I am starting to wonder if the same forces that are seeing the arts disappear from K-12 schools are starting to encroach upon university level education to the same effect. There have been recent articles about eliminating the liberal arts degree. Given the amount of debt you get into going to a 4 year university, there is a concern about having a degree in practical fields like business or science one can translate directly into a job.

But I am seeing first hand that there are pressures to even retain arts classes. We just had an acting faculty member retire and I was talking to the chair of his division about when the ad to replace him might go out. Unfortunately, replacing him is not going to be automatic because there are a number of factors the upper level of administration considers before giving approval for a search.

The first is whether the class can pay for itself. It isn’t a surprise to anyone that instruction in the arts is more expensive than in other disciplines because the student – teacher ratio has to be smaller in order to be effective. One professor to 16-20 students instead of 30+. When it comes to arts classes then, general arts classes like survey world music are preferred over specialized classes like piano, voice, violin, etc because the ratio can be higher.

I should also mention for those who aren’t aware, my facility is located on community college campus so the price per credit is $95 versus $350 a credit at the system’s 4 year campus. It’s much more affordable for students to take classes here, but the college has to serve a lot of students to generate appropriate levels of revenue.

The decision to replace the acting teacher won’t entirely be made based on money. The fact is, many students who take performing arts classes are apparently not graduating. No one is suggesting there is causation in that. It looks like the type of student that are taking the courses aren’t persisting.

The courses aren’t filling up until nearly the end of the registration period which means that many in the classes may not have the organizational skills and motivation to be there that other students in the college have. Whether they have procrastinated their decision to enroll or just recently moved to the area, they may be in the class because their first preferences were full. They may not be fully invested or even able to commit to pursuing a course of study through graduation due to personal motivation or external forces.

Whatever the reason, if you are an administrator making a decision about what courses to offer and you notice that even if people have done well in a course, they aren’t likely to persist in their studies, it may not be entirely unreasonable to ponder if resources were better directed.

Some of the solutions mentioned in my conversation with the chair were not unlike those suggested for the arts in general. One was having the value of the class to students redefined in the course listings–what skills are you going to come away with, what requirements does this course fulfill, etc. Just as we talk about the value of the arts to communities.

Another was basically just increasing word of mouth advertising. Essentially talking to the counselors about steering students toward the classes earlier in the enrollment process. One potentially promising development is that the college had made orientation mandatory for all students recently and the process starts with an hour long presentation in the theatre. Since many attendees have appointments with counselors soon after their orientation, hopefully the presentation with its goofy skit will result in students being more inclined to want to register for arts classes.

At the very least, I hope the orientation sessions will end my experience where alumni tell me they graduated from the college and didn’t know there was a theatre.

This situation has been the cause of a lot of thought for me. It is easy to damn people who make decisions to cut the arts purely on the basis of return on investment. Saying a course in the arts can’t help a person get a good job will raise a chorus of howls as people reach for studies that may show otherwise. For a lot of college arts programs across the country, this may be the prime criteria for cutting or keeping.

I have a harder time finding an argument against a fairly loose definition of success like is the person likely to graduate. Talking about the value of the arts to bolster creativity and learning capacity will fall flat against that.

These students aren’t the ones getting caught up in the arts lifestyle devoting all their time to their art rather than attending to their other classes. Those guys are familiar to me because they are always hanging around the theatre. I know which ones have started getting Ds and Fs. Which ones are doing well. Which ones had to remove themselves from that life so they could turn their lives around. Which succeeded and graduated and which failed.

There are a whole bunch of others that I never really see until they get up on stage for the final performances at the end of the semester and perform before an audience for the first time in their lives. No matter what their motivation for registering for the class in the first place, they are up there now demonstrating what they have learned. If they aren’t graduating, I hope they are at least taking something constructive away from the experience.