Closing departments that serve underrepresented groups most

[polly_mer]

A US university often has specific general education requirements that everyone must meet.  I've never seen an engineering curriculum that has more humanities requirements than the absolute bare minimum to meet the university-wide general education requirements.  I have seen engineering curriculum that states specific humanities courses to take from the much longer list that the university accepts as meeting the general education requirements.

Thus, yes, you will have engineering students in your classes who may even want to take those classes, but if that gen ed requirement were eliminated, then you'd most likely have far fewer engineering students.

The way people get required to take the courses is by what is approved as meeting the general education requirement.  That's why engineering students will take a required engineering ethics course and then usually not be allowed to count that as whatever the philosophy ethics courses would count for checking the humanities general education box.

You may not be able to force individuals to take your specific courses, but the general education requirements act that way.  If you haven't sat on the gen ed or curriculum committees, then you haven't seen desperation as professors/departments work very, very hard to ensure that the requirements include their courses and exclude other courses that would be pulling from the same pool of students.

The question still remains why people enroll at the institution.  Taking random general education courses is seldom a driving force for additional enrollment, but having general education requirements that are out of step with similar institutions can have the effect of reducing enrollment in majors that would otherwise be solid.

You, fourhats, may not want to discuss diversity, but engineering departments tend to be the least American checkbox diverse and the most thought diverse because they draw international students.  Thus, all the US-focused diversity courses tend to fall flat because they assume prejudices and biases that aren't applicable while ignoring the prejudices and biases that the students have. 

One of the most unintentionally entertaining trainings I ever took was the TA training set up by the humanities folks that was taught to a full house of about 50 engineering TAs where I was one of three Americans.  The questions to the trainers were hilarious because of the mismatch between assumed prejudices and the actual prejudices.  My Russian colleague asked why anyone would think Asians are smart and should be in college at all, let alone studying something worth knowing like engineering.  My Korean colleague was hugely offended by being lumped in as "Asian" with other, clearly inferior countries.  Several people obviously ignored the women speakers and would wait for the men to answer the questions.

[polly_mer]

Double posting to make a different point:

If a closing department is supporting a given department in ways the given department desires, then the closing department will have allies.

For example, the social work and nursing departments may want specific languages being taught so their students can become fluent enough.

The criminal justice and social work departments may want specific courses taught to expand their students' cultural knowledge for a specific community.

I saw one really fabulous humanities course at Super Dinky related to understanding poverty that many other departments strongly recommended that course as the humanities elective.

I've seen individual courses preserved during academic prioritization for the benefit of external departments, even when a given department/major was disbanded.

However, I've also seen many assertions by faculty losing their jobs about how vital their contributions are to the overall university that aren't supported by sufficient evidence of the importance of that individual.  For example, a good working knowledge of history is important to being a broadly educated person.  Requiring engineering students to take one history course, no matter how carefully chosen for the general education requirements, does not go very far towards meeting that goal. 

Requiring engineers to take enough history to matter will be fought by the engineering departments because more history just expands an already full curriculum that will result in engineers.  Therefore, while engineering departments probably won't fight a general education curriculum that includes a history course, the engineering departments also won't fight for history in the same way the department will fight for specific math, physics, computer science, and even chemistry courses that are absolutely vital to the engineering curriculum.

[spork]

I'm going to assume that K-12 teacher training programs emphasize the need to effectively teach diverse pools of students, and that they are eager to recruit undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minorities to help diversify the ranks of K-12 teachers. Yet some of these programs are being eliminated:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/28/teacher-education-programs-continue-suffer-death-thousand-cuts.

Looks like a money-driven decision to me.

[Hibush]

I'm going to assume that K-12 teacher training programs emphasize the need to effectively teach diverse pools of students, and that they are eager to recruit undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minorities to help diversify the ranks of K-12 teachers. Yet some of these programs are being eliminated:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/28/teacher-education-programs-continue-suffer-death-thousand-cuts.

Looks like a money-driven decision to me.

This societal need seems to be getting a hit.

The schools that are dropping education are R1s rather than former normal schools (i.e. teacher training). Is that because the education programs are not well integrated to the rest of the institution at the the R1s? If so, the trend is isolated rather than general.

[Vkw10]

I'm going to assume that K-12 teacher training programs emphasize the need to effectively teach diverse pools of students, and that they are eager to recruit undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented minorities to help diversify the ranks of K-12 teachers. Yet some of these programs are being eliminated:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/28/teacher-education-programs-continue-suffer-death-thousand-cuts.

Looks like a money-driven decision to me.

This societal need seems to be getting a hit.

The schools that are dropping education are R1s rather than former normal schools (i.e. teacher training). Is that because the education programs are not well integrated to the rest of the institution at the the R1s? If so, the trend is isolated rather than general.

That may be part of the issue. They may also be seeing declining enrollment from people who've released that paying R1 price tag is a poor choice when goal is a K12 teaching career. A colleague's daughter chose a good regional university over Harvard a few years ago, because the regional made better financial sense for an aspiring elementary teacher.

My undergraduate institution has reduced their education program over the last decade.  Fewer people are willing to pay private SLAC prices for an education degree. The program is shifting emphasis towards secondary certification for people majoring in other fields. They don't plan to eliminate elementary education completely, but they have filled about half of the vacancies created by retirements in the last decade. The other faculty lines habe been diverted to more popular majors.

I suspect teacher layoffs in 2008 recession have had an impact on education majors. Education used to be a safe choice, with little chance of losing a job. Teachers could take a few years off while children were small, then go back to work with schedules that were similar to their children's schedules. But 2008 showed that teaching wasn't such a safe option, because many teachers lost jobs.

[Harlow2]

The effect of the 2008 recession on my institution's teacher ed program was that those who applied were generally more serious about teaching and less likely to see the program as either a default or as an opportunity for "summers off"