A lot of institutions, in reaction to recent changes are going through program closure (or in politer terms “program suspensions” which in theory means they might get resurrected at some point be revived or saved, but don’t bet the house on it). So, it’s worth going through how these decisions tend to get made.

Contrary to what you might hear, “low enrollment” technically is not the reason anyone closes a program: it’s a bit more complicated than that. The real issue is whether or not the institution is making money by putting on the program. The two issues are pretty closely related—low enrollment usually means low revenue—but costs enter the picture too, in ways we’ll get to in a second. But basically, if a program is making money, it’s safe. A program can lose money and be safe too, but there are a couple of additional considerations that come into play. I’ll come back to those in a second.

It may sound simple—and intuitive—to say that less financially successful programs should be closer to the chopping block than more financially successful ones. But figuring out which is which is not always clear cut. How do you know if a program is making money or not? It’s not easy to tell for three basic reasons.

1) How do you define a “program” for cost purposes? This is trickier than it sounds because institutional costs aren’t easy to assign at the level of a program. At the level of a department? That’s easy but nobody does that because no one closes departments. At the level of a course or a group of courses? That’s possible, but most programs contain both courses which exist solely for the purpose of that program and exist for general enrollment for students not enrolled in the program. So what to include? It’s often a judgement call, one that can and will be disputed by parties who don’t like the result and might do better under a different definition.

 2) How do you define “costs” anyways? Direct costs like materials are easy. But what about salaries? How much of a professor’s salary do you attribute to a given course? And what about overhead? How do you treat heat/light, the costs of central services, libraries, IT, etc.? Again, there are many possible ways to do so, but the decision is never result-neutral. Some institutions just try to ignore the difficult indirect cost /overhead stuff and just measure program revenues minus “direct” costs. This makes every department look like it is making money, which is not always helpful, even if for comparative analysis purposes it’s the “least profitable” which get identified as candidates for closure/suspension.

3) Heck, how do you even define “revenues”? It’s easy enough to measure tuition dollars. But how do you include the value of a government grant? In Ontario and Quebec, which have weighted enrolment grant systems, you can more or less link individual student enrolments to income at the level of a single course. And you can sort of do it in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and—this is stretching it a bit—New Brunswick as well. But everywhere else, universities just get block grants which are completely unrelated to enrollment, and it’s up to the university to calculate how much gets allocated to any given program—and this is a deeply political act. I know some institutions which don’t even bother calculating how the government grant, but rather simply compare units based on tuition income minus costs, which makes every program look like it is losing money—again not super-helpful even if it’s just the “most unprofitable” which get identified as potential targets.

To return briefly to the issue of programs with low enrollments: on its own low enrollment in the program is not obviously a deal-breaker. If a program happens to have courses that have high enrolments from students outside the program, that matters. If a program has disproportionately high enrollment from international students (who usually have more $ attached to them), that matters. If it has high materials costs, that matters, too. If its courses are all taught by full-time 70 year-olds at the top of the pay scale instead of cheaper sessional lecturers, that matters as well. It’s complicated.

Now, if you’re losing money as a unit, you can still stave off closure/suspension if your professors are providing the institution with extra prestige through high-quality research or through the provision of programs which are seen as being of benefit to the community even if they lose money. In universities, this often means having some prestigious research programs in STEM areas (and since STEM programs can be pretty expensive to run, so this will matter sometimes, particularly in lower-enrolment areas like Physics. In colleges, it might mean retaining skilled trades programs even when they are so capital-intensive they cannot help but lose money, because various community interests would be angry if they were not spared. Prestige—however it is gained—can go some ways to helping money-losing programs.

The other thing that can provide cover for units is their political power. Higher Education scholar Peter Eckel has done some fine work over the years (here’s one paper on rules used in academic program closures) showing that time and again, when institutions made decisions about program closures/suspensions, it was the departments that had stronger leadership and could effectively demonstrate support either from other departments or alumni or the local community. Squeaky wheels, in other words, avoided the chop.

When you think about all three of these criteria together—money, prestige and “clout”—it’s easy to predict where cuts will happen, and that is in humanities programs. For one thing, humanities disciplines have a long-term tendency to chop themselves up into ever-tinier areas of specialization, which tends to lower their enrolments and hence also their revenues, which is only partly offset by having lower costs. (If you want to see how this works in real dollars and cents, take a look at a blog I wrote nine years ago showing how costs and revenues play out at the level of an individual interdisciplinary program, I think it holds up pretty well). For another, enrolments are declining across a number of humanities programs—down almost a third in the last fifteen years. Both of these things make humanities vulnerable on simple financial metrics.

But what also makes humanities programs vulnerable is that they tend not to do very well on the prestige metric or the community/alumni support metric. The prestige metric isn’t something they can easily change—society these days doesn’t seem to value these disciplines in the way that it used to, and so while there certainly are departments that are seen as “world-class” they are few and far between. But links with the community and with alumni? Those are things to which more humanities departments could usefully be paying greater attention. You never know, it might come in handy someday.

In any event, when an institution talks about suspending or closing “low-enrollment” programs, take it with a grain of salt. It’s usually a bit more complicated than that. Enrollments are important but not always decisive.