Over spring break, the Office of Enrollment Management and Marketing and the Office of Business and Finance of Seattle Pacific University released an email to all students announcing two new majors, tuition prices for next year and a new scholarship. The new majors are data science and biomedical engineering, with both being set to begin accepting students for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Alongside the email sent out to students, the Office of the President released a video reporting on the new majors and other news. To ease some of the possible questions students may have, President Deana L. Porterfield thanked students for making it through all of SPU’s changes over the past few months.
“Change is necessary, but it also brings opportunity,” President Porterfield said. “I am grateful for God’s faithfulness and SPU’s promising future. Thank you for being a part of this journey”
Despite the positive tone of the video and emails sent out to students, many of the recipients do not feel the same way.
Since the fall quarter, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions has been working thoroughly to attract new undergraduates to SPU. Falcon Fridays, tours and other admissions events can be seen occurring across SPU’s campus. What is primarily on students’ minds, however, is not what these announcements say but what they imply.
For some students, they received this feedback from the university with bitterness. This reaction stems from an announcement SPU made in late November of 2024, where the university made the decision to cut 19 majors.
Conner DeCoursey, a first-year student who was going to major in philosophy (which is no longer offered at SPU), had to switch majors when he came to SPU because he started in the winter quarter, just after his intended major stopped accepting students.
“My major currently is PPE. With a philosophy focus, it’s political science, philosophy and economics. My major before that was philosophy, which they unfortunately cut, even though I got accepted in the school with that,” DeCoursey said. “It was really hard, because I was already coming to SPU and then two weeks before I came in [for the winter quarter], they cut my major.”
DeCoursey ended up coming to SPU due to the lack of notice and being only days away from when he would go, but DeCoursey is transferring from SPU after the 2024-2025 academic year.
“It was really frustrating and, honestly, almost made me change my mind completely and not come here,” DeCoursey said. “I came here in the winter because of some complications with other things in my personal life. However, because of that major drop, I’m not going to be coming to SPU next year.
Although believing data science and biomedical engineering would be beneficial for students and the university, DeCoursey found the news from the university to be distasteful as someone who was promised a major that no longer exists.
“Our generation needs more data scientists and biomedical engineers. That’s very great for the future that I’m going into. So that’s the good part. However, I do not believe that outweighs the negative parts of when I first initially read that email,” DeCoursey said. “It was very passive-aggressive for SPU to really try and do that, especially for me as a person whose major was dropped just to add two new majors.”
Conner DeCoursey will be attending Seattle University in the fall of 2025 in order to pursue the education originally promised to him.
“I think it’ll make up for everything that, you know, unfortunately, SPU did not provide,” DeCoursey said.
To others, the email and video reaffirmed some students’ belief that SPU is downplaying its downsizing and debt.
Keighlee Bunker, a first-year student majoring in psychology, sees the timing for the announcement as convenient for the university as most possible incoming students have already committed.
“They cut a lot of [majors] during the winter, and then they send out a major email in spring to all of the future enrolled students as well saying, Look, we have new majors! The future enrolled students don’t know how many were just cut. They only see growth,” Bunker said. “I could be wrong, obviously, but I think that’s what’s happening because I think that quite a few students have a higher picture of SPU. They’re putting off something higher than what is actually going on.”
Bunker was one such student who had elevated expectations of SPU before coming in the fall quarter of 2024. Bunker’s experience at SPU was quite different from what she thought it would be once she came to campus and learned that the university’s websites were outdated.
“I felt misled in quite a few different things. First of all, there was a scholarship that I was going to be able to qualify for that would knock off around $10,000 extra that was on the [SPU] website that wasn’t actually real anymore because they had gotten rid of it,” Bunker said. “That wasn’t fantastic.”
One of the reasons Bunker originally settled on SPU was because she thought she wouldn’t need to take out student loans in order to attend the two years she needed for her bachelor’s degree. But with SPU’s cuts to programs and rising tuition costs, Bunker finds she no choice but to take out student loans in order to afford another year at SPU.
“With that scholarship, I thought I was going to get around $12,000, which would, by the time I worked over the summer, leave me enough for next year. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that scholarship,” Bunker said. “I have enough for this year, but next year I’m gonna have to work. I’m hoping I can get a job that pays $30 an hour. If not, then I’ll have to figure something out for the summer, but I am gonna have to take student loans out.”
When Bunker had her finalized cost estimates for attending SPU, neither she nor her parents were aware that the true costs would be much higher due faulty information from the university.
“It was $56,000 this year [2024-2025] to attend with the lowest meal plan and double room in Ashton. [If] you don’t have the suite style, you don’t have a single room, you don’t have [200] meals per term, you don’t have those expensive things, $56,000,” Bunker said. “I was told $44,000 of it would be covered. $34,000 of it was covered, and they said that my parents could take out a loan for another $5000 and the other $5000 didn’t exist. That $5,000 falls back onto my parents to be able to pay it. They’re still paying off their student loans.”
