That is a question the UNC Board of Governors has to face every two years under a law requiring it to “encourage an economical use of the state’s resources.” Sometimes, programs are culled from the herd. In the latest review, out of 247 programs in the system that were identified as “low productive,” 22 were merged with other programs and 25 were discontinued.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Jesse Saffron takes a look at this effort at economizing.

An important but unaswered question is whether program discontinuation actually saves any money. A senior administrator was asked about that and replied that the faculty and resources would be “redeployed.” If you realized that you were spending some money needlessly, you probably wouldn’t think you had accomplished much if you simply “redeployed” the dollars — but then you spend your own money, while administrators spend other people’s money.

An alternative to dropping “low productive” programs would be to charge students differentially so as to reduce or eliminate cross-subsidies. Unfortunately, public universities can’t usually consider that.