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During the last legislative session, Utah lawmakers passed a bill that ordered the state's public universities to cut about $60 million from their budgets.

Now, lawmakers said the schools could get that money back if they reinvested it in departments and classes that train students for high demand jobs like artificial intelligence and nursing and data science.

But they said you're going to have to get rid of the classes that are inefficient.

That is, the ones that had low enrollment or limited job prospects.

And at this point, the schools have done most of the cutting, and this may not surprise you.

By far, it was the humanities and the arts that took the hardest hit.

And even before the session began, Courtney Tanner of the Salt Lake Tribune saw this coming.

When these cuts first started being bandied about, I was curious how it happened in other states.

So I found this professor, David C.K. Curry, he'd written some opinion pieces about the value of liberal arts and kind of seeing those go away at his school.

I ended up being this really interesting story.

He teaches philosophy and he'd had some of the professors in his department retire.

And the university just kind of stopped filling them.

So he's kind of seeing his own department get whittled down. And then they start throwing around this word,

realignment.

Kind of a buzzword.

And then they bring in a consulting firm,

and they're starting to say efficiency, and he's starting to get nervous. You know, these are kind of terms that people would associate with cuts.

The university started putting out these metrics, these numbers that they were supposed to hit for

students picking majors and graduating and finding jobs.

Then they started cutting programs.

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