HEA 1001: Impact and Response

House Enrolled Act 1001 (HEA 1001-2025) is the 2025 law that defines the state’s 2025 budget. Beyond the budget, the act includes provisions governing state institutions of higher education, including placing low-enrolled degree programs at risk of elimination by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education (ICHE). It establishes minimum graduation rates for degrees at all levels from associate to doctoral and calls on ICHE to establish a process to review programs and to decide whether they should be continued based on three-year average graduation rates.

The average graduation rate minimums are:

10 for Associates Degree Programs

15 for Bachelors Degree Programs

7 for Masters Degree Programs

3 for Doctoral Degree Programs

By early-summer, ICHE provided clarification that “program” refers to majors listed under a single CIP (Classification of Instructional Programs) code. Developed by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics, CIP codes provide a nationally-standardized taxonomy for comparing educational programs that may have differing names but similar learning goals. CIP codes are 6-digit numbers; the first (left-most) two digits correspond to large umbrella groupings, with each subsequent pair corresponding to narrower definitions.

The undergraduate majors in the Department of Theatre and Dance (Theatre, Sound for the Performing Arts, and Interdisciplinary Performance) are all included under a single degree program, the BA in Theatre (50.0501). Consequently, the “program” comprises the total number of students in all three.

The graduate plans of study in the Department (Acting, Costume Design, Lighting Design, Scenic Design, Technical Direction, Sound Design, Audio Technology) are all included under a single degree program, the MFA in Dramatic Arts (50.0501). Consequently, the “program” comprises the total number of students in all of these plans of study.

Based on the data being shared so far by ICHE, whether a student declares a major in the BA in Theatre degree first or second will not matter; all declared majors will count toward the total graduation rate.

Based on the information shared so far by ICHE, after receiving notice that programs are below threshold, institutions will have the opportunity to request one of three paths forward for the program:

Conditional Approve to Continue with Improvement Plan and Monitoring

Restricted Approval to Continue: Commitment to Merge/Consolidate

Restricted Approval to Continue: Commitment to Suspend with Teach-Out

In other words, for under-threshold programs at Purdue, the university can propose eliminating them (after a four-year “teach out” period to allow current students to complete their programs), to merge them with other programs if doing so can be justified educationally and would bring them over threshold, or propose a plan to continue the program with specific actions intended to increase enrollments to get them above the threshold and to monitor the success of those plans.

ICHE needs to approve these proposals—simply making a proposal does not guarantee that it will be approved. At this time, it is unclear how difficult it will be to convince ICHE to approve proposals.

Unfortunately, no. The process of examining three-year average graduation rates will continue every year, and programs previously over-threshold could find themselves at risk during another year.

The three-year average graduation rate for the BA in Theatre for the years currently under consideration (2022-2024) is 6: well below the threshold of 15. (The three-year average for 2021-2023 was 12.) The three-year average for the MFA in Dramatic Arts for the years currently under consideration (2022-2024) is 5.67, again below the threshold of 7. (The three-year average for the years 2021-2023 was 5.)

In other words: our programs are under threshold and have been flagged for potential elimination.

Addressing this fact is priority number one for the Department, and I want to share some of what we are doing. Before I do, I think it is important to acknowledge that throughout the summer and fall of 2025, Joel Ebarb (in his role as Senior Associate Dean and then interim Dean of CLA) was in close contact with me and with Cheryl Qian (in her role as interim head of the Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance) about this process. Communication has been open and clear, in as much as possible considering the overall process has been nothing but murky statewide so far as ICHE has wrestled with how to implement the actions called for in HEA 1001.

Theatre graduation rates for undergraduate students at Purdue have fluctuated since 2017, from a high of 20 in 2017 to a low of 7 in 2019, back to a high of 19 in 2021 followed by a low of 6 the following year. These wild swings drive down three-year averages and are the result of forces both external and internal to the Department of Theatre and Dance. A slowing economy in 2016, a contraction of the non-profit live theatre sector through 2019, and the impact of the COVID pandemic on the entertainment industry in 2020 align with reduced matriculation of new students in theatre.

Additionally, undergraduate recruitment messaging focused on pre-professional training for careers in non-profit theatre and a massive turnover in faculty due to retirements from 2021 through 2023 appears to have contributed to a perception of poor return on investment for parents and prospective students when compared to larger BFA programs at nearby institutions in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Over the summer, I met with representatives from University Admissions to look at application, admission, and acceptance rates; this revealed that historically we have seen somewhere in the range of 60 to 80 applicants for Theatre, with roughly 50% of those receiving offers for admission. However, only about 15-20% of students who received an offer of admission accepted that offer. When we looked at where those who did not accept admission to Purdue did accept an offer, we learned that the vast majority accepted offers from the major BFA programs in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. This suggests that we have become the second-choice school for students who would prefer to attend a BFA program, rather than a first-choice school for students who would prefer a liberal arts approach to theatre and dance education that also emphasizes high-quality artistic and technical exploration in all disciplines.

At the MFA level, the story is a little different: we simply do not have enough graduate assistantships to fund more students than we already admit. Currently, we can support 17 0.5 FTE (half-time) graduate assistantships in Theatre and Dance, with an additional two supported by Hall of Music Productions. There are an incredibly large number of MFA programs across the U.S. that offer tuition waivers and salaries for graduate students, making competition to recruit students fierce; a strong selling point for the MFA—beyond the education and opportunities it offers—is the full-tuition waiver and relatively high salary for our graduate assistants. Consequently, the number of graduate students enrolled at any given moment will likely never exceed the number of assistantships we can offer. With a cap of 19 students in the three-year MFA program, we will never see a three-year average graduation rate that exceeds a little over 6.

With very different challenges at the undergraduate and graduate levels, different approaches to addressing the situation are necessary.

At the graduate level, because there is a mostly fixed limit to the number of students we can enroll, our options are limited: either suspend the program or merge it with another content-aligned graduate program. Because graduate curricula can be more flexible—students generally propose unique plans of study based on broad guidance from the faculty—combining with another program is somewhat easier.

As the MFA programs in Art & Design face similar challenges, Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, the interim chair of Art & Design, the graduate coordinators for Art & Design and Theatre & Dance (Shannon McMullen and Mercer Aplin), and I met in early fall 2025. We determined that we could combine the existing plans of study in both units to form a broadly framed, combined plan of study that would leave the existing content and student experiences largely untouched. (Indeed, we were able to identify potential opportunities for new and more intentional cross-disciplinary courses and experiences for students in both areas that a combined MFA facilitates more easily than separate programs.) Based on this, the Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance advanced to the Provost a plan to request “Restricted Approval to Continue: Commitment to Merge/Consolidate” the MFA programs in Dramatic Arts and Design.

At the undergraduate level, with the number of enrollments not limited by funding availability (indeed, through generous donations we are able to offer significant scholarship funds to incoming and returning undergraduate students) the possibility is open to increase enrollments and consequently graduation rates. To address this, we have launched improved recruitment efforts to drive new beginner matriculation and dual degree/double major students to increase overall graduation rates; these initiatives include:

Targeted outreach to 25 high school theatre programs in west, west-central, and northwest Indiana;

Admissions profile shift from pre-professional theatre students to students more interested in a liberal arts or cross-disciplinary focus;

Virtual open houses for students who have applied and for admitted students;

Targeted email messaging through CLA Admissions including information regarding scholarship opportunities;

Use of an email/contact info capture portal for recruiting events connected to central admissions for the University;

Engagement in statewide high school student theatre festivals in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio;

Participating in, and offering on-site scholarships at, statewide high school theatre festivals;

Student matinee performances of Department productions offered to high schools and middle schools in surrounding area;

Leveraging campus television systems to market cross-disciplinary and introductory course offerings;

Encouraging the over 120 students (on average) who declare a minor in Theatre or Dance to consider adding a dual degree/double major in Theatre.

In parallel, the Department has begun exploring curricular improvements to better meet student needs and program learning outcomes:

Modify existing courses to align with university core learning outcomes for Oral Communication, Information Literacy, Written Communication, and Science, Technology, and Society;

Develop new, cross-disciplinary “exploratory” courses that engage students as patrons/consumers of live entertainment, rather than solely as practitioners;

Modify major plans of study to streamline time to graduation for dual degree/double major students;

Partner with the College of Engineering, Purdue Polytechnic Institute, Daniels School of Business, and School of Hospitality and Tourism Management to develop advised dual degree plans of study and to explore new cross-disciplinary majors in Theatre that include courses from multiple units.

Based on the above assessment of enrollment trends and proposed immediate action items, the Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance advanced to the Provost a plan to request “Conditional Approval to Continue with Improvement Plan and Monitoring” for the BA programs in Theatre.