Rural students enrolled at regional public universities are facing declining opportunities as their underfunded colleges slash majors. While many colleges are seeing declining enrollments with fewer college-aged young people in the population, under-resourced rural schools are particularly hard hit:
... most of the cuts have occurred at regional public universities, which get considerably less money from their states — about $1,100 less, per student, than flagships — even as they educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools. These kinds of schools are also more likely than other kinds of institutions to enroll students from lower-income families and who are the first in their families to go to college.
How we fund higher education is a policy choice, and policy makers in too many states have decided that low-income/first-generation students will have access to only a narrow set of college majors as they cut humanities and arts and languages.
As one professor who has been fighting these cuts says:
“We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”
