Editorial: WVU walkout has lessons for Pennsylvania colleges, leaders

Pennsylvania colleges, please take note of what happened Monday at West Virginia University.

Hundreds of students at West Virginia’s top public school staged a walkout protest of a slate of proposed cuts announced Aug. 11.

The problem is a significant budget gap. The university is trying to make up for a $45 million hole in its accounts.

The casualties are a list of graduate-level classes, including higher-level degrees in math, public administration, higher education administration and more.

On top of that would be killing off the entire Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. The department offers undergraduate degrees in Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish. Graduate degrees are offered in linguistics and TESOL — Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. There are minors in Arabic, Italian, Japanese, translating foreign literature, and studies of the cultures of Latin America and Slavic and Eastern Europe.

It isn’t just the majors that would disappear. So would the Spanish class a business student might take to bolster the ability to work with bilingual clients or the first-year elective language that would give confidence for a study abroad program.

Because of this, the university would have to eliminate foreign language as an educational requirement. It also means that students already accepted into these programs by WVU — and already mired in debt — are left floundering. Do they change majors? Do they change schools? Have they wasted thousands of dollars and years of their lives?

It makes sense to trim expenses. Colleges are in tough positions around the country, and student enrollment at many colleges, including WVU, is down.

This is the kind of thing all too easy to see happening at any of Pennsylvania’s public universities, especially given the difference in tuition.

WVU is comparable in size and scope to state-related schools like Penn State or Pitt. For its in-state students, it costs about $10,000 less. It’s about $2,000 to $5,000 less than Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education schools like Indiana University of Pennsylvania or PennWest.

Pennsylvania has wrestled with funding its state schools for years — and still hasn’t nailed down this year’s money.

Universities are pushed to maintain programs while cutting costs and reducing those tuition bills. IUP had job cuts in 2019, more restructuring in 2020, cut its journalism department in 2021 and just slashed five executives in May. Penn State has been under fire for cutting funding to its student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, amid its own money woes.

It makes sense to cut programs that may have lower participation. But that should be done surgically and with a sense of responsibility to students already committed. Stop accepting new students and phase out over the two to three years it would take for them to graduate. Universities should plan for cuts the way they do their fundraising campaigns — for the long haul.

And Pennsylvania lawmakers and the governor need to realize that what is happening at WVU could happen in the Keystone State if university funding continues to be an annual fight.