There is no other way of saying it. The American University as the United States knows it since the 1960s is coming to an end. The series of university closures and consolidations that began 15 years ago will surely increase in the coming years.
University inscriptions in general reached their maximum point in 2010, but have fallen consistently since, since, such as the cost of the university, the COVID-19 pandemic and other trends have reduced students of higher education institutions. But with recent repressions against protests on university campuses, the anti-di climate and the persecution of the US government of foreign students, US universities really face a tsunami. The drip of the institutions that close or on the margins is sure to become an flood between now and the end of the 2020s.
The State University of Sonoma (also known as California, Sonoma State) is among the last universities facing budget cuts. Despite a ruling from the Sonoma County Court that has temporarily placed the university’s plans, the state of Sonoma still faces a budget deficit or $ 24 million. Even if the order remains beyond May 1, the state of Sonoma can and will probably work in negotiations in good faith with staff, teachers and students to eliminate more than 22 largest, six departments and more than 100 faculty positions. Specifically, the art history, economy, geology, philosophy, theater/dance departments, and women’s departments and gender studies are in the state cutting block of Sonoma, mostly liberal arts and social sciences.
The Most Expansive Retrachment in the Past Decade, Thought, Occurred At West Virginia University in 2023. That August, after Six-Iar Enrot Rot Enrot Rot Rot Enrot Rot Enrot Rot Enrot Rot Rot Enrot Roat Enrot Rot Entrolyt, and Rot Entratmy and Roat Entrolyt. Sub 26,000 in 2023. The austerity plan was to reduce 32 students, including all its foreign language programs and their mathematics doctoral program, and 169 faculty positions. But after the week or the protests of the students, the number ended up being 28 older (almost a fifth or their undergraduate students) and 143 teachers (a reduction of 13.5 percent). The sudden change towards austerity has led to a constant flow of teachers and administrators renouncing or taking retirement purchases to leave Western Virginia. Again, undergraduate liberal arts specialties and small postgraduate academic programs were the main objectives of the cuts.
Stories such as what is happening in the state of Sonoma and has already happened in West Virginia are part of a larger and more terrible trend. As university enrollment for women has increased incrementally in the last 50 years, there has been a more drastic decrease in men who serve university, especially among white men. Since 1970, men have gone from 58 percent of all undergraduate university affiliates to only around 40 percent of the axis of the early 2020. 71 percent of the decrease in university assistance since 2010 coincides with the decrease of men as students in higher education. Perhaps sexism disguised as disinterest in higher education following a dominant women students could be at least part of the explanation of this strong fall in registration.
But other higher education institutions are worse: the Clarion de Pennsylvania University, the University of Pennsylvania in California, the Faculty of Saint Rose in New York and the University of Independence in Utah, for example. These are among the 76 schools and universities that have closed their doors or have merged with other higher education institutions in the United States, affecting the lives of tens of thousands of students and several thousand members of the Faculty. Almost all of these institutions have cited budget deficit and a lower registration as reasons for their disappearance or margkers.
At the national level, the number of students attributed to US schools and universities fell from a peak or 18.1 million students in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021, including a fall of 350,000 students after the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemia. From this past fall, the registration had increased to 15.9 million students, an increase of 4.5 percent, but just enough to express the tide of closures, austerity and consolidations.
According to the financial stress test model of the Bank of the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia for American higher education institutions, up to 80 schools and universities in the US. UU. It could permanently close Thir by the end of the school year 2025-26. They based their findings on “the worst scenarios predictions[ing] move from the next demographic cliff (or a 15 percent decrease in registration). Demographers also have planned an unmanantade fall in the number of university affiliates from this fall, a consequence of the economic anguish that was the great recession of the late 20,000.
Then there is Trump 2.0 and the persecution of their administration to foreign university students. Recent repressions in academic freedom under former President Joe Biden, with the faculty of the Pro-Palestine University and student protesters, and in most Republican governors such as Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron Desantis in Florida on the critical pharmacy of the Deiald’s theory and theory of Deialld. The Trump administration movement to revoke the visas of more than 1,700 foreign professors and students, and kidnap and deport many others, mainly about pro-Palestinian activism and other political positions considered against the interests of the administration, threatens the area of sustainable growth in higher education. Neinder Alireza Doroudi, Rumeysa Ozturb and Mahmoud Khalil, or any of the hundreds of other victims of this injustice, have committed any crime under US laws. Unless going to a funeral or writing an opinion article or exercising the right of the first amendment to protest is criminal behavior.
In 2023-24, more than 1.1 million international students attended US schools and universities at the undergraduate, postgraduate and professional levels. But with the Trump administration threatening, arresting and deporting foreign students and academics in their boxes, it is almost certain that the international registration of students from the Middle East and Asia del Sur will fall in next year. It is also likely that there is a fall in China students as a result of the current tariff fight between the two nations. A quarter of all foreign students in the United States are from China.
After decades of universities that hire armies of part -time professors intentionally of full -time instructors and researchers, and university presidents who direct their campus as for profit, the implosion of higher education in the United States has been almost likely. Although Harvard recently provides the opposition of the Trump administration to its repression of conferences and universities, the hierarchies from top to bottom and the labor forces have unimpossed the responses of higher education to the conservative and extreme right movements in the United States completely. Add to this the conservative assumptions of the fields of liberal arts as “immoral”, “indoctrination” and “libards” instead of what they really mean: an expansion of people’s knowledge and the world. It also has a leg an excessive emphasis of decades about the voice (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The possibility that the Gurus project of Trump’s 2025 project deprived the Federal Student Loan Program would be the top that broke the back of higher education at this time.
Liberal arts departments, especially, will continue to consolidate, or university administrators will continue to find reasons to destroy them as a cost savings measure. The increasingly large numbers or the senior faculty will receive compensation wages, early retirement or end looted. The faculty and Junior staff not simply be unemployed and, in many cases, unemployed in a US higher education scenario. UU. Above all, those students who are in any institute outside the 136 best elite universities or in the 50 main colleges and public universities flags may not be able to pay the university, with tens of thousands they cannot complete their titles. American Highher Education is not only looking at the abyss, but has already fallen into it.
The opinions expressed in this article are typical of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.