Are undergraduate chemistry programs in crisis?

Warren Wilson College. Fresno Pacific University. West Virginia University Institute of Technology. Christian Brothers University.

These are all colleges that stopped accepting new undergraduate chemistry majors in the past year. Others, such as SUNY Potsdam and Utica University, came very close to cutting their programs. So far in 2024, at least two colleges with chemistry majors—Cabrini University and Wells College—have closed entirely.

Education experts have been ringing alarm bells about the health of US higher education for the last few years. Enrollment is down, which translates to fewer tuition dollars going to schools. Budgets are getting tighter. And experts say college enrollment is going to take more hits.

Chemistry programs are no exception. They suffer the same struggles as the education field as a whole but are faring worse in terms of enrollment and number of graduates. Faced with the high cost of operating a chemistry department, some schools have been responding by recasting the major or eliminating it entirely.

The enrollment problem in higher education is like the Hydra’s many heads. One issue is that there are just fewer students. Researchers at Pew Research Center found a rapid decline in birth rates between 2007 and 2009, possibly related to the 2008 recession. Babies born in those years are 15–17 years old now, the typical ages of first-year college students in the next few years.

The COVID-19 pandemic was another blow. When colleges reopened after lockdown, some students didn’t go back. Many schools never fully recovered, says Hasan El-Rifai, a chemistry professor and chair of the School of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University Institute of Technology (WVU Tech). “It kind of destroyed the small people, and the big guys are still barely surviving,” he says.

Yet another problem is the rising cost of higher education. According to the Education Data Initiative, tuition at public 4-year institutions in the US increased 37% from 2010 to 2023. And a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 29% of adults in the US don’t think college is worth the cost anymore.

Experts say college enrollment is on the edge of an even greater cliff. Undergraduate college enrollment was up this fall for the first time since the pandemic but was still 5.3% lower in 2023 than in 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. And some students who did return are choosing shorter-term courses of study over traditional bachelor’s degrees. In 2023, enrollment was up 9.9% in undergraduate certificate programs and 3.6% for associate’s degrees. Enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs was up just 0.9%.

In 2023, education experts predicted that many colleges would close in the next few years, and it looks like they might be right. According to the most recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of US higher education institutions fell by around 2% in the 2023–24 school year.

The effect is trickling through to chemistry programs. News of small schools discontinuing their chemistry majors have sent ripples of alarm through social media in the past 2 years.

To better understand what’s happening, C&EN gathered and analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics. It turns out that the number of US colleges and universities with an undergraduate chemistry major hit a high in 2019 and has since fallen by only about 1%.

But enrollment in chemistry programs and the number of students getting chemistry degrees have plummeted in the past few years. Larger schools with more students coming through the doors are better set up to survive this slump. But for schools that graduate only a few chemistry students a year, the story becomes one of survival. Chemistry faculty at small colleges and universities are finding that they must fight to keep their programs, change with the shifting academic landscape, or be resigned to give up the major.

‘Chemistry is expensive and smelly’

By their nature, chemistry programs cost a lot of money to set up and maintain. This is because chemistry is not just an academic discipline, says Michelle Boucher, a chemistry professor at Utica University. It’s also a technical one.

“To be a modern bench chemist, you have to work with instrumentation. You have to work with laboratory chemicals that require safe handling and safe disposal,” she says. In addition to sometimes dangerous chemicals, departments need fume hoods, protective equipment, and someone trained in environmental health and safety to deal with waste.

Modern instrumentation is also quite costly. El-Rifai was part of the design team when WVU Tech’s physical sciences building was remodeled in 2016. “We have an amazing facility.” A lot of money has been pumped into that building, he says.

This equipment also needs to be updated to keep attracting students, says Peter Eckel, senior fellow and director of the global higher education management program at the University of Pennsylvania. A school can’t teach classes in labs built in the 1950s. “When you walk students through there, they’re going to think, ‘This is where I’m going to learn chemistry?’ ” And they will go to a school with a shiny new lab, he says.

“There’s an arms race around facilities,” Eckel says. “It’s not just in athletics but also in instructional and research infrastructure.”

And teaching in a lab is different from teaching in a classroom, Boucher says. Lab-based education is less economical because students have to be in smaller groups. “You can’t teach a lecture hall of 300 in a laboratory,” she says. Not only that, but students need experience working in teams, so chemistry departments need multiples of some things.

“Chemistry is expensive and smelly,” Boucher says.

So when college administrators are looking for costs to cut, chemistry programs can be beguiling targets. But most colleges can’t just cut their entire chemistry program. Chemistry classes are needed for students in other majors, such as biology and physics. Chemistry is a service department, El-Rifai says. “Every single student in the engineering school needs to take it. More than half the students on campus take chemistry.”

The chemistry major, though, is fair game.

A back seat to biology?

In addition to the cost of the chemistry major, school administrators look at another number: enrollment.

According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, enrollment at 4-year colleges in the US has dropped 3.2% since 2019. Enrollment in chemistry programs, meanwhile, has tumbled 23.2% over the same period.

In contrast, undergraduate enrollment in biology fell about the same amount as all undergraduate enrollment since 2019. And at a time when college enrollment is dropping and students are opting out of higher education, the number of biology degrees has actually increased since 2019. According to C&EN’s analysis, the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in biology has gone up 7.5% since 2019. During the same period, the number of bachelor’s degrees in all disciplines dropped by 2.6%, while chemistry degrees were down 14.1%.

As of the end of the 2023–24 academic year, only a few hundred more schools offered degrees in biology than in chemistry. And in the past 5 years, the number of programs in each discipline has fallen at about the same rate. But according to C&EN’s analysis, US higher education institutions awarded 132,465 biology degrees in 2023, compared with 12,567 chemistry degrees. And schools don’t seem to be ending their biology programs.

Why is biology more enticing to incoming first-years than chemistry? El-Rifai thinks it might have something to do with the program requirements.

WVU Tech has many more biology majors than chemistry majors, he says. Most people who major in either program are students looking to enter fields like medicine and dentistry. The reason these students go for biology over chemistry is simple, El-Rifai says. “It’s the math.”

Completing either a biology or a chemistry degree will get students the class requirements to apply for medical school. The chemistry major at WVU Tech required four semesters of calculus. The biology major doesn’t require any, El-Rifai says.

“And then you try to convince a student to come to the chemistry route. They look at you and they’re like, ‘Why do I need to take Multivariable, Calculus 1, and Calculus 2?’ ” he says. They look at the requirements for a biology degree and realize that they don’t even need Calculus 1. “Guess what they choose,” El-Rifai says.

Utica similarly has more incoming biochemistry majors than chemistry majors. “We serve a population that perhaps has seen the sacred trinity of doctor, lawyer, or pharmacist,” Boucher says. She thinks this phenomenon has to do with students’ past exposures. “How often do you see a chemist in your daily life?” she asks. “Growing up, you see teachers; you see doctors; you see dentists.”

Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that chemistry programs are taking a hit. And to keep the doors open, chemistry departments might have to get comfortable with change.

The struggle to stay relevant

WVU Tech is a satellite of the main West Virginia University campus, which has about 25,000 students. WVU Tech has only about 1,500 students. And as of the start of this academic year, the smaller school no longer has a chemistry major.

For many years, WVU Tech’s chemistry department chugged along, El-Rifai says. It was a service department, he says, offering courses needed by other majors. Plus, after overhead costs were paid, chemistry students’ tuition brought a lot of revenue. The administration was not looking to cut the major, because chemistry generated money, El-Rifai says. But he knew that couldn’t last forever.

El-Rifai had reworked the chemistry major a few years back to eliminate one of the math requirements. But when the main campus launched what the administration called the academic transformation, El-Rifai worried that his changes to the chemistry department might not have been enough to save the major. So he started to think. “What can we do to use our equipment, use our facility, use our budget, and use our faculty?” he says. “What can have a low math requirement and have it attract students?”

Ultimately, El-Rifai decided he had to discontinue the chemistry major. And the administration agreed. Instead, WVU Tech now has a new program: the chemical forensics major.

“You can say we are a makeover of the chemistry degree,” El-Rifai says. But underneath the hood, the engine is basically the same. “We’re using all the facilities. We’re using all the equipment,” he says.

The difference is how professors approach the lessons. For example, the chemical forensics classes still study instrumental analysis; they just test different compounds. “Instead of using chemical X, I’m using a drug to test, or I’m using an explosive material. Well, guess what they call it? Forensic chemistry 310. It’s just analytical chemistry,” he says.

Utica took a different approach when threatened with closure, Boucher says. In 2023, the school of around 2,500 undergraduates faced a budget gap, and chemistry was on the list of programs that the university president was going to recommend to the board to discontinue. “The idea was that chemistry would be sunset to better strengthen biochemistry,” Boucher says.

At Utica, more students start majoring in biochemistry than in chemistry. But a few semesters in, some realize that they don’t really like sick people, Boucher says. “That’s a problem if you’re premed.” But they do figure out that they like chemistry and switch to that major. Utica ultimately graduates about the same number of majors in biochemistry and chemistry, she says.

But the president wasn’t suggesting cutting both majors, just chemistry, which didn’t make sense to Boucher. “There was no course that we would stop offering and no equipment we would stop maintaining if we lost chemistry and kept biochemistry,” she says.

The Chemistry Department had some time to give feedback to the president on her initial recommendations before she officially presented them at the board meeting. “So we marshaled our forces,” Boucher says.

The main issue was that the administration thought chemistry was outdated and biochemistry more modern, Boucher says. “There was a huge lack of understanding of what a chemistry major is, what it offers, and what it does,” she says.

After the faculty made their case to keep the chemistry major, the president changed her recommendation to the board. “We were not brought forward among the sunsetting programs, very much because of our rebuttal,” Boucher says. “In retrospect, we were much luckier than many other schools, because many schools simply said, ‘We cannot afford the chemical sciences’ full stop.”

But enrollment in Utica’s chemistry major has dropped, which makes administrators uncomfortable. For the past few years, the department has had the same number of students coming in the door, but they’re coming in as biochemistry majors, not chemistry majors, Boucher says. And Utica doesn’t have as many students now as 10 years ago.

As part of faculty members’ appeal to keep the chemistry major, they volunteered to make some changes to the curriculum to better appeal to prospective students. The faculty are still working out the details, but the changes may include a preforensics or pre–natural product track. Local employers tend to hire Utica students after graduation to work on natural product or benchtop analysis, Boucher says. The idea is that designing a chemistry degree based on these jobs may help recruitment.

Boucher does worry about the number of incoming chemistry students, she says. “If the enrollment prospects don’t change in the next 5 years, we’ll be having this conversation again.”

The way of the future

Students have a lot of choices when it comes to higher education, Eckel says. The reality might be that interest is shifting away from chemistry, he says. This shift might not necessarily be due to the content of the degree but rather the way schools present chemistry programs.

“Institutions are going to read the tea leaves because they need to compete for students,” Eckel says. Ultimately, it’s about what students want, because that’s what’s going to keep them coming through the doors.

For example, many jobs are now focusing on sustainability. A college might create a program around sustainability or environmental sciences that is chemistry centric but not called a chemistry degree. It’s a different way for a school to package its courses that allows it to stand out in the increasingly competitive marketplace, Eckel says.

He sees it as a morphing of the chemistry major more than its death. “For the most part, institutions don’t close programs,” he says. They’ve got tenured faculty and infrastructure, particularly in chemistry and related science, technology, engineering, and math areas. It’s more palatable to put a spin on an existing program than shut one down completely.

Eckel says that higher education is about the long game. Colleges and universities are “very good at figuring out how to adapt,” he says. But at the same time, they’re cautious because they don’t have the resources to make misplaced investments. “Institutions evolve incrementally over time in response to student needs, market demands, and employer demands,” Eckel says.

“Students have a lot of choices in higher ed,” he says, “and you need to compete in some dimension to stay relevant.”