South Carolina Takes Out Higher Ed’s Trash

My wife, daughter, and I walk through our neighborhood every day. I’ve been monitoring the situation at one house for the last few years—the yard is usually clogged with old furniture, chairs, sofas, lamps, and every other type of regularly discarded household item imaginable. In recent months, a dumpster has been parked in the yard instead. That dumpster contains the contents formerly strewn across the yard. It appears, upon closer inspection, that the mass inside the dumpster continues to grow. The root problem (hoarding) remains unsolved, even as the symptom (the hoard) is slowly managed. 

There are some, however, who defend hoarding. For instance, there is a strand of conservatism that describes its philosophy as the accretion of wisdom over time. Museums, similarly, are repositories for numerous items from the past. What separates the conservative and the museum from the hoarder? Wisdom and the willingness to be selective—in other words, to play the gatekeeper. Accretion can be a good thing, but only if one throws out the bathwater without the baby. Universities’ degree offerings, under the guise of institutional conservatism, resemble the hoarder’s maze more than a well-curated museum. 

Universities retain far too many degree programs, which leads to ballooning faculty, office space, and ultimately tuition. For the last few years, the South Carolina General Assembly has given funding to state colleges and universities to keep tuition from rising. Generally, that funding came with few strings attached. 

That is no longer the case. For fiscal year 2027, legislators passed Budget Proviso 117.149, which gives funding for another round of tuition mitigation. This time, however, South Carolina is requiring colleges to review their academic programs. The Proviso also empowers the Commission on Higher Education to produce a report detailing recent program approvals and terminations, as well as listing programs that colleges continued after the Commission recommended termination. Simply put, the legislature is requiring colleges to review their majors with an eye towards eliminating underperforming programs. Because this was passed as a budget proviso, colleges will lose funding if they do not participate in the reviews.

This Proviso has already borne fruit at South Carolina State University, as the school’s Board of Trustees recently announced that nine majors have been cut from the list of offerings, including business education, professional surveying, and technology teacher education. Moreover, it appears that the legislative effort only bolstered the new president’s desire to trim the school’s offerings. 

That said, there is one major implementation concern. More specifically, the Proviso is a reactive rather than a proactive policy. Trimming old degree programs is one thing, but the real work is needed in the gatekeeping function. It’s much simpler to never let a program out of the gate than it is to close a program that has a narrow but highly invested constituency of professors and single-digit student populations. Many of these degrees, as evidenced by SC State’s recent efforts, are in the education field. Not only do colleges of education produce new degrees with the zealotry of a Catholic rabbit, but the syllabi are also littered with inane ideologies that ill-prepare students to become teachers.  

Legislators should thus extend their efforts a step further and focus on the proliferation of minors—even if colleges reform their major program offerings, one can obtain a minor in any number of obscure and unhelpful fields—Race, Ethnicity and Migration at Clemson, Social Justice at Coastal Carolina, Social Welfare at Winthrop University, to name a few.  Meanwhile, at the University of South Carolina, there are more minor programs on the books than there are courses available to satisfy the minor requirements.  

The concern is that, in requiring colleges to trim their programs, they’ll simply have more space in their ledger to platform and fund new trendy degrees—one need only imagine the combinations higher educrats can dream up: Master of Artificial Intelligence in Education, Indigenous Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence, Underwater Basket Weaving and Artificial Intelligence. It’s only a matter of time before parody becomes reality and schools actually offer a “studies studies” major. These are fads and trends, and they are intellectually unserious, but they signify a real concern. Until we conquer the program proliferation problem, our efforts to cull the hoard of majors and minors will fail.

The South Carolina legislature’s attempt to review academic majors is a good first step. However, it should expand the proviso next year to require a more intense vetting process. Otherwise, the dumpster on the lawn will simply overflow, making a mess of everything…again.

Robert Cathcart is president and CEO of the South Carolina Policy Council.