Portland Community College Has Slated a Beloved Music Program for Closure

Unlike many college professors, Mary Kadderly doesn’t spend class behind a lectern. Instead, on a recent warm day in July, she stood behind a piano at Portland Community College’s Cascade campus, jamming out with 32-year-old Colt Seidman.

The pair were workshopping Seidman’s song of choice: “I Won’t Care How You Remember Me,” a 2021 song by the band Tigers Jaw. While listening, other students pulled out sheet music and lyrics to their own songs for review. The class is meant to instill performance skills in students—many of them aspiring musicians and performers—from solo performance to harmonization work.

For an hour that day, Kadderly made personalized adjustments to each student’s performance: slowing a song down, adjusting mouth shape or, in Seidman’s case, altering the key. Both were all smiles when they settled on the right one.

Kadderly’s contemporary singing class is part of PCC’s music and sonic arts program, one of the few in the region.

But this rare program currently has no future.

It was one of 14 programs PCC targeted for “self-study,” in which departments must answer questions addressing the college’s broader concerns for their sustainability, trying to convince administrators of their worth as the school contends with rising costs and declining revenue. After that initial study, music and sonic arts was one of three programs the college ultimately identified for closure—the others being gerontology and Russian.

But proponents of the program say the college ignored facts presented in both the self-study and a faculty-submitted appeal that argued for continuation of the program. The appeal argued that music jobs are plentiful—with nearly 24,000 in the professional music and audio worker industry.

Faculty said both the self-study and the appeals process were often time-consuming and stressful. PCC’s approach to costs savings has led to a broader questioning of whether the college was open to input to begin with, says Sarah Gaskins, a co-chair of the music and sonic arts program.

“It seems like no matter what we did through the processes that PCC laid out, we couldn’t have changed what they wanted to do,” Gaskins says. “It seemed like the outcome was predetermined.”

But PCC stands by its rationale, arguing the program has been unable to demonstrate viable job paths and has a low rate of credential completions. It dismissed the faculty-drafted appeal.

PCC spokesman James Hill says if the college is to offer career technical education programs, it is responsible for ensuring that completion of such programs leads to specific jobs in the labor market. He maintains the college could not gather a clear picture of the employment landscape for music and sonic arts graduates.

“When PCC phases out credentials that do not lead to employment and may burden students with unnecessary loans and financial aid without a clear pathway to job prospects,” Hill says, “it creates an opportunity to strengthen transfer pathways or expand noncredit training options.”

Music and sonic arts, once called professional music by PCC, has existed for at least three decades at the college. Jesse Mejía, the other co-chair of the department, says it has evolved to prepare students for jobs ranging from music production and audio editing to recording and film work.

Unlike a traditional music degree, the career technical education program in music and sonic arts at PCC blends digital skills like audio programming and creative coding with more classic skills like piano and sight reading.

“If you want a career in music technology…we’re the only place that you could learn any of that stuff,” Mejía says. “What we’re teaching is pretty special, and it’s directly serving the professional and music tech communities in Portland.”

Proponents of the program say it’s drawn students to the college; enrollment has grown in recent years (up 14.58% since the 2020-21 school year, to the full-time equivalent of 137.5 students), and many sections have students on waiting lists.

“It really is a renaissance sort of program where it comes at music from all angles,” says student Morghan Connell, who has a background in social work but is trying to transition into music therapy. “Cutting this is going to be robbing an entire generation of musicians and artists.”

But in April, PCC announced the program was on the chopping block, an outcome faculty said came out of left field.

On June 13, the college then denied a final faculty-authored appeal that argued music jobs in the state are plentiful, and that many industry employers work directly with music and sonic arts faculty to hire graduates. The appeal also noted that more than 75 respondents to a survey of music employers expressed their “specific interest in hiring graduates of the PCC MSA program.”

(As for the other programs facing closure, Jenny Sasser, chair of gerontology, says her department chose not to appeal because it did not feel confident that the college approached its self-study process with an open mind. Hill says faculty recommended sunsetting Russian to focus on other world languages.)

Part of the explanation for the dissonance between the college’s numbers and the program’s regarding jobs, faculty say, stems from a limited understanding of the industries that music and sonic arts ultimately serves. The department provided PCC with a list of about 50 specific types of jobs it said its degrees could help fill. Hill says the college found many of the jobs identified could be filled by grads with multimedia or music degrees.

“Their single issue is that they don’t believe that the program leads students into jobs, which is completely untrue but very hard to prove because the college doesn’t have a tracking mechanism,” co-chair Mejía says. “Staying in touch with students after they leave is really difficult…we have a ton of anecdotal evidence. But it’s not hard numbers.”

In lieu of associate’s degrees or certificates, Hill says the college is open to merging courses with the more traditional music department, developing a transfer pathway, or opening up noncredit training opportunities. But co-chair Gaskins says those are solutions sure to hurt the program.

“The problem with academic noncredit is that students can’t use any financial aid to pay for that,” she says.

Other students who’ve spoken out in favor of music and sonic arts have emphasized that the decision to close the program speaks to worrying trends around what an education is meant to do.

Seidman, the student in Kadderly’s contemporary music class, says singing brings them immense joy; they hope to become a professional singer. “It’s hard to find work as a musician,” they say. “I don’t think cutting people’s future just because it’s harder to find jobs is the right thing to do.”

Students across the program have shared testimonials about how music and sonic arts has changed their lives, coming out in droves to PCC board meetings and a July 17 rally that drew about 50 participants.

Some 650 community members signed a petition asking PCC’s board to save the program, a document that was delivered to board members following the rally. They have a couple of allies on the board, though it’s unclear if there’s enough support overall for an intervention.

Kien Truong, a PCC board member vocal in his support of the program, says after reviewing the materials from faculty and responses from administrators, he thinks the board should intervene.

Truong says his vote to approve PCC’s 2025–27 budget came as a result of reassurance from staff that it would not include program cuts. “I felt deeply misled and disappointed to learn in the following weeks that this was not the case,” he says. Truong calls for “delaying any program closures until they receive proper board review and approval.”

At the rally, Kadderly led the crowd in various chants, pushing PCC to make cuts elsewhere. She made a note to support her diaphragm while she cracked jokes with her students.

“What we do is, we create people that create their lives, that create their niches, that’s what we do,” she says. “We’re able to nurture [students’ talents and skills], and I’m so hoping that they listen and don’t think they can just put us into this traditional track. That would take away the special magic of our program. It’s very frustrating.”