East Carolina University announced plans to discontinue 44 undergraduate and graduate programs after an internal portfolio review, part of a broader effort to eliminate $25 million in expenses over time. ECU said it has teach-out plans for enrolled students and that the cuts will not require layoffs. It also described consolidation of institutional units, including merging two health colleges into a single College of Health and Human Sciences and combining library services units. The university’s chancellor, Philip Rogers, said the process requires attention to “human aspects,” while senior leaders reported that roughly three-fourths of the programs targeted were recommended by faculty. ECU pointed to low performance against enrollment and graduate-rate benchmarks for the bottom portion of programs. The initiative highlights how public universities are responding to falling growth assumptions by shifting from expansion to “right-sizing,” with immediate implications for departmental governance, faculty transitions, and student pathways.