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Dear Cal State East Bay community,

As you may recall, throughout this past spring semester we have conducted a Focused Program Review (FPR) as a follow-up to the previous year’s Low Degree Conferral Program Review. As our enrollment has contracted, we could see a group of our academic programs (degrees and concentrations) had consistently low enrollments making them unsustainable from a financial and student experience point of view. The FPR process was developed in collaboration with the Academic Senate to augment and expedite our normal program review process. 

Though aligning our size with our current enrollment and ultimately reducing costs were goals of this review, we also seek to reduce curricular complexity and to improve the student experience by focusing on degree programs and concentrations or credentials with more robust demand and that we can deliver well. The results of this review are in no way a reflection of the quality of a program, the alumni of that program or its past vitality. Circumstances, demand, competition, and our ability to financially subsidize low enrolled programs have all changed. Cal State East Bay needs to adapt to its current reality for future growth and financial stability. These are difficult decisions, and much thought and care have gone into making them.

I’d like to express my gratitude to Interim Provost Greer and her team for coordinating the process. In addition, I’d like to thank members of the Focused Program Review Advisory Task Force, a group formed in collaboration with our Academic Senate and that also included members from the CAPR and COBRA standing Senate committees. They played a key role in creating a guiding framework for the review process and identifying quantitative criteria and weightings to determine programs to be reviewed. A list of programs was subsequently developed and shared with campus.

Interim Provost Greer and I invited all department chairs, program directors and any faculty from these programs to meet with us to provide additional qualitative information about the program or revision plans already underway. We were gratified to learn that so many departments had already made the decision to discontinue or consolidate concentrations and degrees, making our job much easier.

Below I have listed my decisions regarding all programs under review. Again, these decisions were not made lightly. All information was carefully weighed. Please see the Focused Program Review website for a complete list of the FPR decisions. 

Please note when a program is discontinued, we stop marketing the program or concentration and we allow current active students a pathway to completion (transfer to a different program or university or providing a period of time to complete remaining program requirements). We will refer discontinued programs to the CAPR committee to go through the existing process for discontinued programs. It’s important to recognize we can continue to offer courses in the discipline after discontinuation and students can achieve a degree of specialization through their selection of electives.

Thank you all for your engagement in this process. I appreciate all the feedback and information provided along the way, including that of external stakeholder groups.

Sincerely yours,

Cathy Sandeen

President

July 3, 2025