News spread earlier this year of Portland Community College’s plan to close its Music and Sonic Arts (MUC) degree program. This decision by the college comes as part of a broad plan to ensure the college’s financial stability going forward. Despite public dissent and protests by faculty, students, and community members, the college plans to follow through with its decision. However, the department’s faculty has refused to give up. 

Music and Sonic Arts offers associates degrees and certificates in Music and Sonic Arts, and Creative Coding and Immersive Technologies. The Creative Coding curriculum combines technology with the arts, similar to Stanford’s CCRMA program. Students learn how to use hardware microcontrollers and programming languages Max/MSP and TouchDesigner in their artistic practice. The Music and Sonic Arts curriculum bridges the gap between music technology and a more traditional music education, teaching Max/MSP and recording techniques alongside classes in piano, music theory and composition. 

PCC’s Fiscal Sustainability Action Plan

The ending of the Music and Sonic Arts degrees come in the wake of PCC’s Fiscal Sustainability Action Plan. The plan was written in late 2024 and began to be implemented in early 2025. The FSAP is a complex plan that proposes many changes, large and small. 

There was a dramatic rise in expenses for PCC’s 2023-25 biennial budget. The college expected operating costs of $513 million, but that number in the revised budget was $594 million, a sixteen percent increase. Their revenue was higher as well: $541 million as compared to $517 million. Operating expenditures for 2025-27 are estimated at $595 million, also a dramatic increase from the previous years. This led to a dramatic reduction in their annual ending funds. If trends continue, the FSAP says, the college could be in the red by 2028 and could be in a $200 million deficit by 2031. 

The college’s goal is to shore up its finances in the coming years. It contends that increased competition for state funding and students enrolling in fewer courses could lead to major issues down the road. There are also increasing costs for information technology, utilities, and campus safety. The consulting group Vantage recently conducted a survey of the college’s IT infrastructure and estimates $20 million is needed for upgrades, for instance. The college thus needs to make major changes to ensure its long-term stability. To do this, the college needs to reduce general fund spending by $14.78 million dollars for the 2025-27 biennium. 

Another major concern is the ending fund, which covers various income shortfalls each year – if enrollment is lower than expected, or if grant funding comes in late, for instance. The FSAP aims to increase the ending fund from nine percent of the annual budget to twelve percent. However, Yvette Rosales, the lead stewart of full-time faculty for PCC’s faculty union, PCCFFAP, says this is, “totally unnecessary and, by account of almost 700 people in the community, is coming at the cost of our students and our reputation. The PCC Board does not require that the contingency fund be that high. They are essentially padding their savings account.” 

The Self-study Process

As part of the Fiscal Sustainability Action Plan, certain degree programs were asked to complete a self-study to assess their financial situation. This self-study process was part of a middle- to long-term process of improving the financial stability of each program. 

Music and Sonic Arts (MUC) was among the programs selected. The two primary concerns for the MUC degrees and certificates raised in the self-study process were “duplication and alignment with industry jobs,” as the administration told members of the MUC faculty. “Duplication” is when multiple courses have overlapping curricula. “Alignment with industry jobs” refers to the program offering degrees and certificates that existing jobs in the field require. The outcome was to be a set of recommendations for the program, to work through their financial difficulties. 

The FSAP plan states that certain budget items take priority and should be protected, including financial aid, student services, public safety, and facilities. Included in these protected budget items are “courses essential to the core of academic programs, such as Career Technical Education and high-enrolled transfer areas,” and “high-demand and emerging courses and CTE programs.” Music and Sonic Arts is one such CTE program. 

Students and teachers of programs on the chopping block were confused and frustrated by the self-review process. Many claim the process was hasty and placed an undue burden upon faculty during the 2025 spring term, as their primary concern should have been on teaching courses. The administration asked them to do a year’s worth of work in only a few months. Faculty members across the college called the process “flawed,” “rushed,” “chaotic,” and “ramshackle.” The MUC faculty felt that the process was intended to “manufacture consent for pre-conceived cuts,” in Rosales’ words. Students were informed by the college of the intent to close the MUC degree programs the day after faculty were, and before an appeals process could be initiated, further sowing fear and discontent among the program. 

During the rush to complete this self-review progress, the faculty’s union created the Stop The Cuts petition to garner support from the community. It offered many criticisms of the self-study process, such as the lack of time and resources given to faculty, shifting criteria, and “skewed or incorrect data.” Respondents to the Stop The Cuts petition consistently feel that the administration has not been forthcoming about the true reasons behind the budget cuts. Comparisons to DOGE, the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn cost cutting initiative, abound. 

Throughout this whole process, students, faculty and staff have been confused. “The MUC closure doesn’t make sense to students, staff, and faculty. Because this decision is so short-sighted and rushed, it appears there is an ulterior agenda driving this process,” Rosales told me. “Program students were notified of the intention to close MUC degree programs just 24 hours after faculty were notified of the decision—well before the appeal deadline. This notification has caused confusion and anxiety for students before an appeal by faculty can even be submitted, much less considered by the President and her cabinet.”

A statement made by Gerontology faculty makes it clear that their department has similar concerns over the way the administration is handling the issues facing the college: “We will not appeal the decision taken by the college leadership to discontinue the Gerontology Program, which includes the Gerontology AAS and the Gerontology Professional Career Pathway Certificate. Nor will we engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of the inaccurate claims and assumptions documented in the response to our comprehensive and thoughtful self-study. We do not have confidence that the data and information we provided was read, comprehended, or considered in full. Do not mistake our refusal to appeal or to engage in a process of rebuttal as our acquiescence to or agreement with the decision to end our program. Rather, we are exercising wisdom as for us to prepare an appeal or to engage in a process of rebuttal would be truly futile.”

The statement continues: “Since at least 2019, we have experienced a systematic process whereby the college leadership has disinvested in and dismantled the Gerontology Program piece-by-piece. This process has only intensified in the past two years. It has become clear to us that the decision to end our program was most likely made prior to the current ‘fiscal sustainability’ crisis and the sham process of academic program review and self-study … While we must accept your decision, we believe the decision to end the Gerontology Program lacks strategic vision, care for the community, and consistency with the mission of PCC.”

Even departments that were spared from the cuts feel as though this self-review process was unfair and short-sighted, as their responses to the survey indicate. In the face of hopelessness, the Music and Sonic Arts program has continued to fight the administration’s decision. While Gerontology sees the appeals process as futile, Music and Sonic Arts is choosing to not give up. 

The Appeal

The Music and Sonic Arts faculty got more specific feedback in the appeals process about what the administration is looking for. An email from Karen Sanders (PCC’s Assistant Associate Vice President of Academic and Career Pathways) to MUC faculty suggests the department use databases such as the State of Oregon’s Employment Department to find examples of job listings for audio technicians, sound engineers, and similar jobs that require a degree or certificate such as the ones MUC provides. 

Sanders also seemed to dismiss the union’s survey of local members of the music and sound community as “anecdotal information from students and your local employer partners,” rather than the hard data the administration was looking for. In their appeal, MUC faculty say that this survey was done because they were not given sufficient time or resources to do a more thorough investigation. 

The administration also wanted to see how the MUC department was working with its advisory committee of local employers and what they are looking for in prospective hires, so that the department can tailor its curriculum to meet the demands of the job market. Sanders told the MUC faculty, “to have an appeal granted you will need to provide data/evidence that you did not submit with the initial self study. This new information will need to be objective, data informed and clearly demonstrate two things: One – that there are specific jobs that require an AAS degree or a credit certificate and two – that there is a labor market demand for these jobs (that can accomodate [sic] the number of graduates you are producing) now and in the future.” 

The MUC’s appeal claims that the college does not provide them the proper means to track alumni, as there is no college-wide database of contact information for alumni. Therefore, they were not given the proper resources to give the administration what they were looking for – thus the survey. 

The MUC department also contends that the labor data the administration is looking for is by its nature incomplete or inconsistent, since the field (like technology more broadly) is constantly changing. Many of the jobs available in audio and music technology do not have public job postings, and therefore the numbers underrepresent the amount of people working in the field. 

In a letter to the President and Board of Directors, Music and Sonic Arts faculty members Jesse Mejía and Sarah Gaskins addressed further concerns. Mejía and Gaskins state that the opportunities provided by the Music and Sonic Arts program are not available in four-year Bachelor’s degree programs, such as Portland State University’s Sonic Arts and Music Production degree. They said: 

“This industry does not look for Bachelors degrees. There are jobs that require an Associate’s degree, and we are providing that credential and those skills [bolded in original]… our Self-Study plan is clear, specific, provides actionable items, and tracks extremely well against the evaluation criteria that we were told would be used.”

Discrepancies in Data

During impact bargaining, the administration presented data to the MUC’s impact bargaining team to demonstrate that the program suffered from low completion rates. The program and PCC’s faculty union allege that the data are incorrect, differing significantly from data acquired from the college’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness, which tracks student graduation rates. The aforementioned Stop The Cuts survey also alleges that the administration inflated Music and Sonic Arts’ enrollment numbers, thus further deflating their claimed graduation rates. 

In the notes from the July 29 impact bargaining meeting, the administration claims that there were 34 students who obtained a degree or certificate in the 2022-23 academic year, while the data from the college’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness places the number at 40. Similarly, the administration places the number at 59 for 2023-24 while the Office of Institutional Effectiveness places the number at 78 degrees and certificates awarded. The administration also claimed the program was only ten years old, while it is in fact 45 years old. This is because of a name change that took place in 2016; before then it was known as Professional Music. 

The administration was presented with this discrepancy in a second impact bargaining session on August 20. This discrepancy has not been accounted for by either party, and thus far it does not seem to have changed the mind of the administration. 

Student Response

Let’s Talk! is a podcast supported by PCC’s Disability Cultural Alliance and hosted by Miri Newman. In its May 23 episode, Newman spoke to students from the Music and Sonic Arts program. Newman’s accompanying write-up for the episode says: “The MSA program is well known throughout the professional and creative scene in Portland for being an incredibly open, accessible, and innovative program. Graduates have made art and music installations, gotten jobs at music festivals and nonprofits, scored and mixed films that have been shown in international festivals.”

Miri concludes the episode by saying: “The music and Sonic Arts program means a whole lot to a whole lot of people. While its fate is currently unknown, it’s clear that this program has been something special to everyone who’s been through it. Everyone I got to talk to today plus the dozens of others with whom I didn’t get the chance, has such unique insights and perspectives on what they’ve learned and gained through the Music and Sonic Arts program.”

In the Fall 2025 issue of Portland Monthly, Karly Quadros discusses the cuts to Music and Sonic Arts in the context of the broader financial issues facing Oregon’s community colleges in. Music and Sonic Arts are one of many academic victims of the post-pandemic economy. And it seems the arts are always first to get cut when budgets tighten. Despite the arts – and particularly music – being among the most lucrative industries in the state of Oregon, they are still seen as expendable. 

Moving Forward

The future of the MUC degrees and certificates is still up in the air. The college is required to offer a “teach-out” plan to allow currently enrolled students to complete their degrees. Some courses and faculty members may be absorbed into the college’s music department. Some courses would be offered for students intending to transfer to a four-year university, or offered as non-credit courses for those who are already in the industry. 

PCC Board Chair Tiffani Penson issued a statement in July in response to scrutiny and outrage by Portland’s music community. She said: “Portland Community College is accredited by the The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, which requires that a teach-out plan is written to provide for the equitable treatment of students and a reasonable opportunity for students to complete their program of study. PCC will endeavor to meet our obligations to all existing students, and any indication that currently-enrolled students will be unable to finish their program of study within the Music and Sonic Arts program is false. The Board recognizes that difficult decisions are being made to ensure the long-term health of the College and the continued success of our students. These decisions are being guided by an intentional, equitable process led by the college’s leadership and in accordance with our shared values.”

Rosales told me that this teach-out plan is still not in the best interests of students. “Upon ending the MUC degree programs, the college plans to offer only the ‘job training’ MUC courses as academic non-credit courses. This will obliterate enrollment as well as many niche and innovative classes for the sake of ‘streamlining.’ It also means lower pay for the faculty who teach these classes because academic non-credit courses are not on the same payscale as our unionized instructors.”

The final meeting on the FSAP’s agenda will be on September 30 with the Integrated Planning and Budgeting Council. I suspect MUC students and faculty will be there. 

Fall classes begin soon at PCC, and many Music and Sonic Arts classes are full with long waitlists. Despite all that has transpired over the spring and summer, students remain as committed as ever.