UH regents to consider closing 18 academic degrees

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Oil prices had started to climb in 2010 when University of Houston regents approved a master's degree in petroleum completion and well intervention engineering, expecting to draw as many as 50 students in a semester.

But zero students enrolled in fall 2016. The degree is now one of 18 that UH regents will consider eliminating at Thursday's board meeting.

Many of the 18 degrees are shells of old offerings that the university no longer advertises. For example, UH offers master's of science degrees in biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, geology and physics, while its master's of arts degrees in the same fields are no longer publicized. The six master's of arts degrees will be voted on for closure on Thursday.

"These programs should have been removed from the inventory years ago," said Bruce Jones, vice provost for academic programs.

Still, a few changes are more substantive. That petroleum degree just didn't catch on, Jones said. A linguistics degree for years has been "moribund," English department chair James Kastely said.

Space-related research, once conducted in a master's of science in human space exploration that is up for elimination, is now housed in other entities, like the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture.

"When faculty roll out these programs, there is some judgment that goes into what they feel is marketable, relevant, what is desired by students," Jones said. "It's not an exact science. Sometimes you have anomalies, (but) it doesn't happen a lot."

Three of 18 degrees up for elimination are in UH's English department: a bachelor's in linguistics, a master's in applied English linguistics and a master's in English creative writing and literature.

Linguistics and applied English linguistics graduated no students from the 2014 fiscal year through 2016, according to the state's higher education coordinating board.

The department will try to rebuild a linguistics curriculum that could offer certificates in English as a Second Language and create a minor program. These initiatives would offer linguistics in other areas outside of the cancelled degrees, Kastely said.

Kastely said the master's in creative writing has been "non-functioning" for more than a decade. Master's of fine arts and doctorate programs in creative writing remain strong, he said. The regents' decision for that degree, he said, will amount to a change in bookkeeping instead of any cutback.

UH evaluates academic degrees for closure periodically. The university recommended that regents discontinue a doctorate program in Hispanic literature and language and a master's program in speech communications in November 2015, for example.

"Our driving force here is to maintain an updated inventory," Jones said.

The state's higher education coordinating board recommends closing programs that for three years do not graduate enough students.

Nearly 200 programs in Texas didn't meet the board's requirements last year, the coordinating board says, and the vast majority of those programs have been low-performing by the coordinating board's standards for three years.

Regents on Thursday will also evaluate the productivity of new degrees launched from 2009 to 2015.

On average, those 28 degrees — including two that regents will consider closing on Thursday — are under-enrolled by 26 students. Just three degrees exceed the target enrollment set out when they were approved.