"Higher education's new financial crisis has begun," Michael T. Nietzel, former president of Missouri State University, warned in Forbes, "and it may last a long time." The latest round of announcements across American campuses suggests he was right — and that the crisis is deepening faster than most institutions anticipated.
In just the past two weeks, a fresh wave of faculty layoffs, program eliminations, and institutional restructurings has swept across public and private universities from Oregon to New York. The causes are familiar by now: declining enrollment, stagnant state funding, rising operating costs, and the mounting pressure of federal research funding cuts pursued by the Trump administration. The scale, however, is becoming harder to ignore.
