OBSERVER file photo A march in December brought attention to a budget deficit at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

It’s no secret on SUNY Fredonia’s campus that the university has a looming enrollment crisis and budget deficit. The administration says that they have a plan to do something about it quite often, but yet nothing ever gets done about it — quite the opposite, in fact. There’s a glaring lack of amenities on campus because of this — Tim Hortons and the Blue Devil Grill have both disappeared within the last two years.

When you actually look into it, you’ll find out that this isn’t something that’s unique to our campus, or even our region. Campuses across the state and country are experiencing many of the same challenges. But why is this happening to everyone, at the same time? Surely people not wanting to come to Chautauqua County isn’t the reason that colleges across the country are struggling.

Part of the current problem is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic from a few years ago. Being locked inside all the time isn’t conducive to colleges, which depend on students living on their campus and being a part of a community. But now that the pandemic is over, enrollment rates are still dropping. In the past Fall semester, SUNY Fredonia had 3,212 enrolled undergraduate students. That’s down from 3,552 students from the 2021-22 academic year, which is down from 3,853 students from the 2020-21 school year. You get the picture; Fredonia’s golden age of large class sizes has come and gone.

But if you look other, comparable schools, the exact same thing is happening, so this isn’t an issue that’s exclusive to us. According to the same website, SUNY Plattsburgh’s enrollment, for example, has fallen at remarkably similar rates. Undergraduate enrollment was at 4,323 for the 2021-22 school year. The year before that, it was at 4,680. In fact, their enrollment decline was steeper than ours.

The point is, this isn’t a Fredonia-centric issue.

“We were already in the middle of a high school graduate decline before the pandemic hit, so applications were already starting to decrease,” said Kimberlie Ball, Fredonia’s interim director of admissions. “The pandemic, of course, greatly impacted the lower number of applications for the few years following. We are just starting to see application numbers jump up.”

Part of the reason for this decline may be because of the way universities like Fredonia market themselves. We’re primarily known as a “liberal arts” school, but what exactly are the liberal arts? Put simply, Liberal Arts studies include degrees like history and English. They are degrees that are more similar to curriculums, or an “unspecialized” degree, according to Robert Norris in a 2023 opinion article published by The Wall Street Journal.

In the same article, David Cheng states the decrease in liberal arts graduates is, “mostly a function of the increase in job opportunities that require degrees other than liberal arts or humanities,” but that’s only a half-truth.

Dr. Bruce Simon, a professor in the English Department at Fredonia, said this is because majors with a clear, set career path will simply draw more students toward them.

Majors within the liberal arts don’t even attempt to draw a career path for students within them, Simon argues. That’s not their purpose. They instead focus on giving students a well-rounded education where they are taught the process of solving problems, rather than the solutions to the problems themselves. This gives students a well-rounded education that suits them for a variety of career paths, but at times, it can be difficult to see a path forward with such a general-minded degree.

“Students today are told to approach college ready to choose their life’s career path,” said Norris. “Colleges are maximizing students’ time with (any) given major and spending less time on a core curriculum, including classical studies, history and philosophy. As a result, students, and even professors, forget great stories of robust figures fighting for noble causes.”

But the liberal arts aren’t just declining in a vacuum. In an article published in 2023 in AAC&U, Lynn Pasquerella says that 56% of 1,019 people responded that a four-year degree wasn’t worth getting anymore because it is, “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”

“(Getting a liberal arts education) can be really scary, especially at a time where I feel like families and students are a little bit less risk-averse,” said Associate Vice President of Academic Success and Retention Erin Mroczka. Mroczka is uniquely suited to talk about the issue — as Fredonia’s associate vice president of retention, one of her job responsibilities is making sure that students want to stay in Fredonia after their freshman year is complete. They won’t want to do that if they feel like their education is a waste of time after getting a taste of it. But Mroczka used her own liberal arts education that she got in college to dispel notions of it being useless.

“My background is in business administration, and here I am in higher ed(ucation). It wasn’t what I sought out to do, but all of those skills [I learned in] the communications courses I took [allowed me to] understand how accounting and budgets apply to a variety of different institutions,” she said. “Being able to problem solve and work with groups of people on large, ambiguous challenges are all very applicable to what I do every day.”

James Coughlin, a 2016 Fredonia alum, is another prime example of using a humanities degree in unexpected but useful ways. Couglin currently works in the city of Buffalo as a fair housing specialist with Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME). In this role, he works with people to document their allegations and experiences with housing discrimination. What degree did he receive from the college? Two bachelor’s degrees in history and social studies adolescent education.

This highlights one of the most attractive aspects of humanities degrees: they have a lot of intersectionality with other fields. In Coughlin’s case, he doesn’t have a degree having to do with housing or real estate law. By studying the history of those fields throughout time, he can see how they impact people today, which isn’t something that someone would normally consider.

Students are still considering intersectionality — that’s not the problem. The issue is rather that people just aren’t going to college at the same rate that they used to, and the humanities are suffering more than other majors.

In a 2014 Inside Higher Ed article, Bruce A. Kimball, a professor of educational studies at Ohio State University, is cited as writing that, “The enrollment of liberal arts students has not been dropping over the last four decades but, rather, shifting from liberal arts colleges to their counterpart [sic] in universities.” I asked Ball if Fredonia was doing anything to specifically market humanities degrees towards prospective students, but she instead steered the conversation towards STEM degrees, which aren’t the same thing.

“We’re a liberal arts school in New York state, which has a declining population,” Mroczka said. “Across the country, we see lots of declining high school populations. But not everyone does — Texas is seeing a boom right now. So they may have small liberal arts universities who are doing well, or some Catholic universities. But not everyone who’s lumped into a certain type of institution is struggling — you’re always going to have outliers.”

Preparing for the job field doesn’t mean just earning a degree in whatever you want to actually have a job in. It means earning those other valuable skills and perspectives. According to Mroczka, businesses are looking for “soft skills.” They’re looking for someone to think critically beyond just the problem. A degree in computer science isn’t going to help you learn anything beyond the world of computers. A degree in English, on the other hand, will teach you more than just how to analyze books. It will also teach students skills in writing and critical analysis — skills that are needed and can be used in literally every type of job.

The liberal arts aren’t going away, and we shouldn’t expect them to, either. They’re just changing, to fit in a world of computers and the rising costs of… everything. Add on to that a general misconception that graduates with these types of degrees will have a harder time finding jobs, and you have a recipe for why people don’t want to enroll in these majors. But it’s those misconceptions that proponents of the liberal arts will have to break in order to revive the programs across the country and bring them back up to what they used to be: generators of a well-rounded, intersectional education that would provide college graduates with the broad skills needed to succeed in any field.

Dan Quagliana is a junior at SUNY Fredonia, where he is studying history and political science.