Indiana's new policy requires bachelor's majors to have at least 15 completions or get cut. Most public colleges there have few majors meeting the threshold, forcing specialization. Jeff Salengo predicted 2025 would be the year colleges stop trying to be everything to everybody.
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I'm going to take a look today at the 2025 College Majors Completion app, and I'm going to do it on the state of Indiana, and I'm going to do it for public colleges in the state of Indiana. Here's why. And Matt, you and I spoke about this last week, is the state of Indiana, effective July 1st, gave colleges a minimum number of bachelor degree graduation rates per major, or they have to cut those programs. And Matt, as we discussed last week, it's 15. And I brought up all the publics in Indiana, and I'm just going to briefly highlight a few of those. But the point I want to make, Matt, is how many of these colleges are going to have to cut back significant numbers of programs because they come nowhere close to having 15 majors in a given area. And again, we talked— you'll recall we talked last week, Texas has a similar mindset. Their numbers are different, but we're now starting to see public colleges so far having minimums for graduation rates. And the College Majors Completion app is the only tool I'm aware of that integrates, uh, so almost 3,000, 2,700+ public and private colleges and looks at the number of majors completions across 64 different majors. And you can see in Indiana there's 54 different majors covered of the 64 we have in the app for 15 colleges. But just look, Indiana Eastford Kokomo, they, they have 2 that go beyond 15. I'll go out to 2025, they have 3 that go beyond 15. And we can scroll through that and look at all this. It's Northwest. Let's look at something that's not a directional school. Fort Wayne, Purdue Fort Wayne, look at all these programs both in 2020 and even out into 2023 that don't have anything close to that. And Matt, the reason I bring that up, Indiana State Now again, some diversity here. You see some strong programs, but look at the number that don't even come close to that 15. So Matt, it will be interesting to see if colleges— first of all, states stick with this because you know there's going to be pushback, and there already has been pushback. But it's, it could be an interesting moment because as you and I've talked before, and Jeff Salengo was one who highlighted this, and I've shared this many times, he believes 2025 is the year when colleges, most colleges quit being able to be everything to anybody. And I think we're seeing that in the state of Indiana. We're seeing that in the state of Texas and maybe other states as well for looking at programs and majors and saying, hey, we can't afford to be everything for everybody. Your thoughts?
No, I think that's right. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see is like some of the unintended consequences could be, you know, you push more people to the flagship institution and then the Maybe the flagship institution can't handle all those folks in those majors that have been cut at the regionals.
Yeah.
Yeah. Not, it's not clear to me that that will necessarily save money for the state, but it might if it's more efficient to do it at the flagship, but maybe the flagships don't let them in. Like, I don't know, there's a lot of unintended consequences that we'll see how they shake out. But yeah, certainly for the privates. Yeah, the finances, unless you have a donor supporting a specific program, it becomes an issue of, you know, what's the net tuition revenue versus the costs for a program more than it was in the past. So yeah, certainly going to be on folks' mind going forward.
