On February 24, 2026, Timothée Chalamet sat down with fellow movie star, Matthew McConaughey for an interview with Variety. According to The Independent, Chalamet, while discussing  movie viewership, said “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’” 

Chalamet’s striking dismissal of opera and ballet, two art forms that have been around for centuries, is a timely example of the growing discrediting of classical performance art. 

Just nine days after Chalamet’s interview, Indiana Governor Mike Braun signed into law Senate Bill 199, which includes cuts to low earning degrees in Indiana colleges, degrees defined as those whose graduates have median incomes less than those of high school graduates, which in Indiana is around $35,000 per year, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. 

The official list of degrees that will be halted will not be released until 2027, according to the Indiana Daily Student, but an early list showed a Bachelor of Music degree at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music would be cut. The list also includes a Bachelor of Dance at Ball State University.

IU’s Jacobs School of Music is widely considered one of the most prestigious music schools in the country, so removing this program could be especially damaging. 

This is not the only degree reduction that has been recently proposed in Indiana: in July 2025, an Indiana state law cut or merged 408 low enrollment degrees across Indiana colleges, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. These laws align with the current administration’s efforts to reduce what is deemed unnecessary government spending, mirroring cuts from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” on the state level.

Many of these degrees, which include foreign languages, earth sciences, folklore and ethnomusicology, and ballet, are beginning to be phased out or merged with other programs for the 2026-2027 academic year, according to a list released by the Indiana House of Representatives.

These broader cuts may have some validity to better allocate school resources – it makes financial sense to merge degrees that naturally fit or have few students. But the cutting of degrees only for the sake of their (possibly) low future earnings is a dangerous precedent for higher education. 

South senior Marcella Miles is planning to attend IU next year with an individualized major that includes ballet education, which will not be affected by the cuts. She has grown up around Jacobs, dancing ballet there since she was three years old. Miles described the attitude around the cuts as “a mirror of what’s already happening in society of like, ‘oh, well, the arts aren’t really important because they don’t really provide much to society.’” 

Whether or not the classical performance arts provide anything to society should not have to be relevant for someone to study those subjects in higher education. While this issue is important, it is a separate argument entirely. 

The real issue with these cuts is that they relate a degree’s contribution to humanity with the money that those who study it produce. When degrees are removed for such a reason, students will have fewer options. Miles explained the importance of exposing young people to the arts, saying “[art] represents all different kinds of cultures and allows people of any status to express themselves, however they choose.” 

The economic output of any low earning degree should not have to be relevant to decide the majors offered in a university – people who study ballet, dance, jazz studies, or theatre do so because they are passionate about their field. Why should young people be punished for pursuing a career that may not yield high earnings? Higher education is about allowing young people to discover their passions, not producing graduates whose only value is the money they will make.

This bill also overlooks the possibility of students majoring in a low earning undergraduate degree, like dance, but then getting a graduate degree, which typically increases their earnings. A student may also get a job that does not align with their undergraduate degree and earn more or less than expected. In other words, this law is based on extremely flawed data and reasoning.

Right now, other states like Missouri are in the process of enacting similar laws to Indiana’s Senate Bill 199. If this trend continues on an even larger scale, young people will be faced with fewer opportunities to engage in their passions, and the future of education will suffer for it.