More academic cuts: May 2024 edition

How are colleges and universities responding to financial and other pressures?

This year I’ve been tracking a series of institutional budget crises, spending cuts, layoffs, mergers, and campus closures. They seemed to spike in March (1, 2, 3) and continued in April. Now that May is over I can share what I observed in that month.

tl;dr version — closures, cuts, layoffs continued.

Today I’ll reuse the headers I set up in those previous posts, except for mergers, as I didn’t find any in May 2024.

1 Closing campuses

Eastern Gateway Community College (Ohio) (community college), founded in the 1960s, will close this October 31. Causes are a mix of a terminated online program, financial “irregularities” (federal search warrants, two leaders indicted in 2023), and running out of funds.

The Delaware College of Art and Design (DCAD) (private art school) is closing now. Reasons given included “a shrinking number of college-age students, rising operational costs, unexpected issues surrounding FAFSA.” Note the role of FAFSA in their explanation.

Philadelphia’s College of the Arts (private university) lost its accreditation and thereby decided to close. The official reasons are financial in a classic sense, revenue shrinking and expenses growing:

UArts has been in a fragile financial state, with many years of declining enrollments, declining revenues, and increasing…