You’d think that when you hear about a wave of college closures—dozens every year, from small liberal arts schools to for-profit giants—the logical response would be for everyone to cut their programs, hunker down, and pray for survival. But that’s not what’s happening. In fact, some departments are not just surviving; they’re growing. Fast.
According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse, overall undergraduate enrollment in the United States has dropped by about 8% between 2019 and 2022. Yet during the same period, enrollment in computer science rose by nearly 20%. Health professions, including nursing and public health, saw similar double-digit gains. Engineering held steady. Meanwhile, majors like history, philosophy, and English literature have been shedding students for years.
So what’s going on? Is this just a simple story of “get a job or get a degree”? Not exactly. The truth is more subtle—and more revealing about how higher education is being forced to rethink its role in a hyper-practical age.
The first thing to understand is that colleges are now competing in a way they never had to before. For decades, a bachelor’s degree was a guaranteed ticket to the middle class. No one checked what you studied—just that you had the piece of paper. That’s no longer true. With rising tuition and growing skepticism about the value of a degree, students (and their parents) are asking a very direct question: “What will this major pay back?”
And the answer is driving a brutal sorting process. Majors with a clear career path—like nursing, software engineering, or accounting—are seen as safe bets. Majors that lead to less predictable outcomes—like art history, anthropology, or gender studies—are increasingly viewed as luxury goods. Colleges that rely heavily on those “luxury” programs are the ones most at risk of closure.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Some of the fastest-growing majors aren’t purely vocational. Data science, for example, sits at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and domain knowledge. Cybersecurity draws on political science and psychology. Healthcare management requires both business acumen and empathy. The most successful new programs are hybrids—they combine hard skills with the kind of critical thinking that used to be the exclusive domain of the liberal arts.
What this suggests is not that the humanities are dead, but that they need to be repackaged. A degree in philosophy alone might not attract students, but a program called “Ethics and AI” might. A history major might struggle, but “Historical Data Analysis” could thrive. The real shift isn’t away from deep thinking—it’s toward concrete relevance.
Of course, there’s a risk here. If every college races to become a glorified trade school, we might lose something valuable: the space to explore ideas without immediate utility. But the market doesn’t care about that. And given that many small colleges are operating on razor-thin margins, they have little choice but to adapt or die.
So the next time you hear about a college closing, don’t assume it’s a sign that education itself is collapsing. It’s more likely a sign that some curricula are finally being forced to answer the question they’ve avoided for years: “Why should someone spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars on you?” The ones that can’t answer convincingly are the ones disappearing. And the ones that can—whether through a redesigned major or a new partnership with employers—are quietly expanding, even in the middle of a storm.