University to Cut 93 Programs, Including 55 With No Enrolled Majors

Of the 93 academic programs Syracuse University announced it will close or pause following a year-long portfolio review, 55 had not a single declared major at the time the decision was made. The figure cuts against any simple enrollment-driven explanation for the cuts: more than half the programs being eliminated were, in formal terms, already empty.

Vice Chancellor, Provost and Chief Academic Officer Lois Agnew announced the restructuring in a campus-wide email, the culmination of a review she launched in August 2025. Deans across Syracuse's 13 schools and colleges spent the fall semester evaluating their programs using nine years of enrollment data, financial metrics, and course and faculty records before submitting recommendations. The result was a reduction of roughly one in five of the university's 460 total academic offerings.

The 258 students currently enrolled in paused or closed programs, about 1.2 percent of Syracuse's total student body, will be allowed to finish their degrees. Deans will work individually with faculty to develop teach-out plans and curriculum transitions. No faculty positions have been identified for elimination, Agnew wrote, though that language leaves the door open.

The cuts fall most visibly on the College of Arts and Sciences, where nine undergraduate majors will be fully eliminated: Classical Civilization, Classics, Digital Humanities, Fine Arts, German, Latino-Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Modern Jewish Studies, and Russian. Three additional majors, African American Studies, Music History and Cultures, and Religion, will be "re-envisioned," a term the university has not yet defined in concrete terms.

At an October University Senate meeting, Agnew put the rationale plainly. "We cannot maintain so many programs with such low enrollment while effectively meeting our students' needs," she said. Professor Zak Braiterman of Modern Jewish Studies pushed back, describing the cuts as evidence of the university's "lack of dedication to the humanities." A faculty census presented at the same senate body found that SU lost 44 faculty members between 2024 and 2025, most of them non-tenured.

The financial pressure behind the restructuring is not abstract. International student enrollment in Syracuse's incoming class dropped from 12 percent in 2023 to 5 percent more recently, a steep revenue loss at a university where international undergraduates pay full tuition of $66,580 per year. Agnew has described the university as currently financially stable, but she has warned that continuing without structural change poses longer-term risks.

Syracuse is a prominent but not isolated case in a national consolidation wave. Facing what demographers call the enrollment cliff, projecting 5 to 10 percent declines in freshman class sizes beginning in 2025 and 2026, institutions across the country are compressing their academic portfolios. The University of Chicago moved to pause or reduce doctoral admissions in more than a dozen humanities and language departments for the 2026-27 academic year. Fitch Ratings issued a "deteriorating" sector outlook for higher education heading into 2026. A survey by Cengage Group found more than half of administrators and faculty reported eliminating or restructuring low-enrollment programs, with humanities and social sciences departments absorbing the largest share of cuts.

What the 55 programs with no enrolled majors actually represent is harder to quantify. Some may have served certificate students, minors, or graduate tracks without generating declared undergrad majors. Others may have been quietly hollowed out over years before any formal review caught up to them. Either way, the final tally of 93 closures makes visible something universities rarely advertise: the distance between what gets listed in a catalog and what an institution is genuinely prepared to sustain.