Higher Ed Dive's assessment of program cost and revenue metrics is an informative and objective analysis of the efficacy of program closure initiatives. Put plainly, most programs are contribution-positive. When you cut the program you don't shed the cost, you just lose the revenue.
The traditional program-closure model breaks down miserably for PCE/O units. The model assumes a program is a discrete, bounded line item within a department or a school/college that can be excised. That assumption collapses when applied to inter-curricular programs like Bachelor of Professional Studies degrees. A BPS has a liberal arts core braided with a professional competencies core, taught by faculty who are simultaneously teaching across three or four other programs. There is no clean box to draw around a BPS, the courses, or the faculty that support it. You can't cost it the way you cost a classics department, because its faculty, its common core courses, and its revenue streams are structurally shared across the PCE/O program portfolio (in some cases, to include non-credit courses). So when you apply the blunt program-closure model to a BPS program, you're severing connective tissue that other programs depend on to function.
None of this will change. Most institutions don't have the analytical infrastructure or the will to do curricular-level costing, so they'll keep reaching for the same tired and crude instrument every time the budget cycle turns downward. Identify low-enrollment programs, cut them, declare victory, and repeat in five years.
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