With nurses in high demand, and the field remaining a popular career choice despite workforce shortages, Providence College officials had high hopes for the launch of a new nursing program this year.
Those hopes turned out to be warranted: the college only had about two months to promote the program before the start of the fall semester, but it still attracted 731 applicants to the new program. Fifty-nine of those applicants enrolled in the program, surpassing the college’s goal of 50.
The college is already raising the bar for next year, says Raul Fonts, senior associate vice president of enrollment management at PC, expanding the program’s enrollment goal to 75.
“I’m of the mind that we could receive upwards of 1,000 applications just for nursing this year for the next class,” Fonts said. That’s a figure that would amount to about one-fifth of the college’s overall current applicant pool, which has hovered at around 5,000 in recent years.
Though a liberal arts college, interest in professional majors – those that aim to prepare students for a particular career path rather than emphasizing breadth of knowledge – was already high at Providence College prior to the launch of the nursing program. Around 38% of students are majoring in one of the college’s four business tracks, Fonts says, and that percentage continues to climb. Even accounting, the business major with the smallest increase in the last application cycle, saw a 64% applicant increase.
Throughout the country, many colleges and universities are seeing a similar rise in students enrolling in professional majors. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 58% of bachelor’s degrees were awarded to students in six fields of study, led by business and health-related professions.
Professional majors didn’t completely dominate the remaining fields but still maintained a strong foothold: sciences and history; engineering; biological and biomedical sciences; and psychology rounded out the remaining six fields.
Nationally, an emphasis on professional majors has sometimes been at the expense of liberal arts programming, with institutions such as Simmons College in Boston and Marymount University in Virginia announcing they would be cutting some liberal arts majors due to low enrollment. And in the Ocean State, Rhode Island College last year cut seven such majors, also citing unsustainably low enrollment.
It’s not all dire news for liberal arts majors: at PC, for instance, so many students have expressed interest in the communications minor that administrators plan to make it a major, Fonts says. In fact, communications “is probably the single program that isn’t a major that we get asked about in the admission office,” Fonts said, noting that converting the program into a major feels overdue.
The field appeals to students for many of the same reasons proponents tout the liberal arts as a whole.
“It’s a program where you can go in a lot of different directions, and has transferable skills of all types,” Fonts said. “I think students and, most importantly, the parents are seeing the potential outcomes being very favorable.”
The University of Rhode Island has seen a similar rise in demand for its communications program, says Dean Libutti, associate vice president for enrollment management and student success at URI.
In October 2022, the university held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a $15 million renovation to its Harrington School of Communication and Media – not quite the lofty $150 million spent on a new engineering building but a favorable direction compared with the stagnation that has hit some liberal arts majors across the U.S.
Like Providence College, URI’s more established nursing program remains exceedingly popular, while interest in business-related majors is also on an upswing.
But this increased interest in professional majors isn’t happening equally, Libutti says. The university’s well-regarded pharmacy program has seen a decrease in enrollment, with this year’s yield coming up short of the goal of 120 to 130 pharmacy majors per year. It’s a trend seen in pharmacy programs nationwide.
“Our faculty and staff worked the hardest they’ve ever worked on [enrolling] that program,” Libutti said. “That used to be a program that had applicants upon applicants.”
And URI has had to cut back on some programming due to low enrollment in other fields, Libutti says. The university’s graduate degree in library science and information, for instance, is now offered online only.
That online program “has become quite popular,” Libutti said, but couldn’t continue in its traditional form.
Elsewhere in Rhode Island, Salve Regina University is also holding firm to its liberal arts foundations, says James Fowler, vice president for enrollment management and admission.
“Our enrollment has been pretty consistent over the past few years,” Fowler said. “We haven’t really seen a significant shift in demand for professional programs over liberal arts programs.”
But more students are looking to incorporate professional programming into their liberal arts education, Fowler says, with many adding concentrations in business, health care or entrepreneurship programs.
While students with liberal arts majors can benefit from these professional concentrations, Fonts says, the reverse also holds true.
“What makes our School of Business so unique is that every student at Providence College gets a foundation in the liberal arts,” Fonts said. “That’s what sets our nursing school apart, and our business school. Everyone is taking that strong foundation.”
