, has gotten a lot more expensive," Straessle observed. "Some of these scholarship programs, they won't pay for living expenses. They will only pay for tuition and fees."
According to the report, Tennessee's postsecondary education costs vary widely by institution type. For the 2023-2024 school year, average costs ranged from more than $21,000 at public two-year colleges to more than $44,000 at private four-year institutions.
Straessle emphasized the availability of state resources and scholarships that students can access to assist with college expenses.
"Some of the biggest ones are like the HOPE scholarship that, if you're going straight from high school to undergrad, that can pay a significant chunk of your costs," Straessle outlined. "Then there's Tennessee Promise, which gets a lot of headlines, which is what they call a last-dollar scholarship."
Straessle stressed the importance of obtaining a college degree significantly affects job opportunities, earnings and overall well-being for Tennesseans.
"For most people, going to college is going to pay off in terms of your lifelong earning potential, your health and well-being being improved over the course of your life," Straessle emphasized. "Just the opportunities that are available to you, having that degree or certificate."
The report cited an estimate in 2021, 59% of "good jobs" in Tennessee, those paying at least $39,400 for ages 25-44 and $50,700 for ages 45-64 required a bachelor's degree, a figure projected to rise to 66% by 2031.
Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.
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South Dakota librarians are implementing new policies for young readers in the new year and they are expecting future challenges, with the governor's proposed funding cuts for 2026.
Both school and public libraries across the state are required to roll out new policies Jan. 1 to "restrict the access of obscene materials by minors," online and in print, with a new law passed this year.
Dan Burniston, director of the Vermillion Public Library, said on a South Dakota Humanities Council panel, filters can be challenging, both because coders and programmers can get around them, and useful information can be filtered out.
"Take the word 'breast,' for example. If your filters are turned up high enough, you search for 'chicken breast,' you're looking for recipes; you search for 'breast cancer.' When you aggressively filter, you can filter perfectly legitimate content, too," Burniston outlined.
According to a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case, something legally "obscene" must meet three criteria: It encourages excessive interest in sex, is patently offensive and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."
Nancy Swenson, technology services librarian and chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee for the South Dakota Library Association, said librarians select materials systematically, based on reviews, recommendations and community interest.
"Our stuff that we're buying, even if it's something that, personally, you might not be comfortable with, it has artistic, literary, political or scientific value," Swenson contended. "It is not 'obscene.'"
The American Library Association said more than 4,000 unique book titles were targeted for censorship in 2023. Nearly half involved the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people or people of color.
In her 2026 budget address, Gov. Kristi Noem proposed cutting general and federal funds to the State Library by nearly $2.5 million.
Sarah Jones-Lutter, director of the Redfield Carnegie Library, said the cuts would especially harm small libraries.
"It gets rid of interlibrary loan," Jones-Lutter stressed. "We say, 'With us small libraries, we can't afford all these books, but we can get them for you.' With this budget, that system is gone."
She added the change would also cut funding for shared databases, summer reading programs and more.
Support for this reporting was provided by The Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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