Mississippi Today
‘Easy to just write us off’: Rural students’ options shrink as colleges slash majors

This story was co-published with Open Campus, The Hechinger Report, and The Washington Post
CLEVELAND, Miss. — With no car and a toddler, Shamya Jones enrolled this fall at the four-year university in her small town in Mississippi — Delta State University.
She planned to major in digital media arts, but before she could start, the college eliminated that major, along with 20 other degree programs including history, English, chemistry and music.
“They’re cutting off so much, and teachers [are] leaving,” Jones said. The cuts “take away from us, our education.”
Across the country, rural students like Jones are feeling short-changed and frustrated.
Many of the comparatively few universities that serve rural students are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors, blaming plummeting enrollment and resulting financial crises. Nationwide, college enrollment has declined by 2 million students, or 10 percent, in the 10 years ending in 2022, hitting rural schools particularly hard. An increasing number of rural private, nonprofit colleges are not only cutting majors, but closing altogether.
“We are asking rural folks to accept a set of options that folks in cities and suburbs would never accept,” said Andrew Koricich, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “It’s almost like, ‘Well, this is what you get to learn, and this is how you get to learn it. And if you don’t like it, you can move.’ ”
For many rural students, there are already few places to go. About 13 million people live in higher education “deserts,” the American Council on Education estimates, mostly in the Midwest and Great Plains, where the nearest university is beyond a reasonable commute away.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen private, nonprofit universities and colleges that are in rural areas or serve large proportions of rural students have closed since 2020, data show.
“It is creating a second class of people to say, ‘You pay your taxes just like everybody else does. You vote like everybody else does. But you just can’t have the same choices as everybody else, because there aren’t enough of you here,’” Koricich said of the cuts. “In a lot of rural places, the idea of choice is sort of a fiction,” he said.
Rural-serving institutions are defined by the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, or ARRC, which Koricich directs, as those located in counties classified as rural and not near a metropolitan area.
Even some flagship universities that serve rural communities are making big cuts. West Virginia University this fall began the process of eliminating 28 undergraduate and graduate majors and programs, including most foreign languages and graduate programs in math and public administration. The University of Montana is phasing out or has frozen more than 30 certificate, undergraduate and graduate degree programs and concentrations. A course review is also underway at branch campuses of Pennsylvania State University due to declining enrollment.
But 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, the ARRC calculates. Regional institutions educate 70 percent of undergraduates who go to public four-year schools, according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. These campuses 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, the Baltimore-based Art & Science Group consulting firm found.
St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is cutting 42 degree programs, for example, including criminal justice, gerontology, history, electrical and environmental engineering, economics and physics. The University of Alaska System has scaled back more than 40 programs since 2020, including earth sciences, geography and environmental resources and hospitality administration. Also during that period, Henderson State University in Arkansas dropped 25 and. Emporia State University in Kansas cut, merged or downgraded around 40 undergraduate and graduate majors, minors and concentrations.
The State University of New York at Fredonia is dropping 13 majors. SUNY Potsdam is cutting chemistry, physics, philosophy, French, Spanish and four other programs. The University of North Carolina Asheville is discontinuing religious studies, drama, philosophy and concentrations in French and German.
Related: In this shrinking Mississippi Delta county, getting a college degree means leaving home behind
“Some institutions have no other options” than to do this, because of financial problems and plummeting enrollment, said Charles Welch, president and CEO of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and a former president of Henderson State and the Arkansas State University System, both of which have cut programs.
At Delta State, for instance, enrollment is down by nearly a quarter since 2014.
A drop in tuition revenue stemming from that decline created an $11 million hole in the university’s budget, President Daniel Ennis told the campus last year. When Ennis got to Delta State, he also found the university was overestimating its revenue from facilities and merchandise.

“At a certain point there’s going to be less of everything — personnel, money, equipment and opportunities — because we have to rightsize the budget,” Ennis said.
But the American Association of University Professors, which represents faculty, said in a 2021 report that problems such as enrollment drops made worse by the pandemic are being exploited by administrators to close programs “as expeditiously as if colleges and universities were businesses whose CEOs suddenly decided to stop making widgets or shut down the steelworks.”
Welch said schools are often simply trying to reduce program duplication among campuses in the same systems and compensate for having less financial support than flagship universities.
“The challenge that our institutions have is that they tend to be lower resourced than institutions in urban areas, or flagship institutions. They can’t rely on big endowments,” Welch said. The pandemic, he said, “threw a whole additional layer on top of what those institutions were already facing.”
Many of the majors affected are in the humanities and languages, making those disciplines less available to rural students than they are to people who live in urban and suburban areas.
These subjects “do much of the work of helping students dream beyond their realities,” said Michael Theune, who chairs the English Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, a private, nonprofit school that has also eliminated majors. “We are paring down the sense of the vastness of our world and the possibilities of university students to experience it differently.”
Some rural-serving public universities and public universities in largely rural states have now undergone repeated rounds of cuts. Youngstown State University in Ohio, for instance, axed Italian, religious studies and other majors in 2021, then six more this year. In all, more than 25 programs have now been eliminated there, many of them in the humanities.
The university, in a message to the campus, pointed out that there were no students at all in 10 of those majors. But students and faculty say it was still important to offer them.

“It is easy to just write us off as, ‘Oh, well, do they really need that school?’ when there are so many other majors,” said Owen Bertram, a senior theater major whose program has so far escaped the cuts. “But I don’t think it’s that simple.”
Bertram, who is also student government representative for the university’s College of Creative Arts, said it’s hard to watch his classmates who wanted to study humanities struggle with the questions, “Do I stay?” “Do I leave?” “Is it worth it?”
At many of the schools, it’s too early to tell if the program cuts will lead to even lower enrollment. In some cases, however, enrollment has continued to decline. At Emporia State, enrollment is down by 14 percent in the two years since about 40 majors were eliminated there.
These cuts come at a time when the proportion of rural high school graduates going to college is falling. Fifty-five percent enroll right after high school, down from 61 percent in 2016, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That’s a lower rate than the national average.
Low-income and Black students are disproportionately impacted by program cuts. The University of North Carolina Greensboro, for example, is in the process of phasing out 20 degree programs, including anthropology and physics. More than half the students are low income and 28 percent are Black, according to the state university system.

“UNCG should be a place where anyone should be able to come and get an affordable education in whatever they want,” said Holly Buroughs, a physics major who started a petition protesting the cuts.
“Is a first-gen student like me going to come next year and not see the UNCG that I fell in love with and the opportunities I had?” asked Azariah Journey, a second-year graduate student in history who comes from a rural town in Kentucky.

Related: A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’
Dominick Bellipanni is one of the last remaining music students at Delta State as the department is being phased out. He received a scholarship to study piano, which he isn’t sure he would have gotten at the state’s larger, more competitive universities.
Bellipanni is from Indianola, a once-busy crossroad 30 minutes from the university, where he grew up hearing stories about businesses that once operated there but closed.

“Used to be, used to be, used to be,” he remembered people telling him.
Now he’s hearing that again.
His professors talk about how there used to be more music recitals, more scholarships, more money, said Bellipanni, who said he plans to leave the Mississippi Delta when he graduates.
“All you hear is, ‘We used to have this, because we used to have more students.’ ”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.
This story about rural college majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on strengthening local coverage of higher education. Reporters in the Open Campus Local Network contributed: Mississippi Today’s Molly Minta, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson and Signal Ohio’s Amy Morona
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1944

Feb. 9, 1944

Alice Walker, novelist and poet, was born the eighth child born to sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia.
During her youth, she was accidentally blinded in one eye, and her mother gave her a typewriter, which enabled her to write. She studied at Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, receiving a scholarship to study in Paris. She turned it down to go instead in 1965 to Mississippi, where she joined the civil rights movement.
Part of her work involved taking depositions of sharecroppers, who like her parents had been thrown off the land. She and her husband, civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal, married in New York in March 1967, and when they returned to Mississippi four months later, they became the first legally married interracial couple in the state, where interracial marriage was still illegal.
They persevered through death threats, working together on the movement. Leventhal served as lead counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Walker taught history to Head Start students and became pregnant.
Grief overcame her after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and she lost her unborn child. She continued to teach, showing students at Tougaloo College and Jackson State University how poetry could be used in activism.
After moving to New York, she finished her novel, “Meridian,” which describes the coming of age of civil rights workers during the movement. In 1983, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel “The Color Purple,” which has since been adapted in both a movie and a Broadway and movie musical. She has continued to champion racial and gender equality in her writing and her life.
“Activism,” she explained, “is the rent I pay for living on the planet.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1968

Feb. 8, 1968

Students Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Henry Ezekial Smith and Delano Herman Middleton were shot and killed by state troopers who fired on demonstrators at the South Carolina State College campus in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Fifty were also wounded in the confrontation with highway patrolmen at the rally supporting civil rights protesters.
The students had been protesting at the All-Star Bowling Lane, which refused to serve the Black students. When police arrested protesters, chaos ensued, and police began beating protesters with billy clubs, sending eight students to the hospital. Angry at what had taken place, students set a bonfire in front of the campus. When authorities showed up to put out the fire, one officer was injured by an object thrown from the crowd.
State troopers began firing their guns at the unarmed protesters, killing two students, Hammond and Smith, as well as Middleton, a high school student who was simply sitting on the steps of the freshman dormitory, waiting for his mother.
The governor tried to blame “outside agitators” for what happened, but the federal government brought excessive force charges against the nine troopers. The jury acquitted the troopers, who claimed they acted in self-defense.
In contrast, a jury did convict activist Cleveland Sellers of a riot charge in connection with the bowling alley protests, and he was forced to serve seven months in prison.
The violence became known as the Orangeburg Massacre, foreshadowing the shootings that followed at Kent State University and Jackson State University.
The on-campus arena has since been renamed in honor of the slain students. Jack Bass, the co-author of the “Orangeburg Massacre,” which details the slayings, has called for South Carolina to do something similar to what Florida did with regard to the Rosewood Massacre — award money to surviving children and college scholarships to grandchildren.
“Perhaps,” he wrote, “it is time now for South Carolina to clear its conscience.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House unanimously passes bill to make kratom 21+


The Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday to limit kratom purchases to people 21 and older and to ban synthetic kratom products, also known as kratom extracts.
It’s one of four pending bills addressing kratom in the Legislature. Two bills impose an age limit on purchasing the substance, while the other two make kratom or kratom extracts a controlled substance.
Critics of the herbal substance, which is commonly found in gas stations and tobacco or vape shops, say it is a highly addictive and dangerous drug that produces stimulant- and opioid-like effects. But advocates argue it is an effective tool for treating opioid use disorder, chronic pain and depression.

“It’s one of those things that needs to have a fence around it in order to protect not only those that take it but also those who are affected by those that take it,” said Business and Commerce Chair Rep. Lee Yancey, R-Brandon. “And currently there is no fence.”
HB1077, authored by Yancey, will require people to show proof of age when purchasing kratom and require retailers to keep the product behind the counter. It institutes fines for people under 21 who buy kratom and retailers that sell the product to them.
It also outlaws synthetic kratom extracts, or products that contain high concentrations of 7-hydroxymitragynine, one of the chemical components in kratom that binds to the same receptors in the brain as opioids, like codeine.
The bill passed in the house unanimously with a vote of 115-0. It now advances to the Senate.
A similar bill in the House authored by Judiciary B Chair Rep. Kevin Horan, R-Grenada, would impose the same regulations and levy a 5% tax on kratom products. Rep. Yancey said he plans to bring this legislation to the floor for consideration.
More than thirty counties and cities in Mississippi restrict or ban kratom products at the local level.
Two other bills in the Legislature this year seek to make forms of kratom a Schedule III controlled substance, which would institute criminal penalties for possession and make it available only with a prescription from a licensed health care provider.
Penalties for small amounts of Schedule III drugs in Mississippi include a maximum of one year in jail or a $1,000 maximum fine. Other Schedule III drugs include benzodiazepines, ketamine and steroids.
A bill in the Senate authored by Drug Policy Chair Sen. Angela Turner-Ford, D-West Point, would schedule only synthetic kratom products, while a bill in the House by Drug Policy Chair Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes, R-Picayune, would schedule all forms of the drug, including pure leaf forms.
Turner-Ford said she does not support banning all forms of kratom, given that it is a naturally occurring plant. Hobgood-Wilkes said there are many natural substances that are dangerous.
Hobgood-Wilkes said she believes bills solely to restrict kratom to consumers 21 and older don’t go far enough.
Yancey said he supports scheduling the substance, but has grown frustrated by unsuccessful attempts to ban the drug in years past.
“This year I’ve decided that getting 50% of what I want is better than getting 0% of what I want,” he said.
Dr. Jennifer Bryan, the president of the Mississippi Medical Association, urged lawmakers to schedule kratom as a controlled substance at a House Drug Policy hearing Jan. 28, given its highly addictive qualities.
“This is what the next phase of the opioid crisis looks like,” she said.
State Health Officer Dr. Dan Edney said he supports making the drug a Schedule III drug because it would remove kratom from stores but impose relatively small penalties on people who possess the drug.
He pointed to the success of lawmakers designating tianeptine, another substance sold in gas stations and used to treat depression, a Schedule III drug in 2023.
“I personally have not seen a case of tianeptine since the ban last year, except one case that got it from Louisiana,” he told lawmakers Jan. 28.
Christina Dent, an advocate who opposes a criminal justice approach to drugs and addiction, said banning kratom entirely would harm people who are using kratom as a tool to stop using opioids or for other health conditions, and create a dangerous underground market for the substance.
“Banning kratom and putting people in jail who use it will lead to more crime, more health problems, and more families destabilized by incarceration,” she said.
She said she supports bills that restrict the sale of kratom to young people and ban the sale of synthetic kratom products.
This is not the first time the Legislature has sought to regulate or ban kratom. The House passed a bill in 2022 to make kratom a Schedule I drug and a bill in 2023 to ban kratom extracts. Both died in the Senate.
Yancey said passage of a bill to regulate kratom this year will depend on the Senate’s appetite for such legislation.
“The Senate needs to step up and do their part,” he said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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