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Recently, Marymount--a small Catholic university in Arlington, Virginia--has been in the news for a draconian plan to eliminate a number of majors, ostensibly to better meet student demand. I recently learned the university leadership has been circulating one of my charts to justify the decision, so I thought I'd chime in on the context a bit. My understanding of the situation, primarily informed…
Recently, Marymount--a small Catholic university in Arlington,
Virginia--has been in the news for a draconian plan to eliminate a
number of majors, ostensibly to better meet student demand. I recently
learned the university leadership has been circulating one of my charts
to justify the decision, so I thought I'd chime in on the context a bit.
My understanding of the situation, primarily informed by the coverage in
[ARLNow](https://www.arlnow.com/tag/marymount-university/), is this
seems like bad plan,[^1] so I thought I'd take a quick look at the
university's situation.
Not knowing much about Marymount, I thought I'd first check how low the
major numbers actually are. Here's the list of all the majors that
Marymount reported to [IPEDS](https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/) from
2017-2021. Majors proposed for removal are in blue. The largest group
are Nursing majors; the next largest are general business, a category
that has stagnated. The two largest majors in what used to be called the
"Liberal Arts" are psychology and biology; arrows show change from the
2005-2015 period to the 2017-2021 period.
A few things jump out at me here.
1. The proposed cut majors are doing perfectly well. The annual numbers
in history have declined only about 15%; that's significantly better
than most history programs. The sociology program, slated for
removal, has actually grown.
2. If you want to cut a major at Marymount, you should cut Liberal Arts
and Sciences/Liberal Studies. It has declined greatly, it provides no
benefit over any specific course of study, and it's where a number of
the students that would have majored in the majors slated for removal
are likely to go. This does them no good; general liberal arts
degrees tend to be a characteristic of community colleges looking to
set students up to complete a major inside of two years if they move
to a four-year institution, but for a four-year degree they're just
dead weight.
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{.caption}
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Majors at Marymount
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The first point is especially important--there doesn't seem to be
anything particularly low about these numbers. Universities routinely
offer majors that graduate fewer than 10 students a year. Marymount
itself has several other ones. Let's compare to some peers. Marymount
offered 3,223 degrees from 2016-2021. Let's make a group of other
schools that are private, offer MAs but not many PhDs (that is, are
Carnegie class Masters 1 and Masters 2), and granted between 3000 and
3500 degrees over the same period.[^2]
Looking at this, it's clear that Marymount's major numbers are not in
any way remarkable; making cuts of these majors in the context of
national trends is a wildly speculative gamble on the university's
character that other comparable places aren't doing. I don't know the
specific finances, but from a positioning standpoint, Marymount is
making a peculiar choice. The school in this bucket with the weakest
humanities programs is the evangelical Oral Roberts University; for a
Catholic school to aspire to supplant them is uninspiring, to say the
least.
{#majors-since-2016-at-marymount-and-similar-schools}
## Majors since 2016 at Marymount and similar schools
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{.caption}
:::
Math, Religion, English, and History degrees.
:::
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{.caption}
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Sociology, Philosophy, and Fine/Studio arts degrees.
:::
:::
[^1]: From a PR perspective, among other things--if I had heard of
Marymount before this, I forgot; but now it's widely known for
advertising that it's in financial peril by executing a plan that is
unlikely to save it any significant amount of money, which is not a
great way to attract talented students or retain talented employees.
Bryan Alexander, the 'futurist' who apparently showed my Twitter
chart to some set of Catholic universities, uses the phrase ["Queen
Sacrifice"](https://bryanalexander.org/higher-education/another-queen-sacrifice-might-be-in-the-works-this-time-in-virginia/)
to describe cutting a department to save a university; what
Marymount's doing, cutting the majors while retaining the
departments, seems to be just folly.
[^2]: All the data and charts for this post, including national degree
numbers, are in an Observable Notebook
[here](https://observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/marymount-degrees).Read on benschmidt.org ↗
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