Dear Columbia College Chicago Faculty and Staff,
This week we started a series of steps to ensure Columbia College Chicago, which enters its 135th year in 2025, continues to be a destination for creatives who seek to make an impact in today’s world.
Like many private institutions, we have been faced with challenges which have impacted our enrollment and increased operational costs, challenges we urgently need to address to ensure the continuing health of the college. To address them, we must focus on those elements that distinguish us in the marketplace: educational programming that is driven by our community’s understanding and appreciation of the value of creatives and creative thinking, and our commitment to preparing creatives to impact the world through their creative careers. Our business model must reflect what we value, but also reflect our appreciation that keeping our education affordable furthers our commitment to being a broadly inclusive college for students from a wide variety of backgrounds.
The Challenge
When we admit students to a program of study, we promise to deliver the courses required for them to complete their degree. The delivery of each major program comes with an associated minimum instructional cost that includes the salaries of our instructional staff; equipment, lab and specialized staff support; Core educational costs; and vital academic and student support services, such as academic advisors, tutors, our Library and Registrar, Dean of Students, disability services, wellness and a host of other support elements. The minimum instructional costs increase with the number of credits associated with the program and complexity of the program elements, including prerequisite requirements and the number of electives.
For a program to be economically viable, there must be a minimum number of students enrolled in the program so that the tuition collected pays for the minimum costs of delivering the program. For a program to be healthy, there needs to be financial resources that allow for innovation and reinvestment.
The number of programs we offer in our program array reflects a time when we had many more students. Now, the majority of our programs have a total enrollment – across all four years – of fewer than 50 students, and cost more to deliver than we collect in tuition. Even those programs with more robust enrollment are often designed with complicated pathways that cost more to deliver than we collect in tuition. This is not a sustainable educational model, and it does not permit innovation: our efforts to continue to fund our current array of 58 undergraduate programs has stretched us thin.
This is a challenge we must face together as a college. We have in the past few years tried different strategies: growing our student body, increasing revenue through our tuition and development strategies, and lowering both administrative and instructional costs through efficiencies. Those strategies have helped – and we will continue to pursue them – but more needs to be done; it is time for a comprehensive reset of our academic programming. Together, we need to find the right number and mix of programs that allows us to thrive. As was noted in the recent message about our enrollment:
To ensure creatives from across our country (and internationally) have the opportunity to seriously consider our college for their education, we must ensure our creative-focused program offering continues to align with the expectations and needs of students, families, and industry.
Our Next Steps
Our review of our programs has identified a number of discrete programs that are costly to deliver, and our external consultants have recommended that we sunset those programs. In addition, they recommend closing some smaller discrete programs that are not closely aligned with our main creative focus. Fulfilling our promise to faculty at the beginning of the summer, we have presented both the consultants’ recommendations and our immediate reaction to them. Our intent is to feed those recommendations into a much larger transformational mandate: a reimagined program array that is a sustainable mix of programs, promoting growth, centering student success, and meeting students’ interests and expectations around costs and outcomes.
Reducing the number of programs to a sustainable number will mean phasing out some programs and developing new programs that combine key disciplinary elements, while maintaining our distinctiveness and better supporting all CCC students in achieving their creative and professional goals.
What Will This Mean For Students?
For students currently enrolled in our programs and the faculty who teach in them, nothing will immediately change. Currently, no action has been taken to terminate a program, other than three programs already in the process of being phased out. All programs continue until the recommendations of the faculty are reviewed by the provost later this fall.
For many programs, we anticipate that much current content will be available in a differently configured program. Current students will be offered the opportunity to transition to new and our adjacent program (in the same way they were offered the opportunity to transition to the improved Core Curriculum) to complete their studies. For students continuing in existing programs, we will develop completion plans that supports them through 2028 (current freshmen, sophomores and juniors). For the three programs that are already being phased out, Acoustics, Documentary, and Television Writing and Business, we will continue to deliver those programs to students enrolled in those programs through 2027.
Following an expedited timeline, a new program framework will be developed this fall, and in spring we will be able to announce new programs being made available beginning fall 2025.
Meeting The Challenge
Since its founding in 1890, Columbia College Chicago has charted a new course several times, transitioning from an oratory school to a comprehensive liberal arts college with a vibrant creatives’ curriculum, pivoting to incorporate emerging creative practices, and shifting away from disciplines rendered obsolete by cultural or technological advancements.
Those previous transformational achievements give us the confidence to believe that, working together, Columbia College can successfully navigate this moment, and continue our mission of preparing creatives for success for many decades to come. We look forward to meeting the challenge with you.
Jerry Tarrer
Interim President
Marcella David
Senior Vice President and Provost