Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Cutting up to 21 Academic Programs
“Some of the programs have no students enrolled and will end immediately.”
The school is also expecting staff and faculty cuts in the spring.
Go Erie reports:
Edinboro University will eliminate more than 20 academic programs
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania will cut 21 academic programs over the next few years.
Some of the programs have no students enrolled and will end immediately.
Other programs on the moratorium list have as many as 30 students enrolled and will end after those students complete the program, university officials said.
“Moratorium basically means no new students will be admitted into these programs, but students currently in the programs, if they wish to, will be able to complete them,” said university Provost Michael Hannan.
Some of the programs that will be eliminated are degree programs. Others are certificate programs or concentrations within degree programs.
Eliminated will be:
• Graduate certificate in conflict management, teaching certification-music, teacher leadership-social studies and teacher leadership-online instruction — all with no students enrolled.
• Secondary education-physics, teaching certification-physics, teaching certification-special education 7-12, history-comprehensive history, physics, data analytics, geographic information science, health and wellness studies, cooperative engineering physics, special education 7-12, autism spectrum disorders endorsement, anthropology, anthropology-forensic anthropology, special education-autism, and web/mobile application development — each with fewer than a dozen students.
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Comments
Seems that they’re cutting physics. At least those instructors should be able to find other positions in teaching and industry.
Not many American students these days have the chops to study physics. Too much softening of the secondary school curriculum.
Math is hard …
Physics is phun.
The comanies hiring physics people already hire Indians and Chinese on the cheap. I’d imagine a physics degree held by a white male is as marketable as a grievance studies degree.
Edinboro is part of the state university system and prob not where someone would go to study physics. Js
Most of those are programs associated with teacher licensure endorsements. Evidently their Education department isn’t effective in selling to teachers who just need an endorsement.
As for “hard” sciences, I think most kids who are heavily into the sciences aren’t going to get a degree from a small liberal arts school.
PASSHE, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, is overbuilt when it comes to institutions. Slippery Rock University, Clarion University, and Edinburg University are all rather near each other. Their programs overlap quite a bit. Their graduates are not bad at all but it isn’t cost-effective to have three times the same programs within such a small radius.
Studies repeatedly show that teachers now are drawn from the lower end of college students academically. This may be reflected here in the unwillingness of prospective teachers to take physics.
When I was young teaching was not a major. English was taught by an English major, Science by a natural science major, math usually by a math minor,history by a history major, but sometimes a major, particularly in High School.
That was the difference between what is going on in the classroom then as compared to now.
Why don’t they shut down their departments that don’t matter??????
They might drop their physics major, but they still may need physics instructors to support other majors. Of course, they could be combined with the Chem department. Same with anthro, but that could be combined with sociology (if it isn’t already).
As for the rest of it – begone!
Isn’t it strange that the more money gets poured into higher education, the more education options are reduced. Just looking at the local community college offerings now compared to what was available 30 years ago is mind-boggling. What are they doing with all those funds?
* Diversity and Inclusion Dean.
* Assistant Dean of Diversity.
* Sub assistant vice dean of LGBTQ+ Affairs.
* Vice Provost of BLM.
* etc
Embezzling……
These kinds of shakeouts will continue to happen as there is a lot of excess capacity in some of the liberal arts disciplines, especially when graduates discover no clear career path (except into scholarship, where the game is to reproduce more young scholars). Art history, philosophy, literary studies are all going to contract. Sadly, world language studies are probably going to contract as well, which is too bad: it’s a field that can lead to employment. My sis’s German major scored her a job straight away with Bayer, and my nephew’s Chinese major similarly worked out great.
The academic job market can defy gravity for a long time, but maybe not forever. The humanities academic job markets are apparently almost dead now.
I didn’t know those foreign language majors were so marketable. I would have thought that when you need a speaker of English and some foreign language, you could hire a native speaker of the other language, because so many educated people speak English as a second language.
True: a few years ago, none of Columbia U’s 19 just-minted PhD’s got full-time tenure-track employment at all, let alone in one of the coveted R1 slots. The number of jobs for English, History, Philosophy, Sociology, and Anthropology PhD’s are falling through the floor, so the PhD programs that produce them are in a panic.
There are a few recently hired PhDs at the community college where I work and they are full of resentment. I hear them, like Kent at the end of Lear, pleading, “is this the promised end?” No one here cares about their cutting-edge research on Bahktin’s theory as applied to Caribbean folk narratives as depicted in graphic novels. We care only if they can teach writing well, and a lot of them find that a challenge.
A girl in my high school went on to study Art History and met an Italian millionaire at an art show. She married him and subsequently lived in a mountaintop castle somewhere in northern Italy or southern France. So I’d have to count her as one of the more successful of my high school’s graduates.
Many of these programs they are ending involve specialization for teaching certification, and they may not really be needed. I used to advise students who were getting science secondary teaching certification at an Enormous State University.
For science teaching certification, it’s best to have a major in one of the fields that provide full-time employment of teachers at most high schools: That means math, chemistry, or biology. That can serve as their primary teaching area.
I advised my students to have two additional area certifications. Usually one would be another of the three major areas: A high school can always plan a full schedule for a chemistry major who is also certified in math or biology. Often one of the three areas would be a minor area such as physics or computer science, which would allow a small high school to offer a couple of classes in those areas.
For students to be certified in physics, there doesn’t really need to be a specialized curriculum for it to be their major area. They can do it as a minor area, with only a couple of additional physics courses in addition to the ones they take anyway as a chemistry major. Most of my students with three areas of certification were snapped up by the best high schools in the state.
I live within a relatively short drive from Edinboro’s campus so this is local news for me. As I stated above, the state university system is overbuilt. The local evening news has reported that the chancellor is trying to consolidate programs among Slippery Rock, Clarion, and Edinboro to reduce overlap. Funding for the state system has been a perennial problem especially as Penn State is not part of that system.
Considering one of more of the western PA schools was going to be closed or there were going to be mergers between the schools this isn’t nearly as awful as it looks.
A good teacher and interested student can accomplish much. I was blessed to have excellent professors for almost all the courses. The physics prof would teach as much of the math as anyone was missing.
Even the Econ guys would teach the metrics if you were interested. However, the math was not required for the core courses.
That was more than 40 years ago. In those days Edinboro was a state teachers college.