Nearly every week brings another announcement: programs closed, positions eliminated, a campus merged or shuttered. The stories read as tragedy, and often they are because by the time an institution is forced to act, its choices have already been made for it.
Higher education is at a crossroads. Demographics are shifting, funding models are evolving, families are asking sharper questions about value, and artificial intelligence is reshaping both the future of work and how knowledge itself is created and shared. What differs from campus to campus is whether leaders act before the pressure becomes a crisis or wait until change is forced on them.
At East Carolina University, we chose to go first. The how matters as much as the results.
Change on our own terms
In the fall of 2024, with enrollment down roughly six percent over five years, we launched a task force to get ahead of the headwinds. A year later we set a public goal: $25 million in savings and efficiencies over three years—about two percent of our $1.2 billion budget—to reduce or reinvest in our highest priorities. I was direct with our campus: this was not a response to a crisis. It was a decision to control our own destiny.
Year One carried a $5 million target. We closed it at more than $6.6 million, creating a new College of Health and Human Sciences, merging two libraries, redesigning IT and HR, and reviewing our entire academic portfolio. Year Two carries an $8.5 million target with an emphasis on reinvestment.
The how is the point
Our portfolio review examined roughly 107 programs against four questions: societal need, student demand, program quality, and mission alignment. A faculty member chaired it, and it moved through our shared-governance structures, from Faculty Senate committees to direct conversations with every affected unit.
Of the roughly 47 programs identified for discontinuation or significant revision, 36 were identified by the faculty in those programs themselves. That was not luck. It was the product of transparent criteria, real data, and a process people could trust.
Three principles made it work. Be transparent early: every workgroup’s charge and report was posted as the work unfolded. Protect people: reductions in Year One have come primarily through attrition, retirement, and redesign, and saying so at the start is what allowed the harder conversations to happen. And reinvest: savings that vanish into a budget hole teach a campus that efficiency is punishment, so a share of what we save now seeds an ECU Innovation Fund for academic innovation, student success, and research.
Why it matters beyond our campus
The case for acting proactively is not only survival. Public higher education is one of the most powerful engines of economic growth this country has, and engines must be maintained. In eastern North Carolina, the return on an ECU degree is visible everywhere: nurses and physicians in rural hospitals, teachers in classrooms, engineers and construction managers building our region, and nearly $80 million in sponsored programs last year despite the evolving federal research landscape. That is what a regionally rooted R1 university does for the place it serves.
But we only keep doing it if we keep evolving. As Jeff Selingo has argued, enrollment is not a recruitment problem; it is a product problem. So we are redesigning the product, not just the budget: growing online and adult-learner pathways through ECU Flight Path with the UNC System’s Project Kitty Hawk, and designing 90-credit-hour applied bachelor’s degrees for working adults and students who were never going to consider a four-year institution. Not a replacement for the traditional degree but an addition to how we serve.
The AI moment sharpens everything
Our graduates will need to be adaptable and discerning—able to work alongside these tools while bringing the judgment, creativity, ethical reasoning, and human connection no tool supplies. That cannot be a set of disconnected campus projects; it requires an enterprise strategy for teaching, research, and how the university itself operates. It is also why portfolio review cannot be a one-time event. A university that reviewed its programs once, in 2026, and called the job done will be out of date by 2030.
Proactive, or forced
Every institution will change over the next decade. What is optional is whether leaders shape that change collaboratively, with faculty at the table, or wait until a market, a budget line, or an external stakeholder does it for them. The first path is harder in the short run. It is the only one that leaves an institution stronger, with the trust of its people intact and the resources to invest in what comes next.
Higher education is at a crossroads. At ECU, we decided the choice of direction was ours to make.
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