Is Indiana University Eliminating 116 Low-Enrollment Degrees? Not Really. But It Should Eliminate Some High-Enrollment Degrees

Indiana University announced it is eliminating 116 degrees, including the Statistics, Earth Sciences, and Computational Linguistics B.S.’s, the Art History, French, Italian, and Portugese B.A.’s, and Classical Studies, Chinese, Comparative Literature, and Journalism M.A.’s.¹ This comes after a state law passed in 2025 that says any college major with less than 5 students per year must be eliminated unless the Indiana Commission on Higher Education votes to continue it. I don’t know if the President of Indiana University is going to make any effort to argue for the non-elimination of any small majors, though the law certainly does not say they must be eliminated.²

Indeed, the law is really a nullity, since the Indiana Commission on Higher Education already must vote to create a major and I suppose it already has the power to eliminate majors too. The law just changes the default for small majors from “continue” if there is no vote to “eliminate” if there is no vote. But the Commission can do what it wants.

I think the legislature voted the new law without knowing what it does and does not do. Not only does it not give the Commission any new powers or remove any old ones, but the elimination of small majors does not necessarily have any real effect. In 2024, IU grants a degree in French. In 2027, IU will grant a degree in Modern Languages with a concentration in French. Those two degrees will have exactly the same course requirements. No faculty or staff will be fired for lack of work. No money will be saved. It is only a matter of labels.³

So Why Do Majors Make a Difference?

I suspect that the reason there are so many majors is that universities like to boast about how many majors they have: “Come to Indiana University, and you can choose from 1,232 different majors!” Some of the majors will only be slightly different from each other, but what prospective student or impressable state legislator will look up the courses to see? But you can’t boast as well about 1,232 tracks.

On the other hand, cutting majors also has boasting value, just for different people. Here, the Trustees can boast, “Look how much money we’re saving. We’ve cut 78 majors from the university! We’re really economizing.” Here at Indiana, it’s the Governor and legislators who can do the boasting. Plus, since they’re Republicans, they can say to the voters, “Look how we’re reforming that evil den of sexual perversion and socialism Indiana University. We cut 78 majors! Take that, IU.” The cut in majors doesn’t save any money, nor does it hurt IU except in its ability to boast, but the voters don’t know that.

At Indiana, there’s something else too: President Pamela Whitten will use the elimination of a major as an excuse for reducing the number of faculty and staff. Perhaps the old French major had a secretary dedicated to it, and two faculty positions. President Pam could have cut the secretary and one faculty even without eliminating the major. But for rhetorical purposes, she might first want to turn it into a French track, and then say that tracks don’t get secretaries and don’t deserve two faculty. That’s just verbiage; the reasoning (to save money) would be the same either way.

An Example of a Useful Small Degree: The M.A., Master of Arts

Labels actually do matter some, so I’ll back up a little. There are certain degrees that are useful labels, in particular, masters’ degrees. In many fields, including my own field of economics, the M.A. is useful as either (a) a bonus for an undergraduate who takes a bunch of PhD courses, or (b) a consolation prize for a PhD student who fails his qualifying exams or doesn’t finish his dissertation. There are no classes specifically for master’s students—they take PhD. classes—so the cost is zero. I, myself, am an example of the first use. As a college student at Yale, I took six or eight PhD courses and wrote a senior essay, so they gave me both B.A. and M.A. in Economics. That meant I was a GS-9 for my job the next summer as an intern at the National Center for Health Statistics Research in Maryland, though it didn’t help for anything else. An example of the second use is my PhD classmate, Robert Barsky. An interesting fellow, he started as a violin student at Juillard before getting a B.S. in math at Michigan, and his achievements were big but erratic. He failed one of the big second-year econ PhD exams twice, so he started writing a master’s thesis for his M.A. When he presented it at a research seminar, though, with all of us students cheering and lobbying for him, it was good that the idea of the M.A. was dropped and he was allowed to continue and finish his Ph.D. He also published that paper, “Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard,” in a Top Three journal with Larry Summers, later to be Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard, as co-author.⁴ His articles are more cited than mine— and I have done pretty well.

Thus, the M.A. provides a way to recognize smart undergrads and to give unsuccessful PhD students recognition for two or three years of successful work even though they didn’t make it through the entire program.

The Real Issue: What Should Students Be Allowed to Concentrate Their Courses In?

The big issue, though, is not which labels are useful, but what courses students are taking. Why are less than 5 students per year majoring in French? This is out of 9,000 undergraduates students per year. My daughter tells me that at her college they also have about 5 French majors per year. That is Hillsdale College though, with 300 students per year. Indiana has 30 times as many students and boasts that it is a research university, not a mere teaching college, yet it can’t get anybody to major in French. And so it is with statistics, earth sciences, and art history. That is the scandal— not that Indiana has eliminated French, but that its French major empty.

Why don’t students major in French? To answer that, let’s first think about why college majors exist at all. Why don’t we let students take whatever courses they want?

A college major is a collection of required and suggested courses that go well together and ensure that the student has a firm foundation, takes some advanced courses, and can’t just take the easiest courses in the college. This last is the most important. If students are allowed to take whatever they want, all of them will take some easy-A, low-effort, fun courses, and some of them will take only easy-A, low-effort, fun courses. If instead we require that they major in something, they must take at least a few-A, high-effort basic courses and a few advanced, high-effort courses. They are still free to take some easy and fun courses, both inside and outside their major, and that’s not a bad thing— a load of 100% calculus, chemistry, ancient Greek, logic, and intensive writing in a semester is too much.

At Indiana, a large fraction of students would like to gain admission to the Kelley School of Business. The Business degree is vocational, but it’s relatively difficult and it teaches students how to think. The most popular major at Indiana University, Finance, is in the Kelley School. The Finance Department has a rule that the average grade in all but the smallest classes must be 3.1 or less, where 2.7 is a B-, 3.0 is a B, and 3.3 is a B+. Students flock to finance anyway because employers know that finance majors have learned something. And even if they don’t take jobs in finance, finance gards can think better than when they were freshmen.

Some majors, though, don’t require any basic few-A, high-effort courses and don’t have any advanced high-effort courses. The material is fluff and the grades are all A’s. This is what happens when a department tries to compete for students to increase its budget. The easiest way to get more money is to attract more students, and the easiest way to attract more students is to give lots of A’s and be easy.⁵ French, or any foreign language, is intrinsically hard. All a French department can do is give out lots of A’s, and since most departments in the university do that, it’s not enough to attract majors. Combining this with the false notion parents have that humanities majors are unemployable and live at home the rest of their life, and we get to fewer than 5 majors per year.⁶

If there were no easy majors, French would have a chance. But there are. And more are being created, even as the traditional majors are being eliminated. At its July 24 meeting when the Commission on Higher Education votes on which old majors to discontinue, it will also need to vote on whether to create three new Bachelor of Science degrees the Trustees approved in June. You might think, “New B.S. degrees, great! IU is starting to emphasize science.” Alas. Here are the three new majors:

Global media is a program for students with an interest in communications and international affairs. Students will develop skills in reporting, media creation, and strategic communication geared toward global audiences.

IU says its new media advertising degree meets a demand for more media advertising classes at its Bloomington campus. The program will prepare students for jobs in advertising, marketing, sales and communications.

Public relations will move from a concentration within the journalism program to a standalone degree. Doing so, the university says, “better serves students who are interested in public relations but not journalism.”

Global Media, Advertising, and Public Relations are replacing Statistics, Computational Linguistics, and Earth Sciences. There will be plenty of demand for these degrees from students. They are easy, they will award lots of A’s, and they sound good for getting jobs, even though they won’t be.

This is where the students who used to major in French have gone. If a college starts to offer a degree in public relations, that means fewer students will get degrees in other majors. The more fluff that is offered, the more staff positions are filled by fluffologists and the less money is left over for real professors.⁷ A degree in public relations is not even a vocational degree. Who would you hire as a P.R. flunky, a P.R. grad or a French grad? A degree in French shows that you’ve at least had the discipline to learn a foreign language and been exposed to a smattering of culture; a degree in P.R. shows you’re good at partying.⁸

The true test of a college major is whether it leaves you a better person than when you started.⁹ Many college majors do that, in their assorted ways. My French-and-English-major daughter majoring in French and English has learned to read, write, and speak in two languages. My German-and-Philosophy daughter learned a different language and a different way to read and write. My Nursing daughter will know how to take care of people when she finishes (already, a friend of hers used her college skills to save the life of an old man who collapsed on the street). And my Materials Engineering son? He, too, is a better person after his college courses. Even if he switched to teaching history, as he might some day, he learned hard work, persistence, and logical thinking, and, since he was in Purdue Engineering, how to avoid despair in failure and how to be content knowing other people are smarter than him. I don’t think you get those things out of a Public Relations major.

I don’t object to vocational degrees if they teach you how to think, but I object if they just leave you as a 22-year-old who knows how to run a machine, or fill out forms, or use AI to write a press release. If a major is difficult and doesn’t have grade inflation, why not let the student follow his interest, whether it be Finance or Classics or Mongolian? But what we need to do is cut out the majors that are not real disciplines and have reputations for being easy. The entire Media School should go, with Journalism retained as part of the the School of Arts and Sciences. The School of Education is not only worthless but marxist, as is true nationwide.¹⁰ I’d take a look at the rigor and politicization of the School of Public Health and the School of Social Work too. With those majors gone, the B.A. in French would have a chance to recover.

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Footnotes

1. The Chicago Tribune editorial whose headline is the image at the top of this Substack is a treaction typical of everyone hearing this.

2. The list of eliminated degrees is here, together with whether they are just being consolidated.. Majors truly eliminated include Portugese, Organizational and Business Psychology, and Fitness and Wellness. The list bears careful reading— you will see that almost all the majors are being “merged”, which means nothing will really change except the word “major” will become '“track”.

3. Most people get fooled into thinking majors matter. See the comments, both pro and con, on Steve McGuire’s excellent X post on Indiana University’s cuts. Majors, departments, and spending are three distinct things. You can have an American Studies major where students take courses from the History and English departments and there is no extra spending. You can have $50 million in spending on Particle Physics research (plus $40 million more the university rakes off the $90 million federal grant) with no Particle Physics major or department. If you divide Biology into two departments, Natural History and Biochemistry departments, you have no new major and no new spending.

4. “Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard,” Robert B. Barsky and Lawrence H. Summers, Journal of Political Economy (1998).

“This paper contributes a new element to the explanation of the Gibson paradox, the puzzling correlation between interest rates and the price level seen during the gold standard period. A shock that raises the underlying real rate of return in the economy reduces the equilibrium relative price of gold and, with the nominal price of gold pegged by the authorities, must raise the price level. The mechanism involves the allocation of gold between monetary and nonmonetary uses. Our explanation helps to resolve some important anomalies in previous work and is supported by empirical evidence along a number of dimensions.”

5. The second-easiest way for a major to grow in size, after A’s and ease, is to make the courses fun. That’s only second easiest because it requires some effort to make a course fun. The professor at least has to pick out some entertaining movies and learn some good jokes. Not all professors are up to that task.

6. Do French majors get jobs? Yes. Everybody gets jobs. They just don’t have employers coming to campus to do job interviews for French majors. Instead, the students must do the jobhunting themselves instead of having their first job handed to them on a silver platter like students in the business school.

7. It is perhaps relevant that President Whitten’s plagiarized PhD dissertation from the University of Kansas is in Communications Studies.

8. Think of the 19th-century idea of an education in the Classics as preparation for life. The student learned to work hard and methodically and how think in an orderly way, even if the material itself was useless. The Chinese and the British both realized this. Classics majors make good managers. See Teng, Ssu-yü. "Chinese influence on the Western examination system: I. Introduction." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 7, no. 4 (1943): 267-312.

9. A traditional liberal education was meant to liberate your mind from the mental walls of childhood by exposing you to to the very different minds of ancient Jews, Greeks, Romans, medieval monks, Protestants, Catholics, atheists, and deists. At the end your own beliefs would be better founded and you would understand other people better. At most universities, however, a modern liberal education is meant to liberate you from the beliefs of your parents and enslave you to the beliefs of your teachers, also teaching you to never never let a new idea into your brain again unless so directed by your superiors. Both kinds of liberal education served to mark you as a member of the elite. Traditional education marked you as a gentleman of the world. Modern education marks you as either a member of the Americn ruling class or one of their domestic servants.

10. “How Ed Schools Became a Menace: They trained an army of bureaucrats who are pushing the academy toward ideological fundamentalism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Lyell Asher (April 8, 2018). See also “Largest teachers’ union labels Trump ‘fascist,’ urges resisting ICE in shocking revelations,” John Ransom, The Heartlander (July 8, 2025):

Notably, the NEA resolution misspelled the word fascism, which some observers may find ironic in light of poor reading scores in public schools around the nation.

In other resolutions, the NEA called Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to deport illegal aliens “kidnapping” and encouraged children to actively organize against law enforcement operations that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared lawful.