The Return on Knowing: Why the Value of Mexican American and Latino Studies Exceeds ROI, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., August 21, 2026

The Return on Knowing: Why the Value of Mexican American and Latino Studies Exceeds ROI

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 14, 2026*

Updated August 21, 2026

I encourage readers to learn about Jim Estrada’s compelling and accessible book, The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution: A Primer on the Growing Influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA.

Estrada approaches Latino history and culture partly from the perspective of a corporate marketing professional who spent decades advising institutions about Latino communities. His central argument is that widespread ignorance about Latino history, identity, language, cultural diversity, and economic participation is not merely a social or educational deficiency. It is an economic liability—a consequential gap in knowledge and understanding.

Latinos are consumers, workers, students, taxpayers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and voters. Their growing presence shapes education, employment, health care, public finance, consumer markets, and virtually every major institution in the country. Estrada therefore argues that schools and universities should cultivate the historical knowledge and cultural competence necessary to function effectively in an increasingly diverse society (Estrada, 2013).

His argument is especially useful when placed in conversation with Texas leaders’ growing emphasis on the “return on investment,” or ROI, of higher education curricula and degree programs. On its face, asking whether public institutions use resources responsibly is reasonable. The problem arises when ROI is defined too narrowly—as though the value of education can be reduced to a graduate’s first salary, the immediate labor-market demand for a major, or the direct revenue generated by a particular academic program.

Such calculations tell us something, but not nearly enough.

A more appropriate framework would be what I call the Return on Knowing, or ROK.

ROK asks what students, institutions, communities, and the nation gain when people understand the histories, cultures, languages, experiences, and contributions of the populations with whom they live and work. It recognizes knowledge itself as a form of public infrastructure. Just as roads, schools, health systems, and communications networks make social and economic life possible, cultural and historical knowledge equips people to navigate an increasingly diverse democracy.

ROI asks, “How much money does this degree produce?”

ROK asks, “What becomes possible because people know more—and what does ignorance cost us?”

ROK includes economic benefits, but it extends well beyond them. It includes improved judgment, stronger public institutions, more effective professional practice, better communication, greater historical understanding, and the capacity to work across cultural and linguistic differences. It also includes the avoidance of costly mistakes that arise when institutions misunderstand the communities they serve.

This distinction also requires some care with the concept of efficiency itself. Fallace and Fantozzi (2013) caution against treating “social efficiency” as a historically coherent educational doctrine with a single ideological meaning. Efficiency has always depended upon the purposes against which educational outcomes are judged. The more important question, therefore, is not whether a university is efficient, but efficient at producing what—and according to whose conception of educational value?

To move in this direction, we must open a conceptual space between ROI as an instrumental metric and the normative framework that determines what counts as an efficient or valuable educational outcome in the first place. A university could conceivably be “efficient” at cultivating civic understanding, cultural knowledge, democratic capacity, intellectual discovery, critical inquiry, or human development—if these are recognized as legitimate forms of return. 

The difficulty arises when ROI is defined almost exclusively through earnings, enrollment demand, program costs, completion rates, or labor-market outcomes. At that point, ROI ceases to function as a neutral measure and begins to operate as a theory of educational value, privileging some forms of knowledge while rendering others expendable. 

The metric does not simply measure what universities produce; it increasingly helps determine what universities should produce, which fields deserve institutional support, and which forms of knowledge are permitted to survive. This is precisely the dynamic now unfolding across Texas public universities, where questions of enrollment, workforce alignment, program productivity, and economic return are increasingly being invoked to determine which fields warrant institutional support.

Employers, educators, health professionals, public officials, journalists, and nonprofit leaders who understand Latino histories and experiences are less likely to rely on stereotypes, design ineffective programs, misread demographic change, alienate workers or customers, or make decisions based on incomplete information. Cultural competence is therefore not a decorative addition to professional preparation. It is part of what makes institutions capable, responsive, and effective.

Seen through the lens of ROK, Estrada's The ABCs and Ñ also reveals the limitations of evaluating higher education solely through individual earnings. The return from investing in Latino students includes greater financial security for graduates and their families, but it also includes a more highly educated workforce, increased tax revenues, greater entrepreneurship, stronger public institutions, improved organizational decision-making, and professionals better prepared to serve the communities around them.

Conversely, what does the nation lose when it fails to educate students about Latino communities?

It loses talent when Latino students are underserved or pushed out of higher education. It loses institutional effectiveness when professionals are culturally unprepared. It loses economic opportunities when businesses misunderstand major consumer markets. It loses democratic capacity when the histories and contributions of large segments of the population are excluded from public knowledge. And it loses trust when students and families enter institutions that do not recognize their experiences or regard their histories as worthy of study.

This is why Mexican American Studies, Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, and culturally sustaining curricula should not be dismissed as peripheral expenses. They are investments in professional preparation, institutional effectiveness, social understanding, democratic participation, and the nation’s economic future.

They also benefit students of every background. Latino Studies is not only for Latino students, just as African American history is not only for Black students and women’s history is not only for women. These fields provide all students with the knowledge necessary to understand the society they inhabit. They help prepare graduates to teach, govern, practice medicine, conduct research, build organizations, serve clients, manage workplaces, and participate intelligently in public life.

ROK is therefore not a rejection of economic accountability. It is a more complete form of accountability. It asks policymakers to count benefits that narrow ROI calculations often ignore: knowledge, cultural competence, institutional trust, democratic literacy, social cohesion, and the prevention of costly errors.

It also requires us to acknowledge that not everything of public value can be captured in an immediate financial metric. Education prepares people not only to earn a living, but also to interpret the world, understand one another, evaluate evidence, remember history, and participate in democratic life.

Estrada’s work helps us see that ignorance has a price. Institutions pay that price through failed outreach, ineffective policies, cultural misunderstanding, lost markets, weakened trust, and poor decision-making. Communities pay it through misrepresentation, exclusion, and educational neglect.

The relevant policy question, then, is not simply whether Mexican American Studies or Latino Studies produces an acceptable financial return. It is whether Texas—and the nation—can afford the consequences of not knowing.

References

ASU News. (2014, February 7). Latino author makes economic case for teaching ethnic studies in schools. https://news.asu.edu/content/latino-author-makes-economic-case-teaching-ethnic-studies-schools

Estrada, J. (2013). The ABCs and Ñ of America’s cultural evolution: A primer on the growing influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA. Tate Publishing & Enterprises.

Fallace, T., & Fantozzi, V. (2013). Was There Really a Social Efficiency Doctrine? The Uses and Abuses of an Idea in Educational History. Educational Researcher, 42(3), 142-150. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X13484509

Latino author makes economic case for teaching ethnic studies in schools

February 07, 2014

Making an economic case for teaching ethnic studies in America’s schools and universities is the focus of a book talk presented from noon to 1 p.m., Feb. 11, by ASU’s School of Transborder Studies. Author Jim Estrada, a corporate marketing consultant and former San Diego television journalist, suggested there is a substantial information gap about the nation’s largest non-white European populations that could negatively impact the United States economy.

Estrada’s book, "The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution: A Primer on the Growing Influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA," offers important insights into today’s 53 million U.S. Hispanics – including how their history and culture are influencing the nation.

The author said that he believes sharing accurate, non-subjective information about America’s Latinos, their histories and their contributions to our nation will lead to better understanding of their growing influence as consumers, students, taxpayers, voters and members of the workforce.

Registration for the lecture in Interdisciplinary Building B, B161-B, on ASU’s Tempe campus is required. RSVP to Lillian.Ruelas@asu.edu.

According to ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Latinos constitute Arizona’s most rapidly growing ethnicity and could represent more than 50 percent of the state’s population by mid-century. Its 2012 report, Arizona’s Emerging Latino Vote, noted in particular the state’s disproportionate growth in young Latino citizens. “The ramifications will be profound, with major impacts to be felt in the health care industries, at all levels of education, the workforce population and in state budgeting – just to cite a few,” the report stated.

“There are many thoughts on how to create cultural competence,” Estrada said. “The logical place to start is in educational institutions, which are charged with expanding the knowledge base that affects our personal and organizational missions, goals and objectives.

“So it’s really up to our schools to address this critical need for ethnic studies. For students entering the marketplace, it will enable them to adapt successfully to a changing world.”

Estrada is owner of Estrada Communications Group, based in Austin, Texas. He has worked with major corporations, such as AT&T, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald’s, advising them on outreach strategies to Latino consumers for the past three decades. He said every few years, as his client contacts would change, he would need to re-orient their staffs about the Latino market: “My job was to help them avoid making mistakes, cultural faux pas, in their marketing communications.”

After many years, Estrada realized that what he was teaching marketing clientele could benefit a broader audience if compiled in a book. The primer’s 10 short chapters are a collection of essays about different aspects of Latino culture and history, from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to Latino voting rights. A book review by National Hispanic News noted that topics range from language, cultural diversity and history to relationships with the dominant majority, law enforcement and each other.

“Each of these chapters touches on historical and cultural tidbits neither likely to be known by the average non-Hispanic nor by the segment of Latinos themselves who lack exposure to their own contributions to society, or who know little of their place in U.S. history,” the critic observed.

Estrada said the media and entertainment industries are also responsible for projecting a less than positive image of Latinos, as well as those of other non-white, racial, ethnic and immigrant groups. He explained that for decades, mass media have misrepresented Latinos to the nation’s mainstream Eurocentric society through acts of “commission,” use of stereotypic portrayals in media and acts of “omission,” failing to provide factual information about the many Latino contributions to America, and even by historical revisionism.

“Creating cultural awareness and competency takes time and cannot be too daunting a task,” Estrada said. “Providing readers with basic facts, or the ABCs, together with a rudimentary understanding of the influence Hispanics, Latinos and mestizos are having on them and their personal interests can create a sense of ease about learning.”


The School ofTransborder Studies is an academic unit in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Proving the Value of Higher Education Requires Defending It, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 3, 2026

Proving the Value of Higher Education Requires 

Defending It

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 3, 2026

Allison Schrager’s recent Bloomberg Opinion column posted below, “Colleges Face a Choice: Prove Their Value or Risk Losing Students,” responds to Yale University’s report on public trust in higher education by arguing that colleges and universities must restore public confidence by demonstrating clearer value to students and families (Schrager, 2026). On the surface, this is a reasonable concern. Higher education is expensive. Admissions practices can be opaque. Students and parents worry about debt, employment, and whether a degree is worth the investment. Universities should take these concerns seriously.

But the problem with Schrager’s framing is that it treats mistrust as if it were primarily an institutional failure of higher education itself. That is only part of the story. As I argued in my earlier TexasEdEquity critique of the Yale report on this blog, the crisis we are facing is not simply a crisis of trust in higher education. It is a restructuring of higher education itself (Valenzuela, 2026). 

The question is not only whether universities can prove their value to the public. The question is whether the public will still be allowed to have universities worthy of trust.

Schrager writes that colleges need to prove their value or risk losing students. She is especially concerned about first-generation students who may already be uncertain about whether college is worth the time, money, and risk. That concern is real. As someone who has spent my career focused on educational equity, Mexican American and Latina/o schooling, and the public mission of universities, I share it. First-generation students deserve institutions that support them, challenge them, graduate them, and prepare them for meaningful lives and livelihoods.

Yet a narrow “return on investment” framing can unintentionally reinforce the very forces that are diminishing higher education’s democratic purpose. If the value of college is reduced to wages alone, then fields that cultivate historical understanding, critical thought, civic imagination, ethical judgment, cultural knowledge, and democratic participation become vulnerable to attack. If universities are judged only by immediate labor-market outcomes, then education becomes training, students become consumers, faculty become service providers, and the public university becomes a credentialing arm of the economy.

That is too small a vision. And not at all becoming of the University of Texas at Austin, one of only two of the state's flagship institutions.

The value of higher education is not simply that it helps people get jobs, though it often does. Its deeper value is that it helps people navigate complexity in an ever-changing world. It teaches students to read closely, reason carefully, evaluate evidence, ask better questions, understand historical context, communicate across difference, and participate in democratic life. These are not luxuries. They are survival skills for a society facing climate disruption, artificial intelligence, democratic backsliding, economic inequality, racial conflict, public health crises, and disinformation at scale.

Indeed, employers themselves continue to say that they value precisely these capacities. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has repeatedly found that employers want graduates who can think critically, communicate effectively, adapt, solve complex problems, and work across difference (Finley, 2023, 2025). These are not narrow technical competencies. They are liberal learning outcomes. They are also democratic capacities.

So when Schrager suggests that “less elite” schools may need to become “less academic” and provide more job training, we should pause. Students from working-class, first-generation, rural, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities do not deserve a thinner education than students at Yale. They do not deserve only training while elites receive philosophy, history, literature, political theory, art, science, and critical debate. That would reproduce the very hierarchy higher education should challenge: broad intellectual formation for the privileged, narrow workforce preparation for everyone else.

The problem is not that public universities are too academic. The problem is that they are being pressured to abandon their academic and democratic missions in order to survive political attack, austerity, and market discipline (Valenzuela, 2026; also see Wray, 2024).

This is where Schrager’s institutional affiliation matters. Schrager is identified as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. That does not disqualify her from writing about higher education, nor does it mean every point she makes is wrong. But it does require context. 

The Manhattan Institute is not a neutral observer of higher education’s trust crisis. It has been directly involved in campaigns to reshape public universities, including through model legislation aimed at abolishing DEI bureaucracies, ending mandatory diversity training, restricting diversity statements, and eliminating identity-based preferences (Manhattan Institute, 2023). Inside Higher Ed reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-DEI higher education agenda drew from Manhattan Institute model legislation developed with Christopher Rufo and others (Moody, 2023).

This matters because the language of “restoring trust,” “rigor,” so-called “viewpoint diversity,” and “academic excellence” can operate in two very different ways. It can be a good-faith call for better universities. Or it can be a political vocabulary used to justify state intervention, program elimination, curricular control, anti-DEI laws, donor influence, and the disciplining of faculty and students whose work challenges inequality.

We are seeing the latter across the country.

In Texas, Senate Bill 17 eliminated DEI offices in public universities. Senate Bill 37 has expanded state authority over curriculum, governance, and faculty life. Programs in Mexican American and Latino Studies, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and related fields have been threatened, consolidated, renamed, or politically scrutinized. Across the country, public higher education is being told to prove its value while the very conditions that make it valuable—academic freedom, shared governance, critical inquiry, inclusive access, intellectual breadth—are being undermined.

That is why the Yale report, while useful, is incomplete. Others have similarly noted that the report gets some things right—especially around institutional effectiveness, public confidence, transparency, and the need for universities to respond more seriously to legitimate public concerns (Rudawsky, 2026). It names real concerns: costs, admissions, grade inflation, administrative growth, free speech, and public skepticism. 

However from the vantage point of Texas, the deeper issue is power.

Higher education is not simply being misunderstood. It is being remade. And much of that remaking is being carried out by political actors, ideological organizations, donors, and think tanks that have long viewed universities as sites to be captured or disciplined.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains helps us understand this longer history. MacLean traces how radical libertarian networks, including those associated with Charles Koch, sought to limit democratic capacity by reshaping law, policy, education, labor, taxation, and public institutions in ways that protect concentrated wealth from democratic demands (MacLean, 2017). One does not have to accept every claim in MacLean’s book to see the relevance: higher education has long been a battleground over whether democracy will serve the public or be constrained on behalf of market power.

Katherine Stewart’s work is equally illuminating. In Money, Lies, and God, Stewart documents an anti-democratic movement that brings together Christian nationalists, billionaire networks, disinformation campaigns, and far-right organizations seeking to transform American democracy from within (Stewart, 2025). Her reporting shows that the assault on public institutions is not random. It is organized, funded, and ideologically motivated. Universities, public schools, libraries, school boards, courts, and state legislatures are all part of the same terrain.

Seen in this light, Schrager’s question—how can colleges prove their value?—needs to be turned around. Higher education should absolutely be accountable to students, families, taxpayers, and the public. But we must also ask: Who is defining value? Who benefits when value is reduced to salary? Who gains when the humanities, Ethnic Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical social sciences are framed as politically suspect or economically wasteful? Who profits when public universities are weakened and privatized? Who gains when democratic education is replaced by workforce sorting?

A university’s value cannot be measured only by wages or return on investment. A university also proves its value when it helps students recognize propaganda, understand history, analyze policy, question authority, read the law, evaluate scientific evidence, work across difference, and imagine alternatives. It proves its value when it prepares students not only to enter the economy, but to shape it. It proves its value when it produces teachers, nurses, engineers, artists, organizers, lawyers, scientists, public servants, writers, parents, neighbors, and citizens capable of democratic judgment.

This is why Ethnic Studies is central, not peripheral, to the university’s value. Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and related fields teach students to understand how power works historically and structurally. They connect knowledge to community, memory, identity, policy, and justice. They help students see that democracy is not only a set of institutions, but a practice of belonging, critique, participation, and repair.

In a state like Texas, this is especially urgent. Texas is young, diverse, multilingual, and multiracial. Its future depends on students who can navigate complexity, understand multiple histories, communicate across communities, and participate in democratic life. To dismantle or weaken the very fields that prepare students for this future is not academic reform. It is civic disinvestment.

To be clear, universities should not dismiss public concerns. They should address affordability, debt, student support, admissions transparency, administrative growth, uneven teaching quality, and ideological narrowness where it exists. They should strengthen academic rigor and protect open inquiry. They should make clearer to students and families what a college education offers.

But they should not accept a market-only definition of value. Nor should they allow organizations that are actively working to narrow public higher education to present themselves as neutral arbiters of trust.

If higher education wants to regain public trust, it must do more than prove its economic payoff. It must tell a better truth about what it is for.

Higher education is for work, yes. But it is also for democracy. It is for complexity. It is for memory. It is for ethical judgment. It is for public reason. It is for learning how to live with others in a plural society. It is for asking not only, “What job will this get me?” but also, “What kind of world are we building, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it, and how might it be otherwise?”

The crisis, then, is not simply that universities have lost public trust. It is that trust is being weaponized by forces that want to shrink the democratic mission of higher education. The answer is not to make universities less academic for most students and more intellectually expansive for elites. The answer is to make the full promise of higher education available to all students.

That means defending affordability, access, academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, the humanities, the sciences, professional education, and the civic purposes of the university together.

Colleges do need to prove their value. But their value cannot be proven by surrendering to the very forces that are trying to undercut them.

Their value will be proven by defending the university as a democratic public good.

References

Association of American Colleges and Universities. (2025, December 11). New national survey finds strong employer confidence in higher education: Findings show clear alignment between liberal education outcomes and evolving workforce needs, AAC&U. https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/new-national-survey-finds-strong-employer-confidence-in-higher-education

Finley, A. P. (2023). The career-ready graduate: What employers say about the difference college makes. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/research/the-career-ready-graduate-what-employers-say-about-the-difference-college-makes

Finley, A. P. (2025). The agility imperative: How employers view preparation for an uncertain future. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/research/the-agility-imperative

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Viking.

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

Moody, J. (2023, February 6). DeSantis debuts a new conservative playbook for ending DEI. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2023/02/06/desantis-debuts-new-conservative-playbook-ending-dei

Rudawsky, D. (2026, April 28). What Yale got right, and what the trust crisis still demands, Institutional Effectiveness Weekly, 37. https://donrudawsky.substack.com/p/what-yale-got-right-and-what-the

Schrager, A. (2026, May 4). Colleges face a choice: Prove their value or risk losing students, Bloomberg Opinion. https://www.statesman.com/opinion/columns/article/universities-trust-enrollment-decline-opinion-22232350.php

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Valenzuela, A. (2026, April 28). The wrong crisis: What the Yale report misses in the age of manufactured mistrust. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-wrong-crisis-what-yale-report.html

Wray, A. (2024, March 27). How these 10 states’ anti-DEI laws will impact college campuses, Reckon.
https://www.reckon.news/justice/2024/03/how-these-9-states-anti-dei-laws-will-impact-college-campuses.html

Yale University. (2026). Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Yale University.

Colleges face a choice: Prove their value or risk losing students 

By Allison Schrager, Bloomberg Opinion | Austin American-Statesman, May 4, 2026


University of Texas students walk through campus last year. If the U.S. values economic mobility, the whole system of higher education needs to regain the trust of the public, Allison Schrager writes.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

Last week Yale University took the first step on the road to recovery: It admitted it had a problem. That problem is a lack of trust — and the damage that Yale and other top schools have done isn’t to themselves, it is to the entire system of U.S. higher education.

But if universities want to offer a truly rigorous education that is open to good-natured debate, students and faculty of different political backgrounds will need to feel more welcome. Without substantial change, U.S. universities may squander what little trust they have — and the country will be worse off.

America’s elite universities, which produce world-class research and attract top scholars from around the globe, should be a source of pride. But most Americans mistrust the U.S. higher education system, and last year Yale’s president assigned a committee to study the reasons why. The resulting report identifies several culprits: high tuition costs, opaque admissions practices, a politically monolithic culture, and a weak commitment to academic rigor and open debate.These perceptions, the report concedes, are not entirely wrong. The irony here is that even if Yale does nothing to change, it will probably be fine. Elite students and scholars will still want to go there. Donors will still give them money. The consequences will redound for people who go to schools not named Yale or Harvard.

Anyone who would consider a top school like Yale won’t decide against college altogether because of the flaws and excesses detailed in this report. I worry more about the first-generation students who are ambivalent about going to college in the first place, uncertain about whether the investment is worth it and whether they can stick with it.

RELATED: If UT wants to restore public trust, leaders must earn it

In the last 60 years, getting a college degree became part of the American Dream. Technology and the economy changed in ways that rewarded graduates with higher earnings. The result was that many more people — not just the children of the elite but first-generation students too — went to college.

In the last few years, however, this trend has started to reverse. Now about 62% of high school graduates enroll in college or university, down from 70% several years ago.

There is no single reason Americans have turned on higher education, although one big one is that a degree does not pay off like it used to. If you graduate from a four-year degree program at most schools, the odds are still very good that your degree will confer higher earnings over your lifetime. But it is no longer a sure thing. And as tuition got more expensive after 2000, the college wage premium also stagnated. It seems like college is no longer such a good deal.

Still, given the positive expected value, economics alone can’t explain falling enrollments. One reason could be that the mission of many elite universities is muddled. Back when only a small fraction of the population went to college, it could be just a place to read great books, have fun, and stay up late in your dorm room debating Marxism. When it was over, you got a job in banking or law. Elite universities were especially good at providing that experience, and graduates were rewarded with higher pay.

ALSO READ: UT’s restructuring blurs rich differences into a single ‘Other’

But once more people started going to college, the experience had to provide more transparent economic value. In theory, less elite schools could have become more like trade schools, but this didn't happen (perhaps because the less elite schools are largely staffed by graduates of elite schools). Also the incentives were never there to change because the U.S. subsidizes all college degrees, even if some pay off more than others.

What if the mission was just academic excellence? In that case, almost all universities — and especially elite ones — failed. Most students don’t go to elite universities, but these schools get outsized attention. So it’s hard not to notice how the supposedly best and brightest students don’t care about their classes, don’t get real grades, and often seem comically immature when trying to be taken seriously. Then students had the nerve to demand the government forgive their loans, an unpopular stance with many Americans.

If these elite schools can’t deliver on their most basic mission, what does that say about the system as a whole? The financial returns to a degree have been falling for years, but the decline in enrollments and erosion of trust is relatively recent, and coincides with many of the controversies that have erupted on elite campuses.

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America’s higher education system is already shrinking and will probably shrink further, especially if it continues to be hard for graduates to find jobs. Some colleges are closing, and universities are focused on degrees that offer a higher earning potential and are cutting departments that are less popular.

These falling enrollments may well be justified. At the same time, for all its problems, college remains an important contributor to economic mobility. It still usually produces higher earnings, and it brings together people from different economic backgrounds.

If the U.S. values economic mobility, the whole system of higher education needs to regain the trust of the public. If more marginal schools want to survive, they will need to be less academic and provide more training in skills that translate into jobs. More elite schools can restore trust by returning to a focus on academic excellence rather than trying to solve all of society’s problems.

Yale’s report does have some good ideas that other universities are also trying, such as curbing grade inflation, making admissions more transparent, reforming university governance and cutting administrative bloat. Fixing the perception of political bias will be harder, especially since most academics lean left.

But if universities want to offer a truly rigorous education that is open to good-natured debate, students and faculty of different political backgrounds will need to feel more welcome. Without substantial change, U.S. universities may squander what little trust they have — and the country will be worse off.


Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Freedom, Not Abandonment: The Democratic Case for a Social Market Economy, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 2, 2026

Freedom, Not Abandonment: The Democratic Case for a Social Market Economy

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 2, 2026

Link

I just finished listening to Clara E. Mattei’s Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention—a great Father’s Day gift, by the way, especially for anyone who enjoys a thoughtful challenge to economic common sense. 

Interestingly, the audiobook is currently available for free on the Barnes & Noble website, which feels delightfully “uncapitalistic.” I have only listened to the audiobook version, but as a non-economist, I found it remarkably accessible. One advantage of listening is that you can slow down the reading speed, giving yourself time to chew on concepts and findings that might otherwise pass by too quickly.

Mattei helps us see that capitalism is not only an economic system; it is a political order that defines freedom in a very narrow way. It tells us we are free when markets are free, even if people lack health care, housing, education, retirement security, or meaningful political voice. 

This is why the concept of a social market economy is useful. It offers a way to reject both market abandonment and caricatures of socialism by insisting on two democratic commitments at once: a social floor beneath everyone and limits on the corporate power that distorts public life. 

In this sense, the struggle for public goods and the struggle against corporate capture are not separate struggles. They are both struggles to make freedom real.

In the U.S., we are often taught to associate capitalism with liberty, opportunity, self-reliance, and prosperity. We are told that markets reward hard work, private enterprise creates abundance, and public goods are either unaffordable or inefficient. Yet for most people, our current economic order increasingly means debt, precarity, unaffordable health care, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, weakened public schools, and the constant fear of falling behind.

Mattei’s intervention is powerful because she does not treat capitalism as neutral. Capitalism does not simply organize markets; it organizes people’s lives, fears, dependencies, and imaginations. It teaches us that unemployment is natural, poverty is personal failure, inflation must be solved by disciplining workers, and public institutions must always be cut, consolidated, or privatized in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Early in Escape from Capitalism, Mattei grounds this argument in the staggering scale of inequality that capitalism produces and then normalizes. She notes that in the United States, the wealth of the top 1 percent now rivals that of the bottom 90 percent, even as tens of millions of people continue to live in poverty (Mattei, 2026). This is not a small imbalance or temporary distortion. It is a social order in which wealth accumulates upward while insecurity spreads downward.

Mattei also turns our attention globally, showing how capitalism links poverty in one place to wealth accumulation elsewhere. In one vivid example, she discusses Mumbai’s Dharavi, one of the world’s largest informal settlements, where workers generate enormous economic value while much of that value flows away from them and into distant circuits of capital (Mattei, 2026; also see Behal, 2026). The point is not simply that inequality exists. The point is that inequality is organized through systems of ownership, labor, finance, and policy that make deprivation appear natural while making accumulation appear deserved.

This is one of Mattei’s most important insights: the economy is not a machine governed by natural laws. It is made and remade through policy, law, banking, taxation, budgeting, education, and ideology. When we are told, “there is no money,” “there is no alternative,” or “we have no choice,” we should pause. These are rarely neutral statements. More often, they are political decisions disguised as necessity.

Mattei helps us see that capitalism survives not only by extracting labor and wealth, but by making alternatives appear impossible. It narrows our sense of democracy. We may be allowed to vote, but we are not encouraged to ask whether democracy should extend into the economy, the workplace, the university, or the systems that determine whether people have health care, housing, education, food, clean water, and retirement security.

This narrowing of democracy is not only economic. It is political. The same system that concentrates wealth also allows concentrated wealth to shape elections, legislation, courts, universities, and public policy. 

This is where Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission matters so deeply (Supreme Court of the United States, 2010; Weiner, 2025).

If Mattei helps us see how concentrated wealth disciplines economic life,

Citizens United helps us see how concentrated wealth distorts democratic life. The 2010 Supreme Court decision did not simply expand “free speech” to include corporations. It expanded the political power of corporations, wealthy donors, and dark-money networks to influence public life while ordinary people are told that democracy still means one person, one vote.

The logic is painfully familiar. In the economy, corporations are treated as engines of freedom even when people are abandoned to debt, low wages, medical bankruptcy, and insecurity. In politics, corporations and wealthy interests are treated as “speakers” in the democratic process even when their money overwhelms the voices of ordinary citizens. In both cases, power disguises itself as freedom.

Photo Credit: AP Kelleher

That is why Hawaii’s recent effort to challenge the legacy of Citizens United is so important. In 2026, Hawaii enacted a first-of-its-kind law aimed at limiting corporate and dark-money influence in elections by redefining corporations as artificial entities created by the state, rather than natural persons entitled to the same political rights as human beings (Kelleher, 2026). 

I interject here to recommend two documentaries that make these dynamics vivid for students: Kimberly Reed’s Dark Money and CNN’s Deep in the Pockets of Texas. Dark Money examines the influence of untraceable corporate money on elections through the case of Montana and the real-life consequences of the Citizens United decision. 

Deep in the Pockets of Texas, reported by Ed Lavandera, brings the issue home by showing how a small number of wealthy donors have shaped politics in Texas, from school boards and city councils to the state legislature. Both films work especially well in the college classroom because they help students see that campaign finance is not an abstract legal issue; it is a struggle over who gets heard, whose interests count, and whether democracy can survive when money speaks louder than people.

The law is expected to face legal challenges, but its moral and democratic significance is already clear. Hawaii is asking a question the entire country should be asking: Why should entities created by law be allowed to dominate the very democracy that gives them legal existence?

Hawaii’s law matters because democracy cannot build or sustain a social market economy if corporations are permitted to dominate the political system that determines what counts as public policy, public investment, and the public good. Economic inequality becomes political inequality when corporations and billionaires can pour money into elections, shape public narratives, influence legislation, and punish dissent. 

We should not be surprised, then, when public schools are defunded, universities are disciplined, Ethnic Studies is attacked, labor is weakened, and privatization is presented as common sense. These are not isolated developments. They are part of a larger political economy in which concentrated wealth seeks to govern public life.

This is why Mattei’s work matters so deeply for those of us concerned with public education, higher education, Ethnic Studies, Mexican American Studies, gender studies, democracy, and the future of Texas. 

The attack on public goods is not separate from the attack on knowledge. The dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices; the consolidation or weakening of fields of study; the narrowing of curricula; and the privatization of education are all part of a broader political economy. They tell us that what belongs to the public must be reduced, managed, disciplined, or sold off.

Mattei gives us a language for naming this. Capitalism does not only exploit labor; it also narrows democracy. It tells us that education must serve the market rather than the public. It tells universities to behave like corporations, students to think of themselves as consumers, faculty to produce measurable outcomes rather than cultivate critical thought, and communities to treat their histories, languages, and ways of knowing as luxuries rather than foundations for democratic life.

This is precisely why Ethnic Studies is so threatening to authoritarian and market-driven forms of governance. Ethnic Studies teaches that people are not merely workers, consumers, taxpayers, or data points. It teaches that communities have histories, memories, struggles, epistemologies, and claims on the future. It teaches that democracy is not only about procedure; it is also about power, belonging, recognition, and repair.

Capitalism depends on organized forgetting. It asks us to forget colonization, slavery, segregation, land theft, labor exploitation, gendered violence, and the long histories of resistance that made democracy more real. It asks us to forget that public education itself emerged from struggle. It asks us to forget that the weekend, child labor laws, public schools, civil rights protections, bilingual education, voting rights, and workplace protections were not gifts from the wealthy. They were won by organized people.

At the same time, we need language that invites rather than alienates readers. In the United States, the word “socialism” often evokes fears of expropriation, state control, or the denial of individual differences and aspirations. Those associations are real, even when historically incomplete or politically exaggerated. For many readers, the word can shut down conversation before it begins.

So perhaps a more helpful way to speak is in terms of a social market economy: an economy that preserves individual freedom, entrepreneurship, private initiative, and personal ambition, but refuses to abandon people to economic ruin. A social market economy recognizes that freedom is hollow if losing a job, getting sick, aging, having a child, attending college, or needing housing can push a person or family into crisis.

A social market economy, understood through the lens of a caring economy, does not abolish markets or individuality; it insists that markets be regulated and oriented toward the human needs—health, education, housing, care, safety, and democratic voice—that make freedom real. 

This is not merely a semantic move; it is a conceptual shift that refuses both market fundamentalism and caricatures of socialism, opening political imagination beyond the false choice between market abandonment and state control, toward a democratic economic arrangement in which individual freedom is strengthened—not weakened—by a social floor beneath everyone.

This is where Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in economics, helps complete the argument. If Mattei shows how capitalism narrows freedom and Citizens United shows how corporate power distorts democracy, Sen gives us a fuller language for what freedom actually requires. 

In Development as Freedom, Sen argues that genuine development should be measured not simply by income or market growth, but by the expansion of people’s real freedoms—their actual capabilities to live lives they have reason to value (Sen, 1999). His argument is important because he rejects the narrow idea that freedom is only “freedom from government.” Freedom also requires positive social conditions. A person who is formally “free” but lacks health care, schooling, food, housing, safety, or political voice is not meaningfully free.

That distinction matters. Public health care, public education, affordable housing, child care, and retirement security should not be dismissed as charity, dependency, or government overreach. They are collective investments in human capability. They expand the range of real choices available to people and make it possible for individuals and communities to participate more fully in economic, civic, cultural, and democratic life.

A society with a strong social floor does not eliminate individuality. It makes individuality more meaningful. People can take risks, start businesses, pursue education, care for family members, change jobs, create art, or speak politically when they are not living one emergency away from collapse. A welfare system that prevents people from hitting rock bottom economically is not the enemy of freedom. It is one of freedom’s preconditions.

But this requires more than social programs. It requires democracy protected from corporate capture. A social market economy cannot flourish if the political system itself is flooded with corporate and dark money. Public goods require public power. Public power requires democratic accountability. And democratic accountability requires that human beings—not corporations, artificial entities, or billionaire-funded networks—remain at the center of political life.

These questions are urgent in Texas. We are living through a moment in which public officials claim to defend freedom while constraining what can be taught, studied, named, or debated. They claim to protect taxpayers while redirecting public resources toward privatization. They claim to promote excellence while undermining the very programs that help historically excluded students see themselves as knowledge producers, leaders, and authors of the future.

When public institutions are weakened, communities lose democratic capacity. When curricula are narrowed, students lose historical memory. When universities are disciplined by political power, faculty lose academic freedom. When public goods are privatized, ordinary people lose access to the resources that make meaningful freedom possible. And when corporate money dominates elections, the people most harmed by these decisions have the least power to stop them.

For Texas, this is especially consequential. Our state’s future is diverse, multilingual, multiracial, and young. Yet our political leadership continues to legislate against that future by attacking DEI, Ethnic Studies, public education, voting rights, and democratic participation. These attacks are often justified in the language of efficiency, neutrality, excellence, or fiscal restraint. Mattei helps us understand that such language is not innocent. It is often the vocabulary through which power protects itself.

To escape capitalism, then, is not simply to imagine a distant alternative. It is to reclaim the present by insisting that health care, education, housing, retirement, clean water, public knowledge, and democratic participation are not mere commodities. They are conditions of collective life. Freedom is not being abandoned to the market. Freedom is not choosing among unaffordable options. Freedom is not debt. Freedom is not silence in the face of political intimidation. Freedom is the ability of people and communities to shape the conditions under which they live, learn, work, remember, and dream.

This is why the defense of Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, and public education is not a narrow academic matter. It is part of a larger democratic struggle. These fields teach us to see the world historically, relationally, and structurally. They expose the myths that justify inequality. They remind students that the present was made—and therefore can be remade.

Mattei’s great contribution is to remind us that capitalism is not destiny. It is a political order, and political orders can be challenged. Hawaii’s challenge to Citizens United reminds us that corporate power is not destiny either. It, too, is a legal and political arrangement. It, too, can be contested.

The first step is intellectual: to stop mistaking domination for freedom, austerity for responsibility, privatization for innovation, market dependence for democracy, and corporate spending for speech. The next step is collective: to build institutions, movements, curricula, laws, and public policies that invest in people rather than discipline them.

That is the work before us. Not charity. Not nostalgia. Not reform around the edges of a system that produces abandonment by design.

The work is democratic reconstruction.

The work is reclaiming the public good.

The work is recovering freedom itself.

References

Behal, A. (2026, April 15). One of Asia’s richest men is grabbing sprawling slum and crushing its economy. Pulitzer Center. https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/one-asias-richest-men-grabbing-sprawling-slum-and-crushing-its-economy

Kelleher, J. S. (2026, May 14). New Hawaii law targets corporate influence in politics after Citizens United ruling. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/corporate-campaign-money-citizens-united-hawaii-71a28bc7e8f6e0279b31e999f222519a

Lavandera, E. (Reporter). (2022, June 24). Deep in the pockets of Texas [Television special]. CNN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3PTuADIHQ

Mattei, C. E. (2026). Escape from capitalism: An intervention. Simon & Schuster.

Reed, K. (Director). (2018). Dark money [Film]. PBS Distribution; POV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(film)

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.

Supreme Court of the United States (2010). Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

Weiner, D. I. (2025, January 29). Citizens United, explained, Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained

Undermining Our Future: Deportations, DACA, and Lost Potential, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Undermining Our Future: Deportations, DACA, and Lost Potential

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 2, 2026

In a February 26, 2026 piece authored by Bazail-Eimil in Politico, we learn that
Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deported 86 DACA students despite longstanding protections, exposing a stark and troubling reality about the fragility of that promise. Sadly, by now, this number is certainly higher.

There is no other way to describe it: this is a betrayal. Young people brought to this country as children—many of whom have done everything asked of them—are now being detained and deported by the very system that once told them they could study, work, and build a future here.

These are not abstract policy decisions. They are lives disrupted. 

DACA recipients undergo repeated background checks, pursue education, and contribute to their communities. Yet they are now being swept up under shifting enforcement priorities, sometimes for minor or unproven infractions. I am aware that due to their assimilation in U.S. schools, many of them are not fully literate in the Spanish language—even if they can speak it—and, as a result, face uncertain futures in their parents' home countries. 

When our government callously discards a generation it helped raise and educate, it sends an unmistakable message: no amount of effort, achievement, or compliance is enough to guarantee belonging, and even those who play by the rules can be cast aside without warning.

Moreover, this is where the idea of “wasted talent"—a topic covered in the documentary I just posted—becomes painfully real. 

Many DACA recipients are students, professionals, and essential workers—individuals who have already invested in this country and are poised to give even more. Deporting them does not just harm them and their families personally, it strips the nation of skills, ambition, and potential that cannot easily be replaced. At a time when the U.S. depends on a strong, educated workforce, these actions undermine our own capacity to compete and thrive.

How does shooting ourselves in the foot like this make any sense?

They are exactly the kind of young people the U.S. claims to need—bilingual, educated, and ready to contribute in high-demand fields. Deporting them is not just a moral failure; it is a strategic one. It drains the country of human capital we have already helped develop, weakening our workforce at a time when global competition for talent is intensifying.

The consequences reach far beyond immigration policy. We are actively undermining our own future. A country that turns away its own investment in human potential is not just being short-sighted and dishonest about its expressed concerns regarding "return in investment" (ROI)—it is choosing decline. The loss is not abstract. It will be felt in classrooms, industries, and communities for years to come.

Policies that disproportionately target Latino communities and dismantle pathways like DACA echo a broader pattern that many see as rooted in white nationalist thinking about who deserves to be American. A country that embraces that logic is choosing division over shared prosperity, and risking a future diminished by its own decisions.

Reference

Bazail-Eimil, E. (2026, February 26). DHS admits it deported more than 80 DACA recipients, Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/26/dhs-daca-immigration-noem-dreamers-00801921


DHS admits it deported more than 80 DACA recipients
“Dreamers” who came to the U.S. as children are protected under U.S. law, so deportations of them are unusual.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in her letter to senators that Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals “comes with no right or entitlement to remain in the United States indefinitely.”
| Caitlin O'Hara/AP

By Eric Bazail-Eimil / 02/26/2026 04:05 PM EST

From Deficit to Doctrine: The Hidden Logic Behind the University of North Texas Denton's Drastic Program Cuts, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

From Deficit to Doctrine: The Hidden Logic Behind the University of North Texas Denton's Drastic Program Cuts

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 28, 2026

The headline in the Texas Tribune is is nothing short of staggering: "University of North Texas to cut more than 70 programs and minors to trim $45 million deficit." At first glance, the decision by the University of North Texas to eliminate more than 70 academic programs, minors, and certificates appears to be a straightforward case of institutional belt-tightening. A $45 million deficit, declining international enrollment, and reduced state funding are presented as the primary drivers. President Harrison Keller has been explicit: no state official directed these cuts. On its surface, then, this reads as a story of fiscal responsibility.

But to read it that way alone is to miss two critical dynamics. First, the revenue shortfall is tied to the steep decline in international students—who have long subsidized public universities by paying full tuition. Second, it obscures how power operates in the current context. In Texas today, policy does not always arrive as an explicit mandate; it often works through what might be called anticipatory compliance—a form of governance in which institutions reorganize themselves in response to political signals rather than direct edicts.

Hence, the pattern of what is being eliminated matters. The phase-out of programs in Women and Gender Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Latino and Latin American studies, Mexican American Studies, Africana Studies, and Asian studies is not incidental. It reflects a broader alignment between institutional decision-making and an increasingly restrictive political climate around race, gender, and knowledge itself.

The university’s stated rationale rests on metrics—low enrollment, high instructional costs, and a concept that has gained traction in higher education: “time to value.” Programs are evaluated according to how quickly graduates can recoup the cost of their degrees through post-graduation earnings. Framed this way, the cuts appear pragmatic. Yet this metric quietly narrows the meaning of education. 

Fields that interrogate power, history, language, and inequality rarely produce immediate financial returns. Their contributions are less easily quantified but no less essential. They cultivate the habits of mind necessary for democratic life: critical analysis, historical awareness, and the capacity to engage across difference. To judge them primarily through wage outcomes is not simply to measure their value differently; it is to redefine what counts as valuable knowledge in the first place.

Although President Keller has emphasized that the program cuts are separate from political pressures, the broader context cannot be ignored. In recent years, Texas has witnessed the dismantling of DEI infrastructures through legislation such as Senate Bill 17, alongside executive and administrative directives that narrow acceptable discourse on race, gender, and sexuality. Universities have been asked to review curricula under compliance frameworks that, while not explicitly banning certain fields, clearly signal heightened scrutiny. 

At the same time, faculty governance has been weakened through measures such as Senate Bill 37 , shifting decision-making authority away from traditional shared governance structures. In such an environment, institutions do not need to be told what to cut. They understand the terrain well enough to adjust on their own.

This is what policy looks like when it operates without formal declaration. No directive is issued, yet outcomes begin to mirror political priorities. The language remains managerial—efficiency, sustainability, return on investment—but the effects are unmistakably political. The adoption of “time to value” as a guiding principle further embeds this shift, privileging disciplines aligned with immediate labor market demands while marginalizing those that offer critical perspectives on society. 

Linguistics, for instance, may not produce the highest salaries, but its applications span law, education, and technology. Ethnic studies fields are indispensable for understanding demographic change and inequality in a state as diverse as Texas. Their elimination signals not just a budgetary decision, but a reordering of intellectual priorities—raising questions about coherence as the university simultaneously advances a new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, a field deeply rooted in linguistics (Breeding-Gonzales, 2026).

Equally telling is the reported lack of meaningful faculty consultation. This reflects a broader transformation in governance across Texas higher education, where decisions once shaped through deliberation are increasingly centralized. As shared governance erodes, so too does the ability of institutions to resist external pressures—whether economic, political, or ideological. What emerges is a system in which major academic decisions can be made quickly, efficiently, and with limited internal dissent.

The consequences are already visible. Students are forced to reconsider their academic trajectories. Departments lose the capacity to sustain intellectual communities. Campuses become thinner spaces, offering fewer opportunities to engage deeply with questions of race, gender, and inequality. Over time, the public itself is affected, as the range of knowledge produced and circulated through these institutions narrows.

None of this occurs through dramatic decree. It unfolds incrementally, through decisions that, taken individually, appear reasonable—even necessary. But collectively, they amount to something far more significant: a restructuring of knowledge itself.

The question, then, is not whether universities should be fiscally responsible. It is what values guide those decisions. If higher education is reduced to workforce preparation alone, programs that challenge power and expand democratic understanding will always be at risk. If, however, universities are understood as public goods—institutions responsible for cultivating not only workers but informed and engaged citizens—then a different calculus is required.

What is happening at the University of North Texas is not an isolated development. It is part of a broader reconfiguration of higher education in Texas and across the nation. The language used to justify it may be technocratic, but the underlying logic is unmistakably political. And its consequences will shape not only what universities teach, but what society is able to know about itself.

Reference

Breeding-Gonzales, L. (2026, February 24). UNT to launch undergraduate AI degree this fall, Denton Record-Chronicle.

University of North Texas to cut more than 70 programs and minors to trim $45 million deficit

Offering new details, President Harrison Keller said no state official pushed for the changes, which include phasing out degrees in linguistics and Latin American and women’s and gender studies.

by Jessica Priest March 20, 2026, 2:15 p.m. Central Updated March 25, 2026, 1:40 p.m. Central


Students walk the University of North Texas campus in Denton on Feb. 24, 2022. Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune

University of North Texas President Harrison Keller offered new details this week after announcing plans to cut or consolidate more than 70 academic programs, minors and certificates as it works to close a projected $45 million budget shortfall driven by a sharp decline in international enrollment and reduced state funding.

“We weren’t directed to eliminate programs by any state official,” Keller said in a March 24 interview with The Texas Tribune about a plan that includes phasing out its linguistics degrees, eliminating a women’s and gender studies master’s program and cutting a bachelor’s degree in Latino and Latin American Studies, along with 25 undergraduate minors and more than 40 certificate programs.

The minors being eliminated include women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American studies, Africana studies, Asian studies as well as dance, geology and special education.

The cuts come amid a broader political climate in which Texas public universities have faced pressure from state Republican leaders and conservative activists to limit teaching about gender, race and sexuality.

Last fall, the UNT System, like other public university systems in the state, ordered a review of its courses. Some university systems said the reviews were meant to ensure compliance with an executive order from President Donald Trump, a directive from Gov. Greg Abbott and House Bill 229, all of which recognize only two sexes, male and female, though none explicitly bans teaching gender-related topics.

The UNT System did not cite a specific law when it ordered its review.

Keller said that review is separate from the decision to cut areas of study and expected to be complete by April 1.

Earlier this year, Texas A&M eliminated its women’s and gender studies program, while the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at San Antonio moved to consolidate programs focused on race, gender and ethnicity.

Keller and Provost Michael McPherson said in a March 19 message to the campus community that the decisions followed a “careful review.” They said the linguistics department has seen declining enrollment since 2021, along with higher instructional costs and lower “time to value,” and that the merger with the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures will take effect Sept. 1.

They said the master’s programs being cut enrolled an average of 15 or fewer students over the past five years, while the undergraduate minors had 20 or fewer students since 2021 and certificate programs had fewer than two students per year.

Students enrolled in affected programs will be able to complete their degrees, but new students will no longer be admitted.

“We must adapt to meet the changing needs of our students, employers and communities across Texas and beyond, especially by providing degree and credential pathways that translate into opportunities beyond graduation,” they wrote.

William Salmon, chair of the linguistics department, told the Tribune that faculty learned of the decision shortly before every else did.

“And we weren’t consulted on the matter at all,” he said.

Salmon declined to elaborate further, saying he was focused on supporting students and faculty and “answering the many questions coming in.”

University officials did not immediately respond to detailed questions last week, but Keller said this week that the changes are expected to save the university “a few million dollars” over the next several years, though the exact amount remains unclear. He said the university uses “time to value” to measure how long it takes graduates to recoup the cost of their degrees, factoring in tuition, lost wages while enrolled and typical earnings after graduation, and that officials aim for programs to reach that point in less than 10 years.

Last month, UNT offered buyouts to faculty with at least 15 years of service. Tenured faculty could receive a payout equal to one year of salary, while some non-tenure-track faculty on multiyear contracts could receive half a year’s salary to leave early. About 30 faculty members have applied ahead of the the April 10 deadline, Keller said, and no faculty have been laid off, though some adjunct instructors may not be rehired if their courses were eliminated.

UNT is also planning to move more lectures online in response to the budget shortfall. Beginning this fall, more than 40 courses will shift to a model where lectures are delivered online and students attend weekly in-person sessions in smaller groups focused on discussion and problem-solving. Keller said the hybrid courses will include an additional $35 per credit hour fee, capped at $315 per semester, to cover technology costs, and described the model as a way to serve more students without making more hires.

It’s not yet clear the total number of students enrolled in the affected programs or how long required courses will continue to be offered.

Grace Youngberg, a third-year linguistics major, said she was shocked and felt “disrespected” by the decision and lack of prior notice.

She had planned to attend graduate school at UNT and pursue a career in forensic linguistics, applying language analysis in legal settings to help people better understand and communicate in court proceedings.

Now, she said, she may have to look elsewhere to continue her studies.

Youngberg also questioned the university’s emphasis on “time to value.”

“Putting a monetary value on education to begin with is closed-minded,” she said, adding that there is a need for linguists even if the field is not the highest paying.

Nearly 47,000 students attend the Denton university.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: University of North Texas, University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.