Future of Division III

[Gregory Sager]

An interesting test case for this is Point Loma Nazarene.  They don't really need denominational affiliation for recruitment or fundraising and they're getting regularly pummeled in local press over conservative stances.  The Board of Trustees is still largely Nazarene, though, so it'll be interesting to see if they double down on doctrinal purity or do what might be best for the future of the school.

While I'm not familiar with the particulars of Point Loma Nazarene, I'm not convinced that "doubling down on doctrinal purity" is automatically inimical to "doing what might be best for the future of the school" as a general rule for evangelical schools. Every case is different, and there are a lot of factors involved.

[Gregory Sager]

But really this is about making the expense pay off. When you used to be able to go to college in the 60s and 70s and come out with little or no debt provided you worked a part time job, it was no big deal. Colleges have priced themselves out of the liberal arts benefits, and I just don't see that changing any time soon.

Yep. I hate the ongoing rash of school closures. I feel that the landscape of American higher education, which for all of its myriad faults is still one of this country's major resources, is diminished every time a school closes its doors for good.

Nevertheless, the carnage can't entirely be blamed upon the so-called demographic cliff and/or the Covid pandemic. Some of it was self-inflicted by staffing bloat and a desire to keep up with the Joneses by offering all of the unnecessary bells and whistles that Millennials and Gen Z supposedly demanded of their schools. And I don't think that liberal arts departments were necessarily the problem, because they were there long before everything else and their curriculum was always considered to be the core of higher education until not that long ago. I see liberal arts departments as being the victim rather than the problem, although I also understand that choosing a school is a massive financial undertaking for a young person and a lot of liberal arts subjects are not considered to be either interesting or useful by young people.

[Kuiper]

Wittenberg cuts employee jobs; will end music, language programs, some sports

In a letter to Wittenberg students and staff at 5:30 p.m. Friday, university leaders said the following:

* The school's academic major programs in music, music education, German, Spanish, East Asian studies are being eliminated after this school year, along with the minor in Chinese.

* No further declarations of major will be allowed in international business and international studies until further notice "as the Provost and faculty work to see if and how they can be reimagined."

* This school year will be the final seasons for the men's and women's tennis teams and women's bowling team.

* The jobs of 24 full-time equivalent faculty and 45 full-time equivalent staff members will be eliminated. But, the university said because some current employees will be assigned to open positions, and some open positions will not be filled, the reductions impact about 40 individuals.

[Little Giant 89]

In a world only getting smaller eliminating German, Spanish, East Asian Studies and Chinese.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

In a world only getting smaller eliminating German, Spanish, East Asian Studies and Chinese.

The fact they lasted this long was likely a testament to their importance.  At some point, you can't keep offering programs students don't take.

[Ron Boerger]

I looked at their course catalog.  46 MUSC courses (and 44 applied music lesson courses); 11 MUSI (education) courses; 28 GERM, 18 CHIN, 35 SPAN, 8 EAST.  A number of courses are on-demand or independent study but that's a lot of overhead to support that many programs.

In the year ending June 30, 2023, the school granted 249 bachelor's degrees.  2 of them were in "Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics"; 9 were in "Visual and Performing Arts"; 26 were in "Education" which encompasses more than Music Education. 

EDIT:  I'm not sure where East Asian Studies falls but there was a single degree granted in "Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, and Group Studies" which sounds logical.

[uwwcontra2007]

For any school with a good music program, they are going to have quite a few courses.  Each ensemble they offer has to have their own designation, and yes, each instrument has to have their own applied lesson.  Each instrument is a different discipline taught by different instructors.  Again, going back to the ensembles, it's not like you can fit every single wind player into one ensemble.  You'd have to have more than one including the advanced ensemble (Wind Ensemble in most cases), maybe an intermediate ensemble, and a generic "everyone can play" ensemble (usually Concert Band), and yes, Marching Band has to have it's own class more often than not, especially at the D3 level.  You could drop everything down to just one ensemble, but then how do you retain the music students who need/want more of a challenge?  Chances are that Wittenberg has that many courses because they have a good and well established program that brings in money just like other majors do (if not more with the different fees.

Sorry to get a little defensive here (as a music grad myself at Whitewater), but I keep hearing from people that music programs need to be cut for one reason or another.  My question is if we just teach the main technical courses and grind people to just join the workforce, where do we get our culture from?  Where do we teach students how to be human rather than just be a mindless drone?  The arts.  The arts are your answer in that regard.

[Ryan Scott (Hoops Fan)]

That's the rub, right?  We simply don't have all the students (nationwide) to fill all the valuable and quality majors that exist.  Schools are trying to cut where they can to stay alive, but it's highly unlikely any school is going to cut a major that's making money.  If they do, the school itself isn't likely to be around for long.

[Ron Boerger]

As a performing orchestral musician (who even cashes a check once in a while), you will get no argument from me about the importance of the arts as part of a well-rounded education.  But the school has to pay its bills and if it cannot draw sufficient student interest to float the bill, and cannot fundraise well enough to cover the additional cost involved, a full-fledged program such as that apparently available at Witt can't be sustained.

[Kuiper]

For small liberal arts colleges in era of declining applicants, the ideal system is a consortium where schools focus on their core strengths and partner with other schools that have different strengths and students can easily cross-register and cross-major among the schools in the consortium.  That mitigates the problem of under-enrolled majors and allows for much greater efficiencies.

The problem is getting from here to there.  To be a real consortium, you have to be fairly close to the other schools so that you can easily travel between the schools.  Very few consortiums really have that.  The Claremont consortium is ideal because all the schools are like British colleges on the same campus.  The Tri-Co consortium is decent because Haverford and Bryn Mawr are very close and Swarthmore isn't too far and they seem to have deliberately cooperated to provide certain majors that are labeled bi-co or tri-co with courses scattered among the campuses and others only on one campus, but open enrollment for other consortium schools (e.g., Arabic is tri-co and Art history and museum studies are only Bryn Mawr).  Amherst's consortium is another consortium that sort of works even though the schools are not really co-equals, with UMas Amherst so much larger.  Other schools claim to be in consortiums, but they are logistically too difficult to be a real solution.  It's also difficult to transition if you already have tenured faculty etc.  Online classes can help mitigate these issues, but they work better for the occasional niche class to supplement your degree rather than for an entire major or program.

In the absence of that, we get closures and mergers.  Occasionally, mergers make sense (e.g., Case Western Reserve from a purely subject-matter specialization perspective), but often they have the same kinds of problems as mergers in the business world.  The worst result is just abandoning majors that used to be core (e.g., history or english) and keeping a few token courses so you can claim to still have courses in that area, but not really have any intellectual or programmatic commitment to it.  That just deceives students and isolates scholars in a way that satisfies no one.

Most of these announcements in response to financial pressure are in the worst result category (no real consortium alternative, a few token classes, turns off some students) and are part of the gradual decline of the schools.

[uwwcontra2007]

I totally get the needing to cut funds, I'm just afraid of when schools cut music because, especially at the High School level, these programs get cut for the sake of athletics (such as at my school, support for music is nil at this point).  Also, in the case of Wittenberg, I did want to look at where they are in terms of proximity to other music schools, and it seems like they might get "the rest" of the kids who didn't make it into Ohio State or nearby Dayton, and they aren't good enough to get the students that went to the Oberlin Conservatory (may not be great at football, but damn fine music school).  I know we're trying to keep schools from closing and I'd rather not cut music programs, but therein lies the problem.  No money, no program, and even worse, no money, no school at all.

Again, please forgive my defensiveness.  I may not be using my degree like I wanted to (I now work in Hotel Management but I do still play from time to time, including once a year at Whitewater for the Alumni Band), but that doesn't mean there is no value to the education I received (nor do I think anyone here is trying to diminish music schools in general).  It was just a knee jerk reaction, and I apologize for it.

[Ron Boerger]

No apologies needed.  We're all friends here.

[mhm0417]

That's the rub, right?  We simply don't have all the students (nationwide) to fill all the valuable and quality majors that exist.  Schools are trying to cut where they can to stay alive, but it's highly unlikely any school is going to cut a major that's making money.  If they do, the school itself isn't likely to be around for long.

That's it.  Enrollment decline. Young men are not going to college like they did it the 80s, 90s and 00s.  Trades have become a top choice and that's going to continue because of the demand for tradespeople. So we will have young kids that could have played a D3 sport decide to go to work instead of taking on debt and going to college. 20 years ago, we didn't have the demand for trade workers and college was usually the best choice to get ahead.

Some private D3s are going to be facing a budget crunch and many will close.  I think what we've seen the last couple years will continue for another decade.

[Ron Boerger]

Steve Dittmore, whose Glory Day blog covers various aspects of college sports, takes a look at the potential costs of Wittenberg cutting three sports as a cost-savings move.  He posits they are revenue positive and that cutting sports alone won't cut costs absent other measures should the impacted student athletes not return or be replaced.

It's amusing that he boggles at the size of the football roster (162).

[Gregory Sager]

Yes, people like you and me who regularly follow D3 football are aware that 162 players on a roster, although a high number, is by no means an outlier at this level.

The concern with a school in financial distress (i.e., Wittenberg) having 162 football players, or any large number on the football roster beyond a certain point, is retention. When your roster gets that swollen (typically because of the demands of the admissions department, not because coaches enjoy spreading their assistants that thin in terms of trying to coach so many players), you're well aware of the fact that many, if not most, of those players are really nothing more than warm bodies who are obviously regarded as mere walking, talking revenue sources from a football point of view. And it doesn't take long for the typical 18-year-old with big dreams and little football ability to figure this out and leave the program for good in disillusionment at the end of the season, if he doesn't quit first. And only a very small number of them will be back in school as non-athlete sophomores the following year, if any do at all.

IOW, retention with a roster that large is really low, comparatively speaking, even on one of the national-power teams (which Wittenberg is not and hasn't been for a long time). That means that the football coaching staff is essentially bailing water out of a leaky boat every year, trying to bring in another huge freshman class just as much to meet the admissions department's quota as to maintain or improve the product on the field. That's not a desirable coaching situation, and I've heard lots of D3 football coaches from multiple schools complain about it.

Not to mix sports metaphors, but one of the issues with making the athletics department a de facto adjunct of the admissions department in an effort to keep the school's doors open is that it forces coaching staffs to take their eyes off the ball to some degree. And the pressure from admissions likely ratchets up when the financials get really dire, as is the case at Witt.

It's a good blog post, though, in terms of number-crunching the financials of the sports that Witt is discontinuing.