It’s quiet at Monmouth College in early August, except for the occasional buzzing of a lawnmower and birdsong ringing from towering oaks on the front lawn of Wallace Hall.
Soon there will be other sounds at the home of the Fighting Scots, a private liberal arts college founded in 1853 by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians – bagpipes, football practice, and students moving into their residence halls.
This year’s incoming class will have around 40 more students than last year’s, with a couple dozen of them coming to Monmouth for a brand-new, 3+1 nursing program in collaboration with OSF HealthCare – and more than 60% of this year’s class coming to Monmouth as Division III student athletes.
Monmouth President Patricia Draves said the college would like to see enrollment reach the high 800s in the next three or four years, with slow, controlled growth of an additional 50 students per year.
“We’re trying to be realistic, too,” Draves said. “Because it’s easy to put a number on a spreadsheet and say, okay, we can do this. But in a declining demographic, what's realistic?”
Colleges and universities across the country are facing the combined pressures of shifting student demographics, declining enrollment, and skepticism about the value of higher education.
Against that backdrop, Monmouth is phasing out ten majors primarily in the humanities and social sciences and enhancing other programs based on student interest and market demand, following a months-long academic program prioritization process. Six faculty positions are being eliminated as part of the academic restructuring.
Draves said these changes were not implemented to eliminate a predetermined amount of money from the operating budget – and she said the changes do not mean that Monmouth College is closing.
But the academic prioritization process is meant to align expenses and revenue and to strategically allocate resources for a college’s long-term health. In Monmouth’s case, it was meant to help the college embrace its identity amid that challenging higher education landscape.
“Schools that are not doing this work are trying to kick the can down the road. It's going to catch up to them,” Draves said.
A group of concerned alumni who say they benefitted from humanities courses at Monmouth College is circulating a petition to save those programs.
They say they're concerned about maintaining the institution’s longstanding commitment to the liberal arts.
Changing interests
Draves is a cancer researcher who taught chemistry at Monmouth from 2002 to 2006, when enrollment was growing, reaching 1,379 students in 2009. More recently, enrollment at Monmouth has been in the lower 700s, driven in part by what Draves calls “non-consumers” of higher education.
“Over the last ten years, we have not seen anything like this, just the number of students not going to college at all,” Draves said.
Draves said students’ needs and interests are changing, too. She said millennials wanted new dorms and climbing walls and fancy food in the cafeteria. But current college students grew up in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. They are pragmatic, socially conscious, and they don’t want to go into debt.
“Gen Z-ers care about relationships. They ask about the support. They're aware they need mental health services and development,” Draves said. “They're asking for more of those pieces and an environment that offers that.”
When Mark Willhardt came back to Monmouth in 2000 to teach in the English department, as his father did for 35 years, the college had strongly rebounded from the early 1990s, when enrollment dropped to under 600 students.
“We were putting up buildings. We were putting up dorms. The faculty was growing. The student body was beginning to grow. We were putting on programs,” Willhardt said. “And it was not just Monmouth. You could see it across all of higher ed. I think most of us didn't look much beyond 2010, 2012, because we figured that it would just keep going that way.”
Willhardt became Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs in 2018. He said the city of Monmouth has changed and the college’s place in the community has changed over the years, too. He also sees generational differences in faculty coming on campus.
“They’re prioritizing lives in different ways. So they’re choosing a work-life balance that is different than previous generations have done,” he said. “That means the ways in which we're conceiving of work on campus is changing. “
‘Voting with their feet’
Draves became Monmouth College’s 15th President last year, after seven years as President of Graceland University in Iowa. Prior to that, she was Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Mount Union University in Ohio.
Draves was tasked by the board of trustees at the beginning of this year to undertake the academic prioritization process. Draves said she could not find evidence that Monmouth had ever previously conducted a similar process to holistically evaluate its portfolio of academic programs.
Draves led the academic prioritization task force, which also included Willhardt and faculty members in different disciplines and other administrators. Three members of the board of trustees also served as non-voting advisors to the task force.
The task force first created guiding principles for their work, then gathered data to investigate three main areas for each academic program. That included program quality – based on everything from external reviews, department narratives, and student evaluations – as well as economic sustainability and market demand.
“There was a group that looked at market, trying to think about what an external market would be for these programs, what's the demand? Are students interested? How do we know? Looking at admissions funnels, beginning to think about that,” Willhardt said. “Then there was an economics group that was looking at the per course, per program, down to per FTE sorts of contributions to the overall.”
After months of data analysis and difficult discussions, the task force delivered its recommendations. A number of programs – including business, marketing, data science, nursing, exercise science, and elementary education – are now programs the college plans to grow and invest in.
Others – like accounting, English, math, physics, music, and theatre – are in the maintain category, though they will undergo some changes. And ten “low-demand” majors for the rural liberal arts college, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, are being phased out. That includes majors such as history, anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, environmental studies, and Spanish.
Durable skills
Willhardt said these “low-demand” programs at Monmouth reflect national trends.
“We have seen the humanities dwindle, not because we haven't had talented people in some good programs, but because students are just less and less interested in pursuing them when they come in. Even if our faculty are good at talking about jobs thereafter, they just don't see them,” he said.
The majors being phased out represent 7% of current and incoming students. Those students will be able to finish their degrees at Monmouth. Meanwhile, fields like data science, computer science, and human services are emerging as areas of potential growth at Monmouth.
Willhardt said the prioritization process was about “getting rational.”
“Looking at our student body and saying, okay, these are the things that they’re really interested in. Also, these are the things we think they need at this moment,” Willhardt said. “They need a liberal arts background. They may not be being served by all those programs on the books. Even if they were ones that have been here for a long time, the truth is that they had been voting with their feet for a while on those programs.”
But a liberal arts college without a history major? A Presbyterian college that doesn’t offer a religious studies major?
Willhardt said there’s no list of programs required to be a liberal arts college.
"We are still going to offer history courses. We are still going to offer philosophy courses and religious studies courses. They are still going to be part of what we do. I think that's a misconception. People think that we've eliminated the program, and so we're just going to stop teaching those. That's not true," Willhardt said.
TSPR asked the college’s faculty senate for comment on the academic restructuring but did not receive one.
Another part of the academic restructuring is the development of six schools housing the remaining academic programs – such as the School of Engineering, Sciences, and Innovation and the School of Communication and Creative and Performing Arts.
Draves said the schools will increase interdisciplinary, advising, and mentoring opportunities. She said the new academic structure reflects Monmouth’s commitment to liberal arts education and enhances its mission even as it focuses more on career pathways.
“A liberal arts education is not dependent on one major,” Draves said. “It's really about the breadth of exposure to different disciplines, different methodology, different ways of thinking. One in-depth study as well, and then some critical, durable skills moving forward, whether those are communication skills or problem-solving.”
She said current college students are anticipated to change careers numerous times over their working lives, so they need those durable skills to be successful.
“Part of our role in higher education is to advance individuals, whether for their careers or for their lives, but it's also to advance democracy and to advance our society,” Draves said. “So what are the societal needs, right? Who's going to take on those big issues of how do we use AI effectively? How are we going to address climate change?”
A healthy endowment
Between July 2004 and June 2020, 83 private, four-year, non-profit colleges in the United States closed their doors, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
One of them was MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., a rural liberal arts college that was one of the oldest colleges in the country established just for women. When it closed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, it was after years of declining enrollment and rising costs, and a modest endowment. At the time it closed, enrollment was around 530 students.
In May 2023, Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant, Iowa – another rural liberal arts college – closed. That was due to mounting financial pressures, including a $26 million dollar USDA loan that was about to be recalled, as well as enrollment struggles and a decline in donations. Iowa Wesleyan’s endowment had shrunk to less than $17 million at the time of its closure.
Monmouth is a tuition-driven institution, with publicly available tax documents showing program service revenue making up anywhere from 57% to 77% of its total revenue in recent years. Draves said the college has resources to get through these challenging times of enrollment instability and rising costs.
“One of the things that Monmouth enjoys is a healthy endowment … which allows us some time and some flexibility,” Draves said. “We have very low debt as well and so the combination of good fiscal stewardship in the past and investment will serve us well going to the future.”
Monmouth’s endowment currently stands at around $140 million, while the college has debt of approximately $20 million. In 2024, the college had a record fundraising year, with a total of nearly $19 million. And this year, Monmouth received a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to help students eligible for Pell Grants who are pursuing STEM degrees be successful.
After this initial prioritization process, Draves said Monmouth is establishing an ongoing, two-year evaluation cycle to review academic programs, and potentially add new ones.
Meanwhile, Willhardt has been meeting with departments this summer to talk about the changes and expectations for faculty, not just in teaching but in growing their programs. He said enrollment growth goals used to be something that the President set, and then it was the work of the admissions office.
But that’s increasingly seen as a role of the faculty at Monmouth.
“This is an expectation for you. We would like to see you bring an X number of students because we think that the real recruiting power on the academic side is there. That the counselors in admissions are doing a really, really good job, but that often the faculty are the ones who can help really seal that deal,” Willhardt said.
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