Despite Strong Interest in Physics, Some Universities Are Shuttering Departments

In the early 2000s, after decades of ebb and flow, the number of students pursuing physics in college took off, doubling to 9,000 in just over a decade. Even after COVID-19 battered U.S. higher education, the discipline awarded more than 9,400 bachelor’s degrees in 2021.

But if interest in physics remains strong, why have four universities — Bradley University in Illinois, SUNY Potsdam in New York, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and St. Cloud State University in Minnesota — discontinued their undergraduate physics and physics teaching programs over the past year?

“The university said they needed to find a way to save $13 million dollars,” says José Lozano, physics chair at Bradley. “They started cutting programs, and we were among the first to go.”

“The department really brings in money because of the service courses,” says Lozano, referring to physics courses taught as requisites for students in other fields. “But the administration was focused on the number of physics majors,” which had fallen from an average of 12 to less than 6 in recent years, he says.

“The last two students we have, as soon as they graduate next year, that’s it,” he says. “We’ll just be a service department for premed students and the engineering college.”

The other three programs have similar tales. In the early 2000s, enrollment was growing and the number of physics majors was strong. At St. Cloud State, the university even built a new 100,000-square-foot science and engineering facility.

But now, with campus enrollment nearly half what it was just two decades ago, the university is struggling to manage the building, says physics Chair Kevin Haglin. This May, St. Cloud State proposed suspending one in three academic programs — 47 in total, including physics — in an effort to save itself from financial collapse.

Small ripples in otherwise calm seas were easy to overlook a decade ago. Physics departments were restricted from trying to fill vacated tenure lines, for example, even as administration extended new tenure lines to other departments. Then came cuts to internal research funds, fewer teaching releases (when faculty can forego teaching responsibilities for certain periods), and increased teaching loads. Soon, programs were told to streamline curricula and boost the number of students in each class, and faculty who taught service courses with atypically high drop, fail, withdrawal (DFW) rates were enrolled in workshops aimed at modifying their teaching methods.

By the time COVID-19 struck, Haglin says, St. Cloud State’s physics department had been battling stormy seas for years. In 1998, they had 12 faculty, including four astronomers, and a thriving undergraduate physics program with 58 students. Today, the department has four faculty — no astronomers — and 20 students.

It’s not that the department was blind to its problems, Haglin says. They tried various initiatives to boost student numbers, but “enrollment continued to drop.” In the thick of the pandemic, Haglin says the university’s administration “gently suggested … that if you don’t change your curriculum, it will be changed for you.”

“We finally got [the new curriculum] approved on a Monday in May [earlier this year], and on Thursday of the same week we learned the program was on the list for being suspended,” says Haglin.

UNC Greensboro’s (UNCG) physics program — cut this February, along with 19 others — was issued a similar directive several years ago, says Ian Beatty, director of undergraduate physics. The new curriculum streamlined the major and reduced the program’s teaching needs, but it also left the program “more brittle,” he says. If a student failed just one upper-level course, it could delay their graduation by up to a year.

The program took steps to boost student numbers, too. The physics faculty spent years building the foundations for a new nanoscience concentration, designed to funnel students into the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, a collaboration between North Carolina A&T State University and UNCG. It was a “win-win,” says Beatty. Physics could recruit more students, and the joint graduate school would have a new “feeder.”

“I thought that would buy us at least two years,” says Beatty. “I was wrong.”

At SUNY Potsdam, the physics faculty spent more than four years developing a new 3+2 physics bachelor’s and engineering master’s program, joint with SUNY Binghamton, says Wayne Patton, a visiting scholar in physics at the Potsdam campus. “But then there was no administrative support,” he says. “It just died.” Last November, SUNY system administrators approved plans to phase out nine degrees, including physics and chemistry, following a decline in enrollment and the announcement of a $9 million deficit.

Several leaders from these physics programs noted another challenge: resistance from some ‘old-guard’ faculty to modernizing their pedagogy and curriculum, including by creating pathways for students with less robust math skills.

“We have to teach the students we get,” says Beatty. “The students coming into UNCG over the last four or five years have become gradually less able to do physics,” because of weaker math foundations and what Beatty’s colleagues have sensed is a growing struggle among students to persevere through challenging problems, he says. In 2022, just 31% of graduating high school seniors were ready for college-level math (as measured by ACT scores), a decline from 40% in 2018. This makes calculus a barrier, with many intended physics majors struggling to pass UNCG’s traditionally taught, theory-intensive mathematics courses. “So, we’ve been whittled down,” Beatty adds.

As trouble mounted, faculty from these physics programs often found university administration to be less than transparent. “There was always a strong request from faculty to know how they were judging the departments,” says Patton. “But they’re still being opaque.” Even SUNY’s faculty union “can’t get a single detail,” he adds. And at Bradley, Lozano says physics was “well above the mark” in terms of the university’s financial analysis of its programs, but it was still cut.

As a result, rumors abound on these four campuses around what triggered the cuts, and how programs were selected for elimination. Some faculty point to university mishandling of funds, high DFW rates in service courses, or even retaliation against faculty as contributing factors.

Were the closures inevitable, or is there something these departments could have done?

Haglin, at St. Cloud State, says that, since 2017, his university has been bracing for the 2025 enrollment cliff, when shifting demographics are forecast to cause a multi-year nosedive in college-bound high school grads. But what they failed to appreciate back then was the extent to which the demographics of the university’s student pool were already changing.

At Bradley, Lozano says, the physics department worked hard to develop a new recruitment approach, first implemented this past school year — one of several tactics in the department’s comprehensive “plan of attack” to boost enrollment. All the department’s interventions were borne out of engagement with the Effective Practices for Physics (EP3) guide and the associated Departmental Action Leadership Institute (DALI), says Lozano.

In fact, all four of these departments knew about EP3 and had attempted to implement at least some of the guide’s suggestions. But mostly, engagement with EP3 was limited — the result of several factors, including faculty turnover and sometimes resistance.

“If we had known what we learned from DALI” a decade ago, says Lozano, “I think we could have saved ourselves.”

At UNCG, Beatty says the physics department was in an unwinnable battle. Their foe wasn’t just shifting enrollment, declining math preparedness, or resistance to modernization, but the university’s mentality of “cutting to the bone.” There comes a tipping point when a department simply can’t do more with less.

To future-proof your department’s physics program before it faces rough seas, visit the Effective Practices for Physics Programs (EP3) guide.