Dive Brief:

• Eastern Michigan University has told as many as 10 of the 11 full-time lecturers in its College of Education that they will lose their jobs.
• Undergraduate enrollment in the college has been decreasing, with the number of credit hours in which students were enrolled shrinking about 25% in the last four years.
• Lecturers have started gathering petition signatures to present to the university president to show dissatisfaction with the layoffs.

Dive Insight:

There's some discrepancy over the numbers: While the school says it issued layoff notices to eight lecturers, union representatives say the number was 10. regardless, laying off the majority of full-time lecturers in an entire department is a fairly drastic move that likely reveals just as much about the state of the university's finances as it does about student interest in that particular department.