Azusa Pacific University announced they’re sunsetting and further reviewing majors in the School of Business.
Over the summer, students within certain majors received an email stating a decision was made to sunset a few majors and minors. (In addition, a few majors and minors are still pending review.) The term “sunset” means to teach out a program so that all current students can get a degree in that area of study, but no new students can enroll.
The majors that have been announced as sunsetting in the School of Business and Management are:
Master of Public Administration
Undergraduate Public Administration
Undergraduate Journalism Major
Undergraduate Journalism Minor
The majors that have been announced as pending review in the School of Business and Management are:
Master of Professional Accountancy, Traditional Track Only
Undergraduate Human Resources and Organizational Development Major
Undergraduate Human Resources and Organizational Development Minor
APU Provost Anita Henck sat down to talk with ZU Media about these decisions.
Starting off, every year APU reviews every program and then every seventh year they pull data to look at patterns of enrollment, faculty publications, and students completing each major.
Henck shared that “APU’s financial challenges began in 2018. And, all of higher education has faced difficulties as is evidenced by deep changes in universities across the country in recent years. Specifically, at APU, some majors have seen growth and others have seen declining enrollments. So, our responsibility has been to carefully review our trends and make key decisions accordingly.”
When Henck stepped into the role in 2023, she announced three projects. The first being the finishing realignment of schools and colleges.
Second, she wanted to figure out a consistent process to determine the viability of programs meaning the financial solvency of programs.
Lastly, she wanted to update general education partly because of the change in enrollment numbers.
“In 2018-2019, we had just under 5,000 undergraduate students. Five years later, in 2023-24, we enrolled just under 2,000 students. This has required us to look at the number of majors and General Education courses we offer so that we can ensure a good learning opportunity for all students. Our General Education program was last updated more than 10 years ago, so the faculty focused on updating the curriculum to enhance the student experience and to scale the offerings to our new enrollment,” Henck said.
Henck partnered with APU’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and they looked at how other universities were sorting out which programs have enough students to be both academically sound and financially viable.
They searched for another set of eyes and landed on a group outside the university called CFO Colleague. (This way they could look more at the student demand and then university cost.)
The team took a deeper dive into every course taught looking at factors like how many students were enrolled in it and how much it cost to run the course.
This was done for courses across 129 programs. The details analyzed in every course included: student tuition, scholarship discounts, and what the faculty member was paid for the course.
Each program’s estimated price had to cover the cost of faculty, dean, president, library, and campus safety. After that, they look at which programs had enough majors and students to have every course filled for each year.
Another important detail that was looked at was which class size would promote the best learning environment and still have enough students to fill the major. They discovered that while a class size of three to four students was not a realistic payoff for the school, a class size of over 100 students would also not be the best learning environment. Instead, the sweet spot seemed to be 10-12 students.
Using the collected data, Henck and her team could see which programs were operating in the red as well as which ones were operating in medium give back (yellow) and which were operating in significant give back to the university (green).
The CFO found that 29 of 129 were in the red. These were called into high level of review since it wasn’t profitable. Twenty-two courses were in low review; meaning it met or exceeded the threshold of what it cost for all the overhead staff, faculty, and material. That left 78 in the middle.
The programs in high level of review led to a few courses of action. Some were put as cease to admit, implying that the school cannot keep pouring money into a program that is not full of students. While for other programs, the decision was made that they would continue the program but reduce faculty, staff or other ways of spending.
There were many programs that had well under 14 students, meaning 3.5 students per year on average. Henck said, “To ensure an optimal classroom experience, we want to ensure that the number of majors and GE courses are proportionate to our enrollment size, while poised for growth. Thus we continue to monitor our offerings, in the context of what is the optimal academic portfolio.”
For programs yet to be sunsetted but marred with a red flag, if there continues to be a very small demand, then one solution may be to combine programs.
While in the present moment these decisions have been anxiety inducing for some, at the end of the day, Provost Henck believes they were made to benefit the student body long term.
Programs shift and grow as does the world. This is not an easy thing for any provost to do, let alone in their first year. Henck assures all she is very dedicated to the growth of APU and wants to focus on what we do really well.
She states, “I feel really good about the program viability process the University developed in collaboration with outside experts, It had good integrity and was rooted in enrollment and financial data, as well as faculty workloads. While hard decisions needed to be made, they were done carefully. The CFO and I met individually with leaders of every program that was on high review to explain the process and their program’s data. Our commitment to the integrity of the process continues.”
Still, some students say they feel there was a lack of transparency about what was happening behind the curtain. Affected students have discussed that had they known their program was going down hill, they may have transferred. Another frustration included having to pay full tuition without getting fully educated in their major. This was a concern since several major related courses were consistently canceled due to low class enrollment.
Related to this, when specialized equipment for certain programs were brought up, Henck said she was unaware of the TV news equipment in Darling 409, which hasn’t consistently been used across semesters. When it comes to equipment there is an annual review, and there are steps to have shared equipment between programs to be moved between campuses.
While students might have felt left in the dark, APU is taking steps so their employees can best handle issues as sensitive as faculty layoffs. If faculty are not going to be renewed for the next year, they have to be notified by January 31. However, Henck is very committed to ensuring faculty will be notified in November if their programs are at risk and therefore potentially their jobs.
Through it all, Henck continues to say “When program changes or closures affect the number of faculty and staff required, we treat faculty and staff that are not renewed with adequate notice and dignity. And, always, they are eligible to apply for other APU openings for which they have expertise.”