When Isabella Yagmin tried to declare an English major in the spring of her freshman year at Lasell University in Newton, Massachusetts, she was shocked to find out the program was in the process of being phased out.
“At the time, on their website, it still said they had an English major,” Yagmin, who enrolled at Lasell without a declared major, tells The Progressive. “There were still active people at my school that were English majors, so I had no idea that was happening.”
In 2023, Lasell announced the elimination of five majors—English, history, global studies, sociology, and fitness management—citing financial strain and low undergraduate enrollment in the programs in recent years.
Since Lasell no longer offered her desired major, Yagmin transferred schools after her freshman year to Boston College, where she now studies English just down the street from her previous institution.
“While I was at Lasell, I tried to find ways to stay just because I didn’t want to go through the transfer process,” Yagmin, who grew up in Connecticut, says. “It was just a lot. My parents didn’t go to college, so to transfer [was] a lot to do on my own.”
After Lasell’s announcement, the university stopped admitting students into the affected majors, but guaranteed that any current students in the programs would graduate and finish their degrees. This restructuring has become more frequent at universities since the Trump Administration began to slash billions of dollars for education funding, leaving schools to accommodate for the shifting of funds.
These cuts are happening in graduate programs as well. RJ Beardmore, a Brooklyn-based playwright, dropped out of their three-year masters of fine arts (MFA) program at Pace University in New York after an unexpected announcement that it would no longer be accepting applications for the program after the currently enrolled cohorts graduate. The Acting, Directing, and Playwriting MFA program page remains available on the school’s website.
“They announced the closure of the program about two months in,” Beardmore says. “They were still going to graduate my class and honor the commitment that they made to us—but also they could not guarantee that any of our classmates or professors would stick around.”
With program cuts comes the loss of several faculty members and staff positions. At Lasell, at least four faculty members’ contracts were not renewed for the 2024-25 school year and several open faculty positions will not be filled, with twelve staff positions having been eliminated altogether since the announcement. Lasell University declined to comment at this time.
Lasell is not the only higher education institution in Massachusetts making cuts. In 2024, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD) began to offer fewer courses in several humanities departments, which student Kayleen Denis noticed as an anthropology major.
According to Denis, the offering of fewer courses in her major was quietly kept, and she only noticed it when it came time to register for courses for the next school year. “The class titles and descriptions were increasingly vague,” she says, “and as summer went on without any additions or edits, I knew the outlook for the next semester was bleak for me.”
Denis ended up transferring to University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB) shortly before the fall semester in 2024. “It hurt a lot to transfer. I had finally found my campus community,” Denis, who is from Malden, Massachusetts, says. “But seeing the wide array of fields UMB staff had to offer in anthropology . . . compared to the very mundane curriculum UMD was offering, tipped the scale.”
Though the two universities are within the same UMass system, UMB has more resources than its Dartmouth counterpart due to its status as an R1 research school, meaning that UMB benefits from more substantial grants, funding, and partnerships.
As program cuts and changes in course offerings provoke anxiety amongst students, faculty at impacted schools struggle to toe the line between retaining their students and wanting the best for them. Yagmin says that a staff member subtly advised her to consider other options when she approached him for advice.
“It felt like it would be better for me to leave if I wanted to [study] English,” she says. The push her advisor gave her to transfer, coupled with the lack of English courses for her to take beyond the introductory ones, made Yagmin feel like Lasell was not the right fit for her in the long term.
Faculty are also wrestling with structural changes at nearby Simmons University in Boston. In the fall, the Simmons University Board of Trustees voted to discontinue its undergraduate majors in accounting and applied Spanish, as well as a graduate program in gender and cultural studies, and to split its humanities program into two departments: history, and literature and writing.
The humanities major and department, which encapsulates studies in the arts, history, literature, and philosophy, had launched only one year prior to the announcement. Professor Wanda Torres Gregory, chair of the humanities department and Simmons professor of thirty years, says she’s disappointed about the changes. “The Humanities 100 [introductory] course that I designed has been very successful,” she tells The Progressive. “I’ve had to open up multiple sections for the course. So it’s a great disappointment to see that the higher administration did not take into account the success of the department as a unit and it did not give us enough time to develop.”
Torres Gregory believes the university is doing a great disservice to its students by not providing them with a well-rounded education. Simmons is known for its strong nursing program, but she says even these students need aspects of the humanities in order to thrive to the fullest extent in their fields. “[Students are] losing a great exposure to a different way of thinking, a different way of appreciating and understanding our world, a different way of asking,” Torres Gregory says.
Chloe Manning, a sophomore at Simmons majoring in literature, agrees that many of the university’s resources go toward nursing and sports programs. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she says. “We need writers and thinkers. There is so much value in a literature degree and if Simmons is offering these majors, they have a responsibility to hire more professors and build these programs up.”
Though Yagmin and Denis were able to continue their studies at a different institution, Beardmore took it as a sign to take a step back from higher education as a whole. “My family wanted me to redirect to a different program pretty immediately, and I was the one who put my foot down, and was like, ‘I need to discover myself outside of an institution,’ ” they say.
Beardmore’s sentiment is reinforced by the justifications provided by university leadership when faced with such difficult decisions. In 2023, Lasell University president Eric Turner said in an interview with The Boston Globe that “the marketplace” decided to cut the majors, not the university. His statement suggests a dangerous precedent—that the economy and job market will continue to shape education, instead of the other way around. And with attacks on higher education from politicians already—such as Ron Desantis’s war on “woke” colleges—efforts should be made to preserve a diverse range of studies, ones that provoke critical thought, not just the ones that earn money.
Turner’s comment placing the blame on “the marketplace” appears to operate under the misconception that students with a liberal arts degree are less likely to be employed after graduation, and that pursuing the humanities is a dead end. And though he may have been right a decade ago, the employment landscape is shifting. The strength of humanities majors is that their education is not bound to a particular field or job position, leaving room for a variety of career options.
Across all industries, employers increasingly value skills such as oral and written communication, meaning that career success is not simply dependent not on the major of students, but what transferable skills they developed in their studies. In fact, humanities majors are about as likely as other graduates to work in high-earning fields like management, finance, and sales.
But as universities are forced to cut majors and programs due to limited federal funding, pursuing higher education is no longer a safety net, but a risk that many students cannot afford to take. Students from low-income backgrounds in particular are less likely to be able to commit to a program that might not exist in a few years.
For those that do take the risk, the pressure to succeed has only gotten more intense. “I think that when you put art students and people who are trying to commit their lives to a certain craft under this amount of financial and social pressure, no good art is going to come out of it,” Beardmore says. They think that young artists and students are being sold a false sense of security in higher education at the moment.
Yet, the number of low-income students applying to college is only increasing. However, as tuition rises, some colleges are directing financial aid to higher-income families who can afford to pay at least a portion of the tuition in order to increase revenue. This leaves smaller universities such as Lasell and Simmons at a disadvantage compared to larger private universities with higher endowments that can support themselves. As a result, students from these small colleges—which often enroll a higher number of low income, first-generation, and minority students—are now facing even more financial hardships and instability.
Still, Beardmore does not want their story to deter people from pursuing their passions. “I don’t want to intimidate anybody out of pursuing a career in the arts. I know that my identity and my personhood will always be rooted in my craft, my writing,” they say. “I [just] want young artists to be careful with themselves and with their passion, because if you put that in the wrong place, it can be really sad and heartbreaking.”