Campus cuts, mergers, and closures: August-September 2025 update

It’s already October, nearly the middle of the month.  Somehow I’ve put out some Halloween decorations and arranged for my surprise costume.  Here in the American eastern seaboard the weather is veering between the last hot gasps of summer and the chills of autumn.

Fall’s many associations set the stage for today’s post. Here is share an update on one particular and grim dimension of higher education developments.  As a futurist, I prefer to ground my extrapolations deeply in the present, so I spend a lot of time scanning the horizon for documentable seeds of potential futures. For American colleges and universities that includes, sadly, and among other things, more stories of campus closures, cuts, and mergers. In this post you’ll see a list of these, with links to supporting news stories and official documents.  Alas, this string of posts has become a tradition here.

(From 2024: March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November. From 2025: February, June, July, August. So far. I need to tag these retrospectively.)

Most of this post is about cuts.  There isn’t a closure to report and only one and a half (you’ll see) mergers, but a disturbing number of program and personnel terminations.  As per usual, I’ve added a few keywords describing each institution, along with a link to their Wikipedia article if you’d like to learn more about them.

1 Mergers

Elon University (private, North Carolina) and Queens University (private, North Carolina) announced they would merge.  This seems more like an acquisition, with statements like Elon will “assum[e] governance of Queens by Aug. 1, 2026.”

The new Elon-Queens web page

Why the merger? One view is that Elon will win a larger presence in the city of Charlotte. Elon News Network reports alumni asking if Queens was in poor financial health: “In the 2023 fiscal year, Queens lost $20 million. Since the pandemic, the university has been drawing from its endowment to make up for losses.”

Jack Duval ‘93, who created a website with other alums against the merger, brought up Queens’ financial struggles in response to Piatt.

“You’ll see they’re running an $8.7 million operating deficit right now. It’s worse than that if you look at all their operations, but it’s about $8.7 million a year right now,” Duval said during the session.

In response, “Jim Piatt, Senior Vice President for Advancement and External Affairs and co-chair of the Elon University and Queens University merger sprint team… [stated]

“There’s no crisis here. Nobody’s in crisis,” Piatt said. “They’ve had some enrollment struggles, and that translates to some financial challenges, for sure, in their more recent history. But, I think, in terms of their bond rating and all the things that you would point to for financial health or ratios, they’re in fine shape.”

More discussion here.and here.

Moving across the Atlantic Ocean for another merger, the University of Kent and the University of Greenwich, plan to merge this year, becoming the London and South East University Group. This seems to be done in anticipation of a worsening economic environment. Some criticism:

Not quite a merger: the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (public) and Northcentral Technical College (community college) will mount an interesting collaboration. They will “share space, offer joint programming and develop transfer pathways between the institutions.”  Further, “UW-Stevens Point’s Wausau branch will relocate to nearby Northcentral Technical College’s campus.”  Behind the decision is declining enrollment and state support.

2 Campuses cutting programs and jobs

The University of Chicago (private, research) will lay off 400 staff. The causes are budget stresses plus “[o]ngoing federal policy changes [which] are creating new financial liabilities and greater risks than we had to contend with a year ago.”  This move comes after suspending new admissions to many PhD programs.  Chicago will also sell its Center for Research in Security Prices.

The University of Oregon (public, research) laid off 60 workers, including 20 faculty members.  The goal was to cut a budget deficit “driven by rising costs, falling out-of-state enrollment, federal policy uncertainty.” UO cut a similar amount earlier this year. Elsewhere in that state, Southern Oregon University (public) will cut “10 bachelor’s degrees, 12 minors and one graduate program.”  The reason? “[L]ong-term structural budget deficits.”

The president of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (land grant) proposed a series of program cuts and reorganizations, all of which would immediately or gradually end some faculty jobs.  Community and Regional Planning, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Educational Administration, Landscape Architecture, Statistics, and Textiles, Merchandising, & Fashion Design would end, with some functions distributed to other units. The Departments of Entomology and Plant Pathology and also Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication will become two new colleges, with faculty and staff encouraged to take early retirement.  Nebraska will also implement “administrative actions and efficiencies, as well as a Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP) for faculty.” The stated reason is to save $27.5 million.  Faculty members protested and criticized both data and process.

Barnard College (private, women’s, liberal arts) laid off 77 full time staff. The official announcement described this as a restructuring: “we’ve identified the need to more robustly utilize new technologies, improve coordination across teams, and better align our financial resources with our academic mission in service of the College’s long-term goals.”

Brown University (private, research) will lay off 48 staff as a result of continued federal government chaos.

The University of Arizona staff laid off nearly 50 staff involved in their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education program due to because of federal budget cuts.

Bucknell University (private, liberal arts) announced it would close its scholarly press, terminating two full time and one half time staffers.

Penn State University (public) decided to close its radio station, PBS affiliate WPSU.  The reason: “pressures on the university budget from inflation, enrollment challenges and state funding reductions pushed administrators to re-evaluate the station’s funding model,” according to Inside Higher Ed.

3 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet

In this section I list program cuts, departmental closures, and other events which don’t immediately involve personnel being laid off, but which could plausibly do so in the near term future.

East Carolina University (public, research) announced program cuts.  Degrees include: BA in African and African American Studies, BA in Economics (the BS in Economics is not impacted and will continue to be offered), BS in Geographic Information Science and Technology, BA in Theatre Arts (the BFA in Theatre Arts is not impacted and will continue to be offered), MS in Biomedical Engineering, and MS in Mechanical Engineering, according to a local report.  The reasons given will be familiar to readers:

[T]he changing landscape of higher education today; shifting demographics, including fewer graduating high school students in the years ahead, combined with budget challenges have led to this call to action. At the same time, there is evolving demand for the courses and programs that we offer – demands that we must nimbly seek to meet.

No word yet on which programs will grow or be added, as per that last sentence. Nor is there information of potential faculty and staff cuts.

Reflections

As I’ve said before, we should be cautious in generalizing, especially from a relative small sample as we have in this post (remember there are around 4,000 American colleges and universities). It’s important to recognize that each college or university has its own situation.  Yet at the same time these stories do constitute evidence, and based on them, along with the others I’ve shared, we can trace trends moving through the entire post-secondary sector.

Enrollment continues to be one of the leading drivers for cuts. Remember that the supermajority of campuses depend on student fees to operate; broadly speaking, enrollment drops mean revenue falls.  That’s at the general level.  Enrollment then drives decisions about specific programs.  For example, here’s the data East Carolina shared to explain why they cut certain degrees:

While the arts and humanities have often led the way to the cutting room floor over the past decade, I’ll note other disciplines being hit today and admit to curiosity about them. The conventional wisdom is that STEM is growing, and enrollment data usually shows this. So why are these programs axed?  It’s possible there are local reasons, such as a given department having a hard time recruiting students, or rapid personnel turnover, or offerings simply being weak. I do wonder, though, if Nebraska going after Earth and Atmospheric Sciences is a reflection of a political shift against climate change work in academia, driven in part by the second Trump administration.

Yes, Trump also plays a key role here as we’ve been seeing.  His cuts to research, SNAP, PBS, and many other programs are apparent in these campus actions.  Note that some of the impacted institutions are wealthy and of very high status. (Here’s where I now share my reports on what Trump is doing to academia.)

What I’m not seeing this time around: none of these campuses are withdrawing from in-person learning to shift online.  No leaders are citing AI as a threat.

Let me remind the reader of the timing.  We’re 1-2 months into fall semester, depending on schedules, so enrollment has settled down. We should expect some public data to appear, which will drive new institutional decisions. I have many questions. How mich did international student numbers decline?  Did community colleges win even more dual enrollment (high school) students?  Were there any changes to underrepresented minority numbers as Republicans push diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs into retreat?  Has the battered Department of Education seen operations degrade, and, if so, were there any impacts on enrollment? How have campuses in deep red states fared in attracting traditional age students?

Next-to-last note: today we’ve focused on statistics, bureaucracy, formal communications, policy, and finances, but these are also all stories about real human beings.   The lives of students, faculty, staff and those in surrounding communities are all impacted by all of these events.  Don’t lose sight of that fact.

Finally, I’d like to invite anyone with information on a college or university’s plans to close, merge, or cut to share them with me, either as comments on this post, as notes on social media, or by contacting me privately here.  I write these posts based largely on public, open intelligence (news reports, investigations, roundups) but also through tips, since higher education sometimes has issues with transparency.  We need better information on these events.

(thanks to Thomas Beckett and Peter Shea; University Business published a good article)